Well, that’s the end of any hopes for having a foreign holiday this year, then, certainly if you work for a living. The government has, somewhat belatedly, decided to ease the semi-lockdown by, er, introducing a 14 day quarantine period for anyone arriving in the country, starting from the end of May. I’m sure there were sound scientific reasons for not bothering to quarantine people coming from abroad during the last two months when the virus was at its most virulent, but who am I to argue with ‘experts’, given their track record on dealing with Covid-19? After all, we’ve only got the highest death rates in Europe.
Anyway, that quarantine policy will mean that the only people who can realistically travel abroad, whenever that might be from, will be people who aren’t in work, so mainly senior citizens who are – ahem – the most at risk group from this coronavirus. They can gallivant off to, say, the Canary Islands for a week, fly back and then stay at home for the following 14 days. Only those who are prepared to be take three weeks annual leave for a one week holiday will bee going anywhere anytime soon, five weeks if the country you are visiting insists you spend two weeks in quarantine before travelling. You’ll need a holiday after this.
I get the impression that people are getting fed up with both the semi-lockdown and the government’s serial mishandling of the pandemic. Early last week, we were promised an easing of restrictions this weekend via carefully placed information in the government’s favourite newspapers, only for government officials to spend the rest of the week rowing back. So, what will Boris Johnson announce on the telly tomorrow night that he couldn’t tell us last week?
It does not require the brilliance of a rocket scientist to work out that the government has not had the first idea of how to ease the semi-lockdown and even at the eleventh hour is trying to botch together some kind of ‘road map’, as Johnson calls it.
It’s becoming clear that tomorrow’s changes will be minimal. Unlimited exercise, which many are already doing by cycling and jogging huge distances, opening garden centres (an absolute priority for people stuck in inner city tower blocks) and that’s roughly it. Except at some unspecified time in the future we might just be allowed to do something else. This isn’t good enough.
Level with us. It’s hard to be specific and give exact times, we all know that, but spell it out. If there is bad news, give us the bad news and then tell us how you are going to deal with the bad news. Because all we have now is a government of all the untalented making things up as it goes along with no strategy beyond rhetoric, clichés and buzzwords.
No one will be booking a flight after hearing the news that a 14 day quarantine period will follow, just like no one in their right mind will be buying a football season ticket. That’s just the trivial stuff and we haven’t even talked about going back to work, reopening schools and all the other stuff we take for granted.
Confused? Well, I suspect Dominic Cummings wants you to be in order to deflect from the shambles of the government he advises – some say runs – and the less we understand the better. I confess to being as baffled as anyone else about government policy, if there is such a thing. When Johnson addresses the nation on Sunday, don’t expect anything much to change. He certainly won’t and that’s the most concerning thing of all.
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