The UK government watched a new more transmissible strain of SARS-CoV-2 cause Indians in their thousands to choke to death from acute Covid symptoms, as oxygen ran out in hospitals.
Whilst Brits could not travel, our borders were open. Just as we recovered from a second wave caused by a new strain that originated on our own soil and took over the world, the Indian strain arrived on our shores.
The vaccine programme, the best performing in the world, was getting ahead of the virus. There was hope that we could stave off the disease and end the nightmare of self-imposed house arrest. June 21st 2021 was looking to be our re-opening. The end of a long, dark winter.
And the Johnson administration screwed it up. The leaky bucket strategy paid off again. The Indian variant is now ripping its way through the very same multi-generational households in the same deprived areas that have been so heavily hit by this terrible novel virus. We have moved from celebrating the success of vaccination to a race to save lives once again.
This situation is both predictable and lamentable. Whilst we could not control the evolution of new strains within the UK, we could certainly prevent it from being imported from the outside.
Other than freight, there is no reason for any person to have been entering and exiting the UK since lockdown began. There is no reason this couldn’t have continued until the vaccine programme was sufficiently well progressed to permit us to be confident that the loss of life would be minimised – to those who would likely fall victim to flu or a stiff wind – and our health system not to collapse.
Whilst we have some therapeutics against the disease, the scale of infection makes the numbers game a hard hit on us when the virus is out of control. People need beds, clinicians, time, space, intensive care, and, sadly, morgue space. So we still have to be preventative and use the classical controls against the virus.
And those are easy and highly effective:
- Don’t be close to people
- Isolate if you’re sick
- Don’t allow people to bring more virus inside the country
Do that for several weeks and you see the infection rates come down in a smooth curve. Don’t do that when you have low levels of vaccination and time for protection to kick in, and you see it spike rapidly.
The decisions of today, the impact of today all will be seen in 2-3 weeks time. The real problem is not what the numbers show, but what they imply. It will be 3 times as a bad in a fortnight.
Yes, people are tired of lockdowns. But, don’t give them another series of lockdowns because you didn’t act strongly enough and soon enough.
HANSARD 