Today is what is being called reopening day by many as a lot of businesses that have either been forcibly closed by government due to the coronavirus pandemic or have been operating in less than ideal conditions, can reopen. The biggest difference that many will see is that the mandate for face coverings has ended and that will be welcomed by many, especially by those with auditory disabilities who rely on lip reading to communicate. I suspect that a lot of people will continue to wear masks either because they don’t want to get into confrontations with ‘Mask Karens’ or because they know that covid has not gone away but it is being much better controlled via vaccination than it was at this time last year.
Nightclubs have reopened and this has been a move that has been greatly appreciated by many and I might even be going to the pub, something I’ve avoided so far because of the use of the abysmal and intrusive NHS track and trace system and the requirement for patrons to ‘sign in’ when using a pub. Masks are no longer required on long distance trains but some local metro mayors such as those in London and Yorkshire are changing the conditions of carriage to create their own local mask mandates.
We’ve got to this point because vaccination has been a considerable success. Vaccination against Covid, whilst imperfect in its efficacy and ranging from 60 to 90% in its ability to either prevent covid infections or minimise the effect of infection, has broken or impaired the link between infections and deaths. I believe that we are going to see very high numbers of infections from this moment onwards as the economy opens up again and more people mix, but the numbers of deaths will be lower than it was either this time last year or in January 2021 when vaccination programmes in Britain had only just started.
Like many others I was sceptical about the effects of covid until I got unprompted reports from other sources who had no axe to grind over this issue talking about friends and family who they’d lost to the disease. Because of these reports I saw it as not being ‘only as bad as the flu’ and saw it for what it is, a novel disease that needed to be stopped. Thankfully covid came at the right time in medical history for there to be a vaccine. If covid had come in the 1990’s or if SARS Cov1 had not burned itself out in the early 21st century when mRNA vaccination techniques were still in their infancy, then we might be looking at something akin to the damage caused by Yersinia Pestis or Smallpox.
The economy is reopening not a moment too soon. The damage that covid has done to the economy of the United Kingdom is immense and will take a long time to repair. I only hope that reopening will be the start of that repair. We have seen from the queues last night of people wanting to get into nightclubs ready for them to reopen at midnight that there is a massive thirst from the populace to get back to a semblance of normality. Hopefully this desire will cause greater spending in shops and places of entertainment which in turn will improve the economy. We might see a big spending peak now that reopening has occurred but whether this translates into long term economic growth is hard to say.
Whilst I have nothing but praise for vaccination and the vaccination programme, I have many criticisms of how the UK government has handled the coronavirus pandemic. Government policy seems to have been made up on the hoof, sometimes driven by the media and Britons have been poorly served by groups like Public Health England who concentrated on known threats like Influenza and did very little to plan or model a response to a novel disease. I believe that what is needed is not just a public inquiry into the Government’s response but instead a Royal Commission with the power to compel witnesses and the gathering of evidence to ensure that when the next pandemic hits, which it will as there are an awful lot of nasty diseases out there which could pose a threat, Britain is not left as woefully unprepared as we were with covid.
Covid has not gone away. In a way we are in a similar social position to what we were in in May 1945 where one enemy, Germany had been beaten but there was still another enemy, Japan, that we were still fighting. Even though in May 45 people took to the streets to celebrate Victory in Europe Day, lots of people at the time thought that we were probably in for at least another year of fighting in the East. It was only the use of Atomic Bombs against Japan that cut short World War II and ended this awful war in months rather than years. Today is our analogue of VE Day where we celebrate one victory but the enemy is still out there and still needs fighting. The sort of vaccine technology that has been worked on since the SARS COV1 outbreak in the early 21st century and which came to fruition in time for SARS Cov2, could be the biochemical equivalent of the gamechanging effect that nuclear weapons were back in the 1940’s, as it’s now far easier to produce vaccines that target particular variants of covid than it would be without such technology.
No vaccine is perfect, no vaccine is 100% effective against a particular disease, but what we have is good enough to slow down the spread of covid2 and most importantly inhibit the damage that covid does to those who contract it. We should be thankful that vaccination has got us to the point that the Government can defy the legions of the scared witless and tentatively open up again.
Personally while I agree that the vaccines have been effective, if we had had this outbreak in the 1990s we’d have had much more emphasis on vitamine D, and roll-outs of treatments for the infection.
I disagree. Whilst countries like the UK have populations that are deficient in Vit D there is little evidence that giving Vit D helps with covid See https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/05/study-vitamin-d-wont-limit-risk-severity-covid-19 Also although anti virals have been around since the mid 1970’s the effectiveness is limited and might not have been readily available in the 1990’s. I believe that Israeli researchers are looking at whether current anti virals could be repurposed. Part of the problem with covid is that there is a need to find an antiviral that can deal with the illness whilst having side effects that are not burdensome. Ivermechtin, despite being trumpeted by various quacks might have shown some promise in vitro and in silico but not to much in vivo. Good piece here from Respectful Insolence about how the claims that Ivermechtin is effective against covid have been undermined trials that have by poor data, conflicts of interest and possibly outright fraud. See https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/07/16/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydroxychloroquine-take-4/
I did my grocery shop at Asda today and I would say at a guess that around 75% are still wearing masks. I will be interested to see if people stop wearing them once they see others are going without.
We had to stop at the mini Tesco on our way to pick up Laughing Boy to get some groceries and I sat in the car waiting for my OH and judging by the customers going in and going out I’d say that the mask wearing figures you gave were accurate. I agree that we will have to wait until later to see if this figure stays similar but the number of people who wear masks voluntarily makes a bit of a mockery of the idea that Britons needed to be coerced by law to wear them.
Some people have flatly refused to wear them but for me it wasn’t that big a deal so I’ve been putting mine on just to go into shops. When I first went into Asda today I thought that everyone was wearing one except me and that did make me feel slightly uncomfortable and tense. Once I saw that a significant number of other people weren’t wearing one I relaxed. I think that less confident people will doff their masks once they see that others have done so.
I think that the government has handled covid really really badly and have tried to deflect blame by blaming the populace for the spread of covid hence Boris’s latest bully pulpit statement that despite denials vaccine passports will be mandatory in nightclubs come September. Maybe if the Govt had had coherent messaging from the start which it would have had had Public Health England planned for novel respiratory viruses and not just influenza, then we would not be in this utter and complete mess. The nightclubs don’t want covid certification as they don’t want their doorstaff having yet another thing that will bring them into conflict with punters on top of age ID and checking for drugs and weapons. As one doorman said I think on Twitter covid certification is going to end up with punters getting angry with sharp pointy things. Certification will also increase the problem of criminal gangs controlling nightlife something we are already seeing with the return of illegal raves run by crims who because of the earnings from selling drugs to punters can well afford to lose PA equipment and pay the fines of underlings caught by police at such events.
The Tories had ten years from 2010 until 2020 to sort out Public Health England and make it fit to face current challenges but they did not.
The best way to sort out Public Health England would be to abolish it and not replace it with anything else.
Maybe it should have been replaced with a small group of infectious disease experts who could have planned not just for knowns like influenza but for potential unknowns? It certainly should not have been staffed by any associated with PHE and neither should it be PHE rebadged.