Yesterday the Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the vast majority of the Coronavirus restrictions will go by next week and that the final end of things like self isolation will go in March. This decision was expected and I believe that it is the correct one.
The Omicron variant has, contrary to what much of the mainstream media and the Covid Communists believe, turned out to be less damaging than originally thought. There can therefore be no real medical justification for continuing with restrictions that are both damaging to society and very expensive for the taxpayer.
Whilst there might have been some justification for restrictions when Covid first hit in 2020, those justifications are now long gone. The vaccines, even though they have been shown to have a dwindling efficacy over time, have bought the population some time during which the virus mutated, thankfully, into something more mild than previous variants.
Covid of course has not gone away, but it does seem to be mutating into something roughly equivalent to seasonal influenza which kills some but for the most part makes people feel really crap for a while before they get better. According the the UK ONS, in 2018 influenza killed 1596 in England and Wales and a combination of influenza and pneumonia killed 29451. Everyone of these deaths was a tragedy for someone and for their families but over 600k people a year die of all causes every year in the UK and this should put the influenza and pneumonia figures into some sort of perspective.
If Covid has come down to the death rate of influenza or similar illnesses then it has become a condition that we should live with without social restrictions. After all we tolerate roughly 1500 deaths per year from influenza alone without imposing restrictions on the population. Now that Covid is becoming an endemic disease and with many people having Covid antibodies that have been both naturally and vaccine acquired maybe it should be a condition that we have to tolerate and live alongside?
Doing away with these damaging restrictions is one of Boris Johnson’s better decisions. But I do not believe that it outweighs some of his more appalling ones such as the failure to properly tackle excessive and illegal immigration and the introduction of the appalling and damaging net zero policies. Personally I’m less bothered by the issue of Civil Servants having parties, possibly because I’ve worked in environments where there was a boozy culture but people still worked efficiently, than I am the bigger failures of this government such as migration and net zero.
I believe that the decision to roll back the Covid restrictions as expected may well buy Boris Johnson some time but unless he sorts out and reverses his other bad decisions he’s likely to face a challenge either from an insurgent party, or by those who are more realistic about things such as energy security, from within his own party.
Oh and finally. If you can hear a loud whining sound coming from the direction of Whitehall, various local councils, NHS management offices and the Cardiff headquarters of the DVLA then please do not be alarmed. It’s just the sound of lazy public servants who are now being told that their paid ‘work from home ‘ holiday is now over and they need to get back to their offices and start doing some real work.
