Without further restrictions, ‘Freedom Day’ may never come

As has been anticipated since he set an arbitrary date for the ‘final and irreversible’ relaxation of Covid restrictions, thereby raising public hopes in the absence of any tangible evidence that he would be able to deliver, Boris Johnson has finally announced, via the official government method of leaking it to Laura Kuenssberg at 22.00 on a Sunday evening, that the easing of restrictions will now be delayed for a further four weeks to enable more vaccinations to be administered.

Somewhat predictably, the howls of anguish from the anti-woke, anti-snowflake, anti-Marxist, anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vaccine, pro-flag, pro-statue, pro-Brexit, pro-two-world-wars-and-one-world-cup, pro-Tory divorcees of Twitter were, in the wake of this announcement, quite deafening. “We want our freedom back!” they cried. Hashtag I’m Done. Hashtag Enough Is Enough. Hashtag Please Let Me See The Kids, Sharon.

‘Lockdown extension’ trended for several hours as they vented their spleens about the violent oppression of having to wear a mask in Tescos for another four weeks and the blood-curdling brutality of the greater than usual degree of difficulty in obtaining footy tickets. I tried, via the use of some fairly blunt sarcasm, to make the point that we’re not currently in anything that could be correctly described as a ‘lockdown’ as we’re legally allowed to do most things at this point, but I’m not sure it really landed.

That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t reasons to be angry. If you’ve been anything in the ballpark of ‘conscious’ over the past 18 months, you should be absolutely fucking furious. As is so often the case, however, much of this anger seems to be manifesting for all the wrong reasons.

In February and March 2020, as we watched the carnage unfolding in Italy and elsewhere, we hesitated, prevaricated and delayed. A swift lockdown at that point, together with strict controls on those entering and leaving the country and a working test and trace system, would have left us ideally placed as an island nation to avoid the worst of the pandemic. That’s not mere speculation – Australia and New Zealand have been back to something approaching ‘normal’ for some time now, simply because they acted decisively to halt the spread of the disease.

And ironically, at least some of the responsibility for the fact that we didn’t adopt this course of action lies with the vacuous tits who now spend their Saturdays parading through London with that bellend off ‘Lewis’, the tinfoil-hat-clad brother of a former Labour leader and a woman who filters human excrement for entertainment; demanding an end to restrictions that, for the most part, do not exist. Were it not for the fact that our Prime Minister is far more worried about whether he is personally popular than whether or not a few hundred thousand plebs remain alive, and were it not also for the fact that the very people who now rail against the weaker, more protracted restrictions provided vocal opposition to stronger, swifter but ultimately more short-lived restrictions back in 2020, we might have avoided this calamity.

The same could be said in relation to every step in our disastrous handling of this pandemic. As mistake after mistake has unfolded, the entire process has followed a depressingly familiar cycle:

1. Cases rise, scientists warn that action is required
2. There is significant opposition to any restrictions among right-wing commentators and media
3. Government delays imposing restrictions to avoid negative headlines
4. Situation becomes untenable and restrictions are finally imposed, weeks too late
5. Restrictions last far longer than necessary because of earlier delays, leading to public fatigue
6. When cases start to fall, pressure mounts to relax restrictions
7. Government relaxes restrictions too early to avoid negative headlines
8. See 1.

Without this vitriolic opposition from the right-wing press and the honking, anti-science reactionaries of social media, there’s every chance the PM would have acted differently. He is a man whose first and only thought in any given situation is, “How will this benefit me?” He is powered by pure, concentrated selfishness, and if imposing an early, well-managed lockdown would have led to a Daily Mail splash comparing him in favourable terms to Winston Churchill, he’d have executed the order in a fucking heartbeat.

That’s not to absolve the government of any responsibility, of course. The overwhelming majority of the blame rests firmly on their shoulders, because effective leadership sometimes means making unpopular decisions in the short term knowing they will be for the greater good in the longer term. And the most ridiculous thing is, had they taken these difficult decisions at the outset and pre-empted the first (or the second or the third) wave, he might have actually secured his ‘BORIS IS CHURCHILL’ headline in the end.

This short-termist thinking has characterised the government’s approach to Covid throughout, and it’s no coincidence that we not only have one of the worst per capita death tolls on the planet, but have also taken the biggest Covid-related hit to the economy of any country in Europe. Entire industries have been decimated by callous inaction, ministerial indifference and lack of essential financial support, as billions of pounds have been funnelled into the pockets of Conservative Party donors for a test and trace system that’s not fit for purpose, ventilators made out of old hand-dryers and PPE that was never delivered.

As each half-arsed, weeks-too-late lockdown has been lifted weeks too early, some of these industries have never been allowed to reopen, and many hundreds of businesses have now been lost forever. Indeed, one of the most common arguments advanced in the outpouring of terrible grammar that followed the announcement of this latest delay related to the horrific toll the existing restrictions are exacting on those in the hospitality, arts and nightlife industries. All very valid concerns, and we should be angry about that. 

We should be angry, however, not about the personal inconvenience of having to book a table if we want to go to the pub, but that these essential and profitable businesses have been allowed to go to the wall for want of adequate financial support, and that quicker, more decisive action that stayed the course would have rendered this discussion largely moot.

We should be angry that a three-week delay in imposing the first lockdown led to a wave of death and destruction that could have been avoided or mitigated had we acted sooner. We should be angry that £37bn of our money has been sunk into a test and trace system that has never worked. We should be angry that Covid patients were released into care homes without testing, precipitating further avoidable carnage amongst some of the most vulnerable people in our population. We should be angry that many healthcare professionals perished for want of adequate PPE. We should be angry about Eat Out To Help Out. We should be angry that schools and universities were ordered back in September with no plan in place to control the spread of the disease. We should be angry about the ‘get back to work or lose your fucking job’ headlines. We should be angry about scientists’ calls for a lockdown in the autumn going unheeded until it was too late.  We should be angry that this autumn lockdown, like all the others, was lifted too early. We should definitely be angry about fucking Christmas, and the predictable and predicted wave of excess mortality it unleashed for the sake of a BORIS SAVES CHRISTMAS’ headline. We should be angry that, after all that, the same mistakes have been made coming out of this lockdown as with the previous two. And we should be utterly fucking enraged that, for a country that invests so much time and energy into ‘controlling our borders’ as it pertains to desperate people arriving via dinghy seeking a better life, we have been singularly unwilling to ‘control our borders’ in the context of a global pandemic that has claimed the lives of 150,000 of our citizens.

Scientists warned, several weeks ago, of the dangers posed by the Delta variant. They called, time and again, for India, where the variant originated, to be added to the ‘red list’ of countries to which travel was restricted. These calls were ignored for weeks on end because Johnson was desperate for a trade deal photo-op with the Indian PM to draw our noses away from the interminably pungent shit-smell of Brexit. By the time India was eventually added to the red list, the variant in question was already established in the UK. It has since become the dominant variant in the country, accounting for 90% of new cases. It is now growing exponentially, with in excess of 7,000 new cases a day at the time of writing, and is thought to be up to 60% more transmissible than the previous strain (which was 50% more transmissible than the original). Most worryingly of all, the variant is already showing some degree of vaccine resistance.

We now stand at yet another crossroads. Carrying on as we are simply isn’t enough. With the number of new cases doubling every 7-10 days even with the current restrictions in place, we face the possibility that, in a month’s time, we could easily have upwards of 50,000 new cases a day.

It’s at this stage of proceedings that someone will inevitably pipe up with, “But all the older and more vulnerable people are vaccinated, so it doesn’t matter if the cases go up,” but this ignores the fact that millions of people are still only partially vaccinated, and millions more aren’t vaccinated at all. They still run the very real risk of experiencing long-Covid symptoms (or worse) if they contract the disease. But even that’s not the main problem with allowing cases to spiral out of control at this point.

Viruses mutate. It’s what they do. This particular virus has already mutated on many occasions, producing several distinct strains. These mutations occur randomly as the virus replicates. Advantageous (to the virus) mutations are selected for and become more prevalent, while the less beneficial ones die out. It follows, therefore, that if more opportunities exist for the virus to reproduce, the number of mutations will also increase. More mutations overall means a greater chance that one (or more) of those mutations will be advantageous to the virus. So allowing cases to grow unchecked in a partially vaccinated population, where the dominant strain is already highly transmissible and showing some degree of resistance to the vaccine, creates the perfect environment for a variant to emerge that escapes the vaccine completely. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why such an outcome would be very bad news indeed for every human being on the planet.

Keeping transmission as low as humanly possible until a significant proportion of the world’s population are vaccinated would greatly reduce the risk of this apocalyptic scenario unfolding. This means (relatively) short-term restrictions to bring cases as close to zero as possible in this country, monitoring and disrupting new outbreaks as they occur, and strictly controlling who enters and leaves the country until the rest of the world catches up with their vaccination programmes. A full lockdown might not be necessary given the advanced stage of the vaccine programme here, but far greater restrictions than are currently in place will be required to reverse the upward trend in cases.

Further restrictions at this point would undoubtedly be painful for everyone (though that pain could be alleviated considerably with appropriate support in place from the government), but as in March and September and December and April, taking a short term view of this is the worst thing we could possibly do. I hate lockdowns as much as the next person, regardless of what ‘HammersDave84750398’ might assert in my Twitter replies. My mental health has been in the fucking toilet for well over a year now, and I’m desperate to be released back into the wild to go about my homosexual business. But I’m also pragmatic enough to understand that the vaccines are our one long-term ticket out of this unholy mess, and if we blow that, the next eighteen months could make the previous eighteen look like a sunny evening in a socially distanced beer garden.