On April 18th, Mike4 wrote -
Mike4 wrote:[rant]
Have we learned nothing?
Bloke on Times Radio this morning saying the highly infectious India variant containing two mutations has arrived here now and over 100 cases have been identified, but because the 'numbers are low", the only action required is to "keep an eye on it".
Yeah well, keep an eye on it until the numbers are much bigger? Then what? What IS the point of sitting on our hands and waiting until the numbers get much worse? Surely this is what has worked out so badly for us in the past. NOW is the time to be stamping it out while the numbers are still "low" and traceable.
Have we stopped incoming flights from India? I suspect not and we probably won't for a further month or two. Hopefully I'm wrong about that though.
[/rant]
Well, here we are one month on and it's yet another Groundhog Day for government's Covid response, with the "India variant" all set to become toe dominant virus in the UK, according to scientists. It's almost certainly more transmissible than even our Kent variant, which itself was 70% more transmissible than the Wuhan variant. We don't yet know whether it's also more vaccine resistant - so why not slow down until we find out?
Round 4/5 in the "too little, too late" series unfolded like this.
First of all, Bangladesh and Pakistan were put on the red list, despite India's infection rate being far higher than both these countries.
Eventually India went onto our red list, but the announcement gave 4 extra days for people to fill flights and get back from India.
Next - should the India variant be a "variant of concern"? No, let's just wait until after the May elections.
This week there was a plan to "surge vaccinate" by vaccinating the specific towns and areas where Covid rates were highest, rather than vaccinating 38 year olds in areas of the UK where fewer than 1 in 1,000 people have Covid. But - of course - it's not yet happened. Apparently Blackburn was going to vaccine the higher risk, but government vetoed it.
On the "data not dates" plan, Monday 17th May is set to open up indoor venues, with various other measures including unmasking for school children. Surely anyone with a even a nano-second of commonsense thinking about this must realise that unmasking school children would be utterly stupid. The masks aren't affecting their education, and removing them will simply help the new variant to spread.
Our PM is giving an address at 5pm. Hopefully there will be some common sense measures. It's too late, but it doesn't have to be too little as well.