It seems almost inconceivable and yet it’s not. We could be headed for another lockdown, probably just after Christmas. No one really believes that the measures announced by Boris Johnson this week will stop the new Covid variant from spreading. The private reasoning of the officials recommending them and the ministers agreeing to them is that they need to prepare the public psychologically for the possibility of going back into lockdown.
The issue is the speed at which omicron spreads. It may be three times as transmissible as delta, which means it will have to be a lot milder to avoid overwhelming hospitals. Optimistically, the data so far suggest this may well be the case, but not with much certainty. The booster rollout has been nowhere near fast enough and January is expected to be the pinch-point, if there is one.
As ever, the overwhelming of the health system, rather than the actual number of Covid deaths, is the Government’s red line. Ministers calculate that it would be politically fatal to them if too many of us experience the terror of being unable to take a sick child or a car crash victim to hospital. What they have not understood, however, is that there are some things more important than a brief but acute failure of healthcare provision. It is time to draw some new red lines.
Preventing someone from being with a dying relative, for example, or from checking in on a vulnerable child, as the uncle of the murdered boy Arthur Labinjo-Hughes wanted to do, is simply unjustifiable. If the Government once again tries to make these acts illegal, we as individuals should recognise that some personal priorities must come before political ones.
In other words, we must use our own judgement. There may be no rule requiring us to take Covid tests before seeing elderly relatives, but many of us will choose to do so anyway. For my part, I am much more inclined to wear a mask on public transport after looking at the data on omicron and our slow booster programme than because London Mayor Sadiq Khan wants to score political points by curtailing our freedoms for no reason.
And this, after all, is the real approach taken by people in government. They might tell us to stay at home, but they don’t. They might have told us not to party, but Number 10 staffers clearly judged that since they had worked together in close quarters for weeks, a party couldn’t really hurt. What stinks is not the logic of this decision; it’s the rank hypocrisy of legislating for one thing and then doing another.
If the Government is considering another lockdown, then it needs to understand that it has exhausted consent for the type of policy it could enact before. It has no moral authority to ban fathers from being with their wives during childbirth or to confine people to their houses because an app says they shared a bus ride with a Covid case. If we are told to stay at home, it can only be conditional upon our nearest and dearest social obligations. If that makes enforcement difficult, so be it. Policing this mess fairly has been a fool’s errand from the start.
As for those institutions that operate directly under state control, we are at their mercy and it is the Government’s job to stop them running amok with unnecessary, cruel and damaging Covid regulations. Hospitals and care homes must allow visitors to tend to the dying at all points, even if it requires testing and supplying them with PPE.
Travel bans, which simply punish those countries which are putting resources into genomic sequencing of new variants, are actively counter-productive and always arrive long after the new variant has already spread across the world. They should be scrapped.
Schools must absolutely not be allowed to shut. Reports this week that some are sending pupils home early need to be met with immediate intervention. If the problem is too many teachers being forced to isolate, as the schools claim, the Government should set aside a budget for supply teachers to keep lessons running. It should likewise remove the absurd recommendation that everyone in secondary schools test themselves twice a week, which is piling the greatest burden of Covid precautions onto the one sector of society which we should most want to protect. Whoever heard of shutting down whole school years for a few cases of sniffles before 2020?
Vaccine passports, meanwhile, are an almost Orwellian solution to a problem of the Government’s own making. The main reason vaccine uptake is insufficient is because not enough vulnerable people have even been offered their third jab, not because most of them don’t want to get one.
When Boris Johnson boasted at this week’s press conference that 84 per cent of over-80s had been offered a booster, I was not impressed but shocked by the slow progress. The first step to increasing vaccine uptake is to offer more people more vaccines. Instead, we are incurring what could well become a permanent cost to our freedom to cover for the Government’s failures.
With any luck, this will all end up with a dramatic anti-climax. Scientists are starting to sound increasingly confident that omicron hails Covid’s transformation from a threat to a common cold.
By Christmas, we will know the score. But in the meantime, let’s recognise the government’s half-hearted and ineffective Covid measures for what they are: the start of a campaign to soften us up for another lockdown, if it’s deemed necessary.
If that is what’s coming down the track, we need to be clear: some things are too important to be sacrificed to Covid controls. The Government ought to recognise that and use the law sparingly.
But if it doesn’t, people will have to use their own judgement and make decisions they can live with afterwards. We would only be following Number 10’s example, after all.
