//We'er pretty much there across UK.//
I don’t think so. Let’s see how close to being “there” we really are:
- The hospitality industry is losing £200m a day.
- Funerals are limited to 30 mourners (whilst the numbers participating in general worship in the same venue are unrestricted). Meanwhile last Saturday Her Majesty the Queen had to sit alone wearing a face mask at the funeral of her husband of 73 years.
- I cannot have visitors inside my house and I cannot visit anybody else in theirs. I can go to watch a snooker match but I cannot visit my sister unless I confine myself to her garden.
- I can sit on a crowded pavement outside a pub in Soho but when I go to Tesco’s I have to queue six feet apart from anybody else.
- I can have a stranger sit beside me to examine me for a driving test or for an hour to give me a driving lesson, but I cannot sit beside the same stranger for five minutes if he is driving a taxi and is taking me to the local pub (to sit outside, natch). This reduces the vehicle’s capacity by 25% and makes it impossible for four people to share most taxis.
Back in the real world that is the UK, over 60% of the adult population has had one shot of the vaccine and 20% (including almost all of those likely to suffer serious consequences from contracting Covid) have had two. The number of deaths from Covid reported last Sunday was probably fewer than the number who died on the roads. The average number of daily Covid deaths is now 25 – fewer than one in seventy of deaths from all causes. The numbers in hospitals being treated for Covid are less than 5% of the numbers being treated in January and fewer than 200 people a day are being admitted with the virus. The numbers of patients who are likely to wait more than a year for treatment for painful, debilitating and often life threatening conditions now stands at 4.5 million and is steadily rising.
The country is also effectively split into two camps. There are those who for practical and personal reasons want the restrictions to end as quickly as possible – usually because they need to be able to work. On the other hand there are those who have retreated into a cosy world where "zero Covid" is the only outcome they will countenance whilst they sit at home and switch between their Zoom calls and baking their own bread. They are condemning many of their fellow citizens to ill-health and poverty. The longer lockdown lasts, even in its truncated form, the worse that divide will get. And if and when we are finally released what will be apparent is that the affluent majority will be spending all their extra money that they have saved (by not commuting and buying Pret sandwiches) while the hard-pressed minority will be worrying about how to pay off all the extra debt they have taken on simply to survive. We are very far from being “pretty much there” and don’t look like being so unless this government abandons the ridiculous “precautionary” attitude it has fallen into.