As far as I’m concerned, the government is nailing it this time around (and I’m surprised anyone sensible is saying otherwise just because they don’t like the government and PM). We’ve clearly learnt lessons from cocking it up last year - lessons those in Europe clearly haven’t learnt with the flawed slow, reactive, inflexible joined up approach to the vaccine acquisition a d rollout and a lot of them opening up too early and not putting in place proper precautions to stop the new variants spreading.
To an extent, the government’s damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. It was hammered last year for acting too slow and opening up too soon. And this year, I am hearing from a lot of lockdown sceptics and covid deniers criticism of the lockdowns, not opening up and bankrupting the economy. If anyone listens to TalkRADIO for 10 minutes, they’ll hear a whole raft of covid denial propaganda: “lockdowns don’t work”, “the reckless government is ruining the economy”,
“we just need to live with the virus just like we do with the flu” and the best of all constant reference to mental health and civil liberties being eroded from presenters and pundits who couldn’t usually give two hoots about mental health or civil liberties, but all of a sudden, it’s top of their agenda, as a front for the fact that they’re pissed off at not being able to go down the pub! The government’s slow sensible roadmap out of lockdown is spot on for me and the proof is in the pudding as that approach along with the successful vaccine rollout is driving our stats down, but we can’t be complacent as we need to keep those figures down and monitor things whilst slowly getting back to normal.
Australia and NZ are to an extent rightly held up as beacons of how to deal with the virus; however, I’m not sure that’s fully accurate. It’s very easy for them to lockdown as they have massively low density of populations and no fucker goes there are through there to get anywhere - unlike the UK, US and Europe which are massive trade centres, transport hubs and much more highly populated. They’ve effectively staved off the virus with tiny infection rates, which is good, but means that they have no spread of anti-bodies and that combined with their slow vaccination programmes means that there’s no chance of herd immunity or mass inoculation from the virus anytime soon. That means they’re either going to have to effectively lock themselves from the rest of the world for a long time or open up as the rest of the world does and risk the virus letting rip through a population with no immunity.
On the vaccine passports. I’m all for this as I think it’s not only safe but if done well it will help businesses and leisure open up quickly. It needs to be done quickly, properly and fairy though. I don’t think it’s fair to bring it in until everyone has had the chance of a vaccine, but when they have - mid/late summer, it’s a great idea to bring it in as pubs, beaches and entertainment venues open up inside and out and get packed in the summer holidays. That’s provided the government don’t cock it up like they did with track and trace (again, let’s hope lessons have been learned).
