Abandoning so many controls now is another costly gamble from a prime minister who has forgotten his ‘data, not dates’ pledge
It is a mark of how badly this government has misjudged the pandemic response that Boris Johnson made a pledge in February to focus on “data, not dates” in relaxing social restrictions. We had a right to expect this approach to Covid-19 from the very beginning: it should have been driven by scientific evidence and a sober assessment of competing courses of action. But government decision-making over the past 16 months has been too driven by cabinet politics and internal party management, and too little by the public health of the nation. Johnson’s apparent determination to relax at once a huge swath of Covid control measures on 19 July in spite of steeply rising infection rates, reveals that February pledge as hollow.
The government’s argument is that even though data has changed significantly in recent weeks, with the rapid growth of the more infectious and more vaccine-resistant Delta variant, the link between infection and death has been sufficiently weakened by the vaccination programme to allow its self-styled “freedom day” to go ahead. Ministers are right that vaccines have dramatically cut the risk of death for those contracting the virus: in January, one in 50 infections led to a death; today that figure is just one in 1,000. But there are several important reasons to exercise more caution than the government is showing.
Continue reading...source https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/11/19-july-relaxation-covid-restrictions-boris-johnson-gamble-dates-not-data
No comments:
Post a Comment