We're heading for a new lockdown

 

Covid-19 is still with us and it seems to be winning its battle to infect the whole country. As I write, we are about to go into a second full lockdown (on November 5) in four days’ time.

Back in March, we locked down too late and made a complete mess of handling the pandemic, which cost many more lives. Then, the government was desperate to get back to normal – people were told to go to work, go on holiday and were even paid to dine out (the ill-fated Eat-out to Help-out) government scheme which cost £60 million.

Well, it turns out this extra social interaction was keeping the virus simmering nicely, holidaymakers from Spain brought a mutated version back home with them and when schools and universities went back in September, it spread like wildfire.

We now have 20,000 new positive tests per day and 300 deaths per day, and if we don’t get the numbers down, our hospitals will be overwhelmed by the end of the month.

The government plan was to control local outbreaks, through its Test, Trace and Isolate system but this has been a complete disaster, with the privatised service failing to trace a huge number of contacts. No-one has any confidence in it. Basically, it’s a waste of £12 billion (unless you’re a shareholder in Serco, the firm contracted to run it).

Next, the government tried regional lockdowns, with tougher sanctions on areas with higher infections (basically the north of England). The scientific advisors said it wouldn’t work and wanted a two-week lockdown to halt the rise in infections. What did the government do? It continued with a tiered system of regional lockdowns (we’ve been in tier 1, the lowest) and it supressed the scientific advice. Of course, the report was leaked, so we’ve known for some weeks what was needed and the opposition has been calling for a lockdown.

Now it’s happened (late again) and now it has to be for four weeks, not two. Who knows if that will be enough?

Frankly, our handling of this emergency has been a shambles and, on top of all this, it now seems there’s a good chance of us leaving the EU without a trade deal with our major trading partner.

Can it get any worse?

Poor old Tom had stayed behind in England when Lucy and the children flew back to Ecuador. He had been building up his work quite steadily and was getting a decent income stream building up. That now looks as if it’s wrecked. Will he be able to work in lockdown? Will anyone want to set up stories? I’m not sure what he’ll do but, probably, he’ll head for Ecuador and try again in the new year. It’s very frustrating.