The Coming Omicron Omnishambles
Having delayed action against the Delta variant, a timely red listing of India and applying elementary precautions to travellers coming from there, could have avoided hundreds of thousands of infections, tens of thousands of long Covid cases, and thousands of deaths. The lesson, at least superficially, has been learned. Sajid Javid was seen to act quickly to suspend travel from South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, and Eswatini from lunch time this Friday. Speaking in the Commons earlier, he said it "may pose substantial risk to public health." Yes, so substantial a risk that passengers disembarking from the last flights into the country weren't required to take a PCR test or quarantine themselves for 10 days. Nor are there any plans to introduce these as mandatory precautions any time soon. British nationals can return from the red listed countries and they will be asked to self-isolate at home. Pathetic.
Unfortunately, if Omicron is as bad as feared we can expect the UK to be badly hit. With 150,000 people dead and about a million living with the long-term effects of the disease, it's unlikely the government are going to have a change of heart. Their public health strategy has long determined that property and class relations come before prolonged illness and death. From the moment the first lockdown came into force, Boris Johnson and his clique of super spreaders have worked to make sure the introduction of elementary precautions are next to impossible. Social distancing, mask mandates, adequate support for the sick, anything requiring more than "you're on your own" is too much of an ask. Perhaps chief medical officer Chris Whitty, moaning to the BBC about how people won't accept the need for Covid curbs, should have thought about this when he rubber stamped the government's scheme to run the pandemic hot and relying on vaccines only. 15,000 have died since so-called freedom day - many times than would otherwise have been the case if the UK had adopted the same sorts of precautions as France, Germany, Italy, etc.
Crimes enough that should have Johnson and his cronies in court, not level pegging in the polls. But their culpability does not end there. Along with the heads of all the rich nations, the Tories share responsibility for the new variant by hoarding vaccines. In August, it was reported the G7 had stockpiled a billion doses. In the same month, the Tories threw away 600,000 expired doses, doses that could have been shipped overseas, been administered, saved lives and who knows, a shot might have gone into the arm of someone destined to incubate the new variant. We can't ever know, but what we do is the more Western governments stockpile vaccines, the more the virus spreads, the greater the likelihood new, dangerous variants can emerge. Something even our fool of a Prime Minister knows full well, seeing as he warned against vaccine nationalism earlier this year.
It's become a cliche to refer to our current crop of Tories as the worst possible government at the worst possible time, but any incoming wave of the Omicron variant will underline it with a grim tally of thousands of more unnecessary deaths and serious disease. Given the Tories' gross ineptitude and skewed priorities, we're reduced to a state of helplessness, of hoping beyond hope that somehow the scientists' early warning signs are wrong and that the new variant will amount to nothing.
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