According to Politico these are this morning's London newspaper headlines:
So, every major newspaper leads with the same issue. That is the government's gamble on Omicron.
The claims over the weekend have been that cases are falling. That ignores the data collection issues of a bank holiday period: on 29/12 we now know that more than 200,000 cases were recorded. Experts suggest the real numbers may be close to 500,000.
What we are now gathering is that it also takes around 15 days from a PCR test to getting into hospital with Omircon - the progression is slower than before.
And data now shows that, as expected, cases are creeping up the age range as Christmas has its inevitable impact of spreading this from school-age children to older people.
The government has taken a massive gamble with Omicron. It may pay off. As I noted yesterday, even the Telegraph has its doubts that it will.
There remains all the chatter that it is 'just mild'. The data does not say that as yet. The papers are right to be worried. They know that instead of protecting the country this government is taking the most massive gamble with public health. That's not what responsible governments do.
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The Age of Recklessness once again.
Their approach from day one of the pandemic has been to gamble with peoples lives, running it as a political campaign – and effectively boasting about it – reminding us that ‘many of you will lose loved ones’ etc .
They have challenged scientists and opposition politicians who recommended making schools and work places safe, and taking precautionary early actions to save lives, – asking ‘why do you want to cancel Christmas?’, or ‘close the economy?’.
And they have got away with it – aided and abetted not only by the Telegraph, Express and Mail and Sun, but also by the BBC platforming ideologically-driven ignorance, and abandoning any idea of investigative journalism.
They may well get away with it once again.
Even now , trumpeting ignorance as a virtue seems to really work – not being able to carry two ideas at once: that vaccines alone without supporting mitigations will not work , such as in Javed’s recent utterances.
Acceptance of people dying unnecessarily at the the rate of two or three jumbo jets crashing a week, – otherwise known as ‘living with it’ now seems accepted . What’s wrong with us?
Andrew – thank you for your honest and true comments. I wish these truths were stated by the main media!
Agreed. What is becoming more and more clear is the total unwillingness to address any of the building blocks necessary to build resilience either for now or perhaps more importantly for the future.
Two juxtaposed stories undermine this today. 7000 air filtration units for 330,000 (at least) classrooms, while Liz Truss spends thousands on lunch.
Fiddling (sic) while Rome burns?
It IS a reckless gamble with other people’s lives.
The problem is that, whatever the result, it WILL be portrayed as a triumph by the press.
Over Christmas Ive met up with 2 hospital Consultants and a GP. Comments were that there are huge pressures on general wards. Omicron might be milder so less ITU pressures but larger numbers needing hospital care.
Net result – less space available for other acute and elective care. Ever more delays, suffering and deaths.
This is an utterly callous government.
I don’t generally participate in blogs or discussion forums but feel I need to put in my two pennyworth as this is now becoming seriously depressing.
Our ‘wonderful’ (not), ‘independent’ (not) MSM are intent only on seeking answers to questions that will demonstrate a) Omicron is mild and b) the NHS will not be overwhelmed. Any half decent investigative journalist should be asking questions that probe beneath the surface. So, what proportion of the nearly 1.2 million people who contracted Omicron in the last week will go on to develop long-Covid? What effect will that have on sufferers’ lives? If sickness and absence rates continue to rise, what will be the impact on the economy? Is it sustainable to have millions self-isolating? (We only have to look at the airline industry and trains). Is the answer really to get people back to work when they may still transmit, or is it better to bring down the rate of infections? If too many teachers are self-isolating, how safe is it for those still in schools to double class sizes? If we’re really concerned about childrens’ mental health, why aren’t we worried about the thousands who have been through the trauma of losing parents and grandparents to Covid well before their time?
And let’s just, for argument sake, go with the line that Omicron is mild. Let’s imagine that Omicron won’t kill anyone and that nobody will get long Covid. Let’s assume for a moment that Omicron is no different to a cold or seasonal flu. How did Omicron and other variants mutate in the first place? Bad luck? Or high levels of transmission in countries which have scarcely had sight of the vaccines let alone had a chance to receive jabs. Reporters and presenters nod when there is a rare mention on the airwaves of waiving patents. But their immediate response is to dismiss any such notion in favour of the inane ‘would you rather have a booster for you and your family, or donate it to a poorer country?’ rather than asking why the UK, Europe and others continue to oppose patent waivers.
It seems as a nation we are hell-bent on NOT vaccinating the world as quickly as possible (not even by donating surplus vaccines, let alone by patent waivers), so if Omicron is allowed to transmit to more than a million a week in this country alone, the conditions are perfect for the next variant to mutate – and the next, or the one after that, …. or even after that, might not be so ‘mild’.
I’m no epidemiologist, but it seems to me, this is not rocket science. We need to be thinking long-term. The issues that face us are not simply about Omicron and how mild it might be; they’re not simply about how overwhelmed the NHS might become. MSM needs to be more engaged in asking questions that go to the root cause of this pandemic – how do we minimise transmission, (waiving patents so the world can mass produce and administer vaccines rapidly, funding good ventilation and clean air in schools, public places, workplaces, manufacturing in this country and providing FFP2 masks, etc, etc).
Or, in short, MSM could just use the crib sheets it has been given by Independent Sage for the last 18 months instead of just accepting the status quo….
Like the companies that break the law and then pay a huge fine but write it off as “the cost of doing business” because ultimately it’s profitable the Johnson party write off the deaths, the long-term illness, the devastation of the NHS as the cost of doing politics for their own enrichment and that of their mafia cronies. It’s just collateral damage and they’ll walk away without anyone being able to lay a finger on them because it’s just politics.