Dancing with death: was Boris right to delay the bonfire of restrictions?
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Nobody can say we weren’t warned. The postponement of Freedom Day from June 21 until July 19 had been flagged up so many times that it was almost a relief to hear an exhausted Prime Minister making it official. At least we now know where we are.
Whether a long-suffering nation is prepared to take this latest letdown on the chin is another matter. We had looked forward to this midsummer bonfire of restrictions ever since the dark days of February, when Boris Johnson set out his roadmap to recovery. For the distrustful and the desperate, this delay will be the last straw. Expect tempers to fray and protests to proliferate.
It isn’t just the fact that millions had been looking forward to enjoying an unrestricted summer of festivals and parties, singing and dancing, or just getting on with our lives after what feels like an eternity of anxiety. No: it is also the realisation that the vaccination programme — the one bright spot amid the gloom — has, despite its undeniable success, not gone far enough to protect us against a third wave of Covid. We are so near and yet so far from where we need to be to feel safe. Learning to live with Covid turns out to mean learning to live with crushing disappointment.
The science is, unfortunately, impossible to ignore. Despite the rapid progress in vaccinations — still averaging more than 400,000 a day — the rise in cases across the UK is indeed exponential, in the mathematical rather than the metaphorical sense of the term. Cases are doubling every ten days, from 2,000 in early May to 8,000 daily now. By June 21 the graph shows that we will have 15,000 a day and a week later 25,000. By that time we should know how rapidly hospitalisations are progressing from the low base of 144 a day now. The possibility of as many as 1,000 seriously ill patients arriving daily strikes fear into the NHS, even though younger patients on average recover faster. Increasing the number of daily contacts by easing the remaining restrictions on June 21 would have spread Covid faster at precisely the time of greatest risk. And the fact that the vaccines are available now (unlike last summer) would have made it even less justifiable to put thousands of lives in peril.
Once again, we are in a race against time. Faced with cautious advice from Sage and the latest data in The Lancet, even a Prime Minister as viscerally hostile to lockdowns as Boris Johnson had no choice but to press the pause button. Belatedly, scientists are admitting that the Indian (or Delta) variant is still not fully understood. It seems to be not only more transmissible but also more intractable than the Kent variant, with vaccines offering good protection only after a second jab. Hence the new emphasis on providing second doses as soon as possible, just eight rather than twelve weeks after the first.
It isn’t just that a lot more people might yet die of Covid. With waiting lists having just passed a record five million, the NHS is only just beginning to catch up with all the other patients suffering from life-threatening conditions whose treatments have been postponed, often for many months. Now is not the time to risk a repetition of last year’s delays, which have already proved fatal for some. That is why, sadly, we must still protect our NHS. By doing so, we are really only saving our own souls — or those of our families and friends.
In future years, when we look back on the pandemic, this week may well seem to have been a crucial moment — the moment when we collectively made the unpopular but unselfish choice. By renouncing for another month the delights of a carefree midsummer, the British people are opening up the prospect of a more enduring restoration of the nation’s health and prosperity.
Fortunately for us, we are not being asked to forego all our pleasures: the Euros and Wimbledon beckon, there are partial exemptions for weddings and wakes, and the weather has been kind. As for foreign travel: some, at least, of those who turned their noses up at “staycations” last year are by now more aware of what they had been missing in their own back yards. There is so much to explore and to enjoy on this sceptred isle that spending your summer (and your money) at home is no great hardship. Happy days aren’t quite here again, at least not for everybody. If the only sacrifice that is demanded of us is a little more patience, however, then that is not too much to ask. Whatever you may think of Boris, his decision to delay the day we can go dancing again is surely the right one. Nobody wants another dance with death.
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