Quote: Winslade's Offload "I suspect there will be little relaxation of social distancing until the NHS is able to provide a service again. Currently all the resources are directed at Covid and emergency patients. Then the issue will be which social distancing measures should be relaxed. Currently the Govt. is committed to a return for schools on March 8th and that will use up some of the 'relaxation allowance'. After that I would guess it will all be about the economy and which bits it should allow to return to normal. Although sport is a business, it's also a leisure activity so I would imagine attendance of crowds will be fairly low down on the list.
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The politics of it will determine the speed at which things are relaxed. I think once the most vulnerable groups have been vaccinated, there will be a large political movement for reopening everything, which will be driven by some of the newspapers and also backbench Tory MPs. Boris will also see the political advantage from positioning himself as the one who is trying to get things back to normal again and on the side of people who are fed up with lockdowns, which is what he was trying to do last year with Christmas etc. He certainly won't mind if he's the one saying lets get Britain back moving, and Starmer/the teachers/the civil service/the doctors are being more cautious, as he will think most people in the country agree with him, it will be like Brexit again when he was saying lets get Brexit done when 'the establishment' was trying to delay it.
Also there's a Budget in March, and Budgets are usually times when the Chancellor (who is also on a reputation building exercise) will want to unveil a big plan for the future, so he might want to use that to announce a raft of reopening measures, possibly with another Eat Out To Help Out or similar measures to encourage people to start spending and doing things again.
So I expect things will reopen more quickly than the scientific and medical advice suggests, which will lead to a new wave of cases, and then it will go one of two ways. If vaccinating the vulnerable works to significantly cut the hospital omissions and deaths, then reopening will go smoothly, the rest of the population will just have a wave of a mild illness just like happens regularly with common cold anyway, and we won't need to go back in to lockdown. If on the other hand, a huge wave of cases amongst the socially-mingling unvaccinated under 50s still results in a large number of serious infections then the NHS will still get swamped with covid and they will have to make a choice to either lock down again or ride it out. In the abstract ride it out sounds reasonable and most people will say - look, we've had enough now, we just have to accept there will be a lot of deaths - but that will also damage the economy too as lots of people will not be willing to go out and spend and mingle if the risks are high, and if there is no official furlough support as we aren't locked down that will be the death knell for many businesses, so people will then start saying just lock down again and get on top of the thing once and for all.
The other risk if you go down the route of just let it circulate among the under 50s is the more people that get infected the greater chance for the virus to mutate into a new strain to which vaccinated people aren't immune, and then that virus will become the dominant virus through natural selection as it will have a wider population to infect, and then all the vulnerable people will start getting infected again and we'll be back to where we were a year ago.
The right wing press might well at that point just say let it ravage through and we'll have to live with it, but the government went all in on the vaccine strategy - overpaying for vaccines to make sure we had excess stock, taking liability in the case of vaccine complications on to the taxpayer rather than the manufacturer, and going for the approach of maximising the number of people covered with a single shot and spacing them apart rather than the recommended time between doses. These were all risks, which other countries - especially the EU - haven't taken, but so far they look to have paid off in that the UK has at least in terms of numbers receiving the first shot, done better than other countries and its also been able to leverage the advantage of having a single state-funded health system to oversee the vaccine roll out.
Boris and the government have made good political capital out of this not least because it has given them exactly the type of example they wanted to justify Brexit - the UK has been outside the EU regulatory environment and been able to get an advantage by taking a different approach. If vaccination does get on top of things then Boris may get a Falklands-style electoral boost that could ride him through to an election in 2023. So they are very anxious not to have a new strain emerging which evades the immunity of those already vaccinated and undermines the whole potential success.
Which is why I think that although we will start to relax things more quickly than expected in March, there could be a rapid U-turn back in to lockdown around May, if the cases start to circulate rapidly again even if it is among the "less vulnerable" population.
