Fans back cancelled.

Quote: Saddened! "

There's a balance to all this. What they should be saying is use a common sense approach. Everything can exist as it used to, but wear a mask in public places other than when eating/drinking. Temperature checks on doors of shopping centres and pubs/restaurants and sporting events etc. Anyone with symptoms HAS to isolate. Anyone found violating that is fined, any employer found with obviously positive cases on premises also fined. Visitations to care homes limited and non-physical etc. Schools moving to more digital solutions than in school education etc. Kids who don't have a laptop or internet or carer at home can go in, you'd minimise the number of kids in school, but can alternate it so all get to be around their friends part of the time. Protection of those with pre-existing conditions with a semi-permanent furlough scheme that helps them long term if they are unable to safely return to work, which we could then afford if the economy wasn't being frozen. There's so much we could be doing.'"

I agree with this but most of this stuff has been going on anyway. It's been undermined by two things: failure of the testing and tracking system and government giving out mixed messages which have confused people and undermined trust.

For testing and tracking the principle is already in place with dealing with things like salmonella. If an outbreak is detected, they trace where it came from, rapidly track all the supermarkets and food outlets that could have contaminated produce and get them to remove or recall. They don't need to say "there's some salmonella out there, destroy all food stocks in the UK". An infectious disease is obviously harder to deal with but the same principle applies: if you have knowledge of where the outbreaks are then you know where the risks are and can have a better approach to risk management. If you've identified a series of outbreaks in Exeter then it's not going to affect people going to rugby league matches in the north of England. Enforce isolation of those affected, temporary closure of affected workplaces with testing of employees, if necessary introduce some stricter measures in Exeter for a couple of weeks, get on top of it. It's not 'zero covid' it's 'risk minimisation' covid but you needed to have the proper test and trace infrastructure to deal with it.

This is why it's been so destructive to award the contracts for political reasons to reward cronies than allowing it to be dealt with by public health experts. Then to deflect criticism of the government they abolished Public Health England, and increased Dido Harding's empire by putting her in charge of the things PHE used to do. The Sunday Times reported that they are looking to replace Simon Stevens as head of NHS England with Dido as well - the government is working to a different agenda here. They should be focusing everything on defeating the pandemic, instead they are playing politics and looking at how they can use the pandemic to political advantage by centralising power in the hands of a Conservative peer who they know will be receptive to their future 'plans' for the NHS.

For this to work it would have depended on a lot of public compliance to go along with social distancing and mask wearing and isolation if necessary but I think most of the British public would have been on board if they felt that the government was on their side and trying to enable as much normality as possible just with additional safety precautions. Unfortunately trust in government is very low, the Cummings affair did huge damage after people made big sacrifices for the common good and saw the rules didn't apply to everyone, but its not just about Cummings. The government started by talking up the threat of the virus and making everyone scared, then they tried to take political advantage by making it look like they were the ones trying to reopen the economy and it was the unions and Labour who were championing the lockdown. See Boris repeatedly baiting Starmer at PMQs to say it was safe to go back to schools or on public transport. In the civil service the problem was they have reduced office space to the point everyone is cramped into small hot desking environments in buildings with no windows, they made some adjustments which meant it was safer to come back but for a limited proportion of staff, so those who have difficult home environments for working from home could come back but the rest stay working from home if they could. But then Boris wanted to create a clash with the trade unions so started the instruction for all civil servants to go back which then undermined all the safety measures. The intended audience was his target voter base who are supposed to think "look at our Boris taking on them lazy civil servants" but it also sends a message that the virus is effectively over and we can all return to normal. Now about 3 weeks later he's saying everyone should work from home if possible.

People have seen all this mixed messages and just lost trust so the government's only tool left is a cycle of ramping up restrictions and then loosening them. I have always disliked Boris but a lot of my family supported him in the last election and would not hear a word of criticism against him at first, saying he was doing his best in an impossible situation. But something has changed in the past few months because now they are like "he's just an idiot", "he changes his mind every 2 weeks". It feels like when you have a coach of a rugby team and they reach a point where the fans just lose trust in them. He's past that point as PM.