As COVID rises again, the UK Government’s only plan is denial and distraction.

“Brace yourselves” for rising COVID cases, the UK Government says. The scandalous failure to plan for long-term protection of lives.

... | The Guardian, 14-Mar-2022.

It is a tragedy when governments, rather than using vaccines and therapies to improve outcomes (by using a vaccines-plus approach), use them to promote policies that cause a much higher level of infection, long COVID and unacceptable levels of ‘acceptable deaths’.

Shouldn’t we expect better given we have had 2 years to do better? Vaccines, therapies, and evidence on so many airborne precautions that reduce spread. Or should we just tolerate higher infections? 27,000 deaths involving COVID-19 as per ONS in the UK since ‘freedom day’. Over 9,000 deaths just this year in the ‘mild’ omicron wave.

1.5 million people with long COVID – with 685,000 having had symptoms for more than a year. 21,000 of these with symptoms more than a year are children. The impacts of omicron have not been even fully felt yet on long COVID figures.

And we have decided that mass infection is an okay policy while millions remain unvaccinated or unboosted. Millions of children haven’t even been offered the vaccination yet, despite being MHRA and JCVI approved and recommended.

Not only have they promoted mass infection with these policies, but they have also made us blind to what is going on by the loss of contact tracing, and massively disincentivizing testing. Hospitalisations are going up once again and declines in deaths have stopped at 700 per week.

The only plan seems to be denial and distraction.

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— AUTHOR — ▫ Dr Deepti Gurdasani, Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology, Statistical Genetics, Machine Learning, Queen Mary University of London.   Sources Text: This piece was first published as a Twitter thread and turned into the above article on 16 March 2022 with the purpose of reaching a larger audience. It has been minorly edited and corrected, and published with the author’s consent. | The author of the tweets writes in a personal capacity. Cover: Flickr/Andrew Parsons. - PM Boris Johnson. | 15 March 2022. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.) Share this article:       [Read our Comments Guidelines] Read more Repression of climate and environmental protest is intensifying across the world — A global report reveals rising repression and criminalisation of climate and environmental protests, with state and corporate actors employing anti-protest laws, harsher policing, and violence to stifle activism worldwide. US election pollsters were actually a lot closer than people think — Polling accuracy in the U.S. presidential election faced criticism, despite improved performance over 2020. Small errors in a tight race amplified perceived inaccuracies, but swing state polls generally proved reliable, reflecting a close contest, Professor John Curtice explains. The rise and rise of national populism — National populism, fuelled by media-backed disinformation, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and libertarian ideologies, threatens democracies globally by eroding institutions, fostering fear, and exploiting divisions. Prince Andrew and the British establishment’s ‘target-rich environment’ for spies — A UK tribunal upheld the ban on a Chinese businessman, citing national security risks. His links to Prince Andrew underscore concerns about foreign influence and lapses in public scrutiny.