I am so pleased I have now had my second vaccination, but I remain frustrated with this Government’s handling of the pandemic. In the first wave, the social care sector suffered from government mistakes, hospitals only coped by stopping non-covid treatments, we went 2 weeks late into lockdown and people continued to enter via Heathrow in thousands each day. Everyone was feeling their way at that stage, but in June, when the Liberal Democrat leader called for a speedy inquiry to learn from that, Boris refused. Then in the Autumn, when experts warned of a second bigger wave, government were still deceiving us by talk of concern when they most wanted to revive the economy. Now we have confirmation of an exceptionally high England death rate of 1901 per million people, compared to Germany’s death rate of 97 per million, higher than most developed countries, higher even than Brazil. This is according to the recent John Hopkins University world-wide report on 21 April.
Over half of our deaths came from November onwards, showing clearly the huge mistake government made. If we had gone into lockdown more severely and sooner before Christmas we would almost certainly have had less deaths (as we should have learned from the first wave) and emerged sooner from lockdown.
But is that the end of the matter ? Far from it. We have continued to allow even tourists to come into the country in their thousands every day. On 24th March the Indian authorities warned of a surge of a new variant and cases here began to emerge. We still continued to allow tourists from India to enter our country freely. Boris got elected on a promise to stand up for our nation, but now his claim that we had very strong curbs on people coming here from India was yet another deception. His complacency is unforgivable. Restrictions on people from India start on 23 April, that is 30 days after the warning.
He has learned nothing from the mistakes made last year and it is costing us dearly.
Nigel Jones