Boris Johnson confirms return of working from home as England moves to Plan B | The Telegraph - Maighna Nanu & Sam Hall:
December 8, 2021 - "Boris Johnson has confirmed that the Government is moving to its coronavirus Plan B in the wake of rapidly increasing cases of the omicron variant. Speaking at a Downing Street press conference, the Prime Minister issued new guidance for Britons to work from home where possible from Monday.
"Face masks will also be compulsory from Friday in most indoor public venues such as cinemas, theatres and places of worship, with exemptions for certain hospitality venues such as pubs and restaurants. Mr Johnson added that vaccine passports will be required for nightclubs and other venues with large crowds as of Wednesday, with negative lateral flow tests also accepted. He also announced that daily testing would be introduced instead of isolation for those who come into contact with infected people.
"The Prime Minister stressed that Plan B measures 'do not amount to a lockdown'.... He said his aim was for restrictions to be in place 'no later than early January and possibly before'."
Why Plan B is a mistake | Unherd - Freddie Sayers:
December 9, 2021 - "Just as an experiment, let’s take the Government at face value. They’re worried about the new Omicron variant, which is ... already spreading rapidly in England, doubling every couple of days; the UK Health Security Agency estimates it could be the dominant variant in as little as 2-4 weeks. A big new wave like this, if it passes through the population, will always hit a small minority of vulnerable people badly who will then need hospital care — and ... this wave looks like it might peak in the beginning of January which is the busiest week of the year in UK hospitals, and an annual pinch point at which (because of bad resourcing and planning) we have almost no spare NHS capacity. So they are worried, as ever, about terrifying footage of overflowing hospitals....
"The first thing to make clear is that if the underlying premise is correct — that Omicron spreads like wildfire and will lead to significantly more reinfections and breakthrough cases — it is going to be very hard to stop it. You’d have to go for a full-on nationwide lockdown to seriously attempt to slow it down — and even that may only delay the peak by a couple of weeks. But there is no appetite for another full-on lockdown, especially as it would ruin Christmas again, and the Government is already unpopular. They simply don’t have the political strength to do it — and there are doubtless many people who wouldn’t obey it.
"Meanwhile, a small selection of minor rule-changes such as 'Plan B' entails will not make much meaningful difference. Advising working from home but still going to parties, increasing the wearing of masks in shops but not in pubs and increasing use of vaccine passports for a variant that spreads easily among the vaccinated is not a serious policy response to Omicron. Might it push the peak of the wave out by a day or two? Who knows, but if we are going to be at a million cases before Christmas, it’s a meaningless difference.
"So why do such a pointless thing? The answer, as always, is politics.... The first calculation is within parliament: No 10 figures they can afford to upset their own backbenchers and that Boris Johnson’s position is not genuinely vulnerable (despite media stories). In any case, Keir Starmer will blindly support any restrictions, so they will win any vote. Within the wider electorate, they calculate that the voters who will be most upset by such a move are in the minority, and will either vote for them anyway or not vote at all.... Most important, they imagine a bad scenario in early January with hospitals really under pressure, and they don’t want to be vulnerable to the charge that they 'did nothing'.... This way, they can at least say that they took action."
Read more: https://unherd.com/2021/12/new-lockdown-restrictions-are-pointless/
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