COVID chaos

After weeks and months of the Government imploring the population to go back to work, go back to school, go back to university, eat out to help out and that going to the pub is your patriotic duty, today Johnson reversed that and announced a wide ranging suite of restrictions, including pubs and restaurants closing at 22:00 as it is a well known fact that COVID is more active after dark, after has had its Ovaltine.

Schools will remain open.

As will universities.

Work from home if you can, if the office is not COVID secure. What about if the travel there isn’t secure?

What happens if an employer threatens you with the sack if you don’t go into work?

I had low expectations, so this was about as good as it was likely to get.

Clamp down too hard and he runs the risk of enraging the right wing of the party and country into more limits on their “freedoms”, and too little and the virus will spread.

With this compromise, the virus will spread anyway, and a harsher lockdown will come, but time will have been lost and so will lives. Last time the delay cost 20,000 lives….

So here we go, lockdown but not locked down, more regulations almost certainly issued through SIs, and no scrutiny.

By my reckoning, this will be the 53rd update to the regulations/restrictions.

The Government could use Civil Continencies Act to issue Sis, but that would be scrutiny after seven days and each one with a monthly sunset clause. But that is too much bother.

So the hospitality industry will take a hit, for those working pubs it’ll mean losing at least an hour’s pay a day, and over a week that could mean the difference between being to afford heating and eating, or in restaurants meaning there can only be one sitting per table, and halving takings and profits.

None of this sounds good.

And yet the Government whose policy is to break international law wants us all to obey their latest diktat while they, like the Tory MP sitting on a train on Sunday with no face covering, can ignore them as laws and rules are for the little people, innit. These restrictions are to be in place for six months at least, and if the infection is not brought under control then further measures will be brought in, and at any time the military could be used to support the police.