Surging

The distruption to COVID data caused by Christmas and New Year is coming to an end. It seems yesterday's nfection data, 218,000, included data for all four nations. Dta for hospitalisations has not been updated since 2th December, some nine days ago, which during a wave of infections of a pandemic is pretty remarkable. As it allows the Government to pretned all is pretty much going to plan, the NHS not being overwhelmed, when the opposite is probably true.

Still, good headlines in the papers and all that.

Restrictions on those who test positive by LFT are to be slackened, this as those isolating in some industries are reaching the 25% threashold that makes normal production unviable, and also the need for PCR confirmation is to be abandoned, though this will require changes to some legispatation, but as we know with this Government, a swipe of a Minister's pen will do.

But to highlight this, as a surge in cases of a highly infections pandemic, which may or maybe not be less severe than previous variants, to cope with staff shortages allowing people to return to work just seven days after becoming infected seems an odd way of doing things.

Johnson's insistance last night that his "plan B" was doing well, and as plan B seemed to be wait and see, I'm not so sure. The NHS is under huge pressure, pressure from mostly unvaccinated patients admitted, and that surge in patients maeans resources are used up, and routing treatment like for cancer sceening and treatment gets delayed, meaning more of those patients will get seriously ill and may not make it either. These are the excess deaths that almost no one talks about any more.

Another thing few talk about at all is "long COVID, I have seen articles by journalists, one who has been sick for 18 months, about how even getting out of bed is hard, or leaving the house one day leaves them so weak not able to move for days afterwards. And Long COVID can come from Omicron too, we just don't know, nor what this large amount of patients might need n the months and years ahead in terms of care and support.

And all this cannot be spoken of so Johnson can pretend all is under control and businesses can stay open, even if cstom is down by 90%, so that the gOvernment doesn't have to reintroduce furlough. And because of that, people who should isolate have to go into work, are exposed, and fall ill, not before passing it on to others.