Two years

It is two whole years since the meltdown on Friday 13th 2020, when sport event after sport event was cancelled and by the end of the day, the season was suspended until April. Although the Cheltenham Festival went ahead as did a Stereophonics gig in Cardiff that evening. Both were mass transmission events.

THe evening before, Johnson addressed the nation and stated that many of our loved ones would, sadly, die. This was a policy decision.

I have reread my post for that day, and I said that the Cabinet's "Nudge Group" assessed that the country would not accept a lockdown for the 12 weeks at which point the peak of infection would pass.

It would be eleven further days before a lockdown was imposed, by which time the infection having doubled every two days, hundreds of thousands extra infections were caused, with many of those ending up in hospital, and some died.

It is estmated that 20,000 died as a result of that delay, the same number that died when hospitals were emptied to create beds for the expcted wave of infections, the old and infirm being moved out of hospital into care and nursing homes without testing, thus introducing the virus into hothouses of the most vunerable.

Again, this was a policy decision, and we can lay that and the deaths at the door of Matt Hancock.

But as no Lesson Learned activities were carried out, as Johnson was eager to move on, the same mistakes in imposing lockdowns late, so they had to be harder, we made on the next two waves, causing more and more additional infections and deaths.

As for deaths, those who died not only came as a direct result of the virus, many died because of a lack of capacity for routine checks, screening and non-urgent treatment. This is the hidden cost of COVID, taking the additonal deaths well over 200,000 in the two years that passed.

Odd then, that the Government's main instinct was to use the pandemic as cover to cansfer £12 billion of public money to its friends and backers of PPE of unknown quality in ammounts that could never be used before it went "life-ex", pallets of useless PPE are being burned daily now, the ecidence of the corruption and cronyism literally going up in smoke.

And Johnson likes to tell us, Britain's, and his response, to COVID was "world-leading", as is everything he does, or claims it to be.

As I write this, a new variant is surging, causing infections and hospitalisations to rise 15% week on week, all helped by a total relaxation of mitigation imposed by the Government in order to keep its own backbenchers happy. Once again putting his position as Party Leader above the health and well being of the nation.

Happy anniversary, Great Britain. We got the leader in the time of pestilence we deserved.