My thoughts on Plan B

At the Spectator...

 

Despite consulting the jeremiads at Sage, there was simply not enough evidence to cobble together at short notice to justify the sudden change of gear. Poor old Chris Whitty was wheeled out to do his thing and for the first time in the pandemic found himself calling for tough new restrictions while standing next to graphs showing declining hospitalisations and deaths.

In a statement to the House of Commons, Sajid Javid resorted to ‘Disco Stu’ mathematics to justify his extraordinary claim that the UK was heading towards one million cases of Covid a day by the end of this month. He said that if there were 10,000 cases of Omicron in the country (only 568 have been confirmed) and if the numbers double every two or three days, a million cases per day would be the result. This would be far beyond anything seen in the most Covid-ravaged parts of the world since the pandemic began. Moreover, rates are no longer doubling every two or three days in the Gauteng province of South Africa where Omicorn was first discovered.

In 2020, Covid policy was often based on reasonable worst case scenarios. It now seems to be based on insane nightmare scenarios.