Lockdown pessimism from a natural optimist. Brexit could be to blame

Johnson looks very rattled to me

Chris Johns

The Indian variant has got a lot of people very worried. Me included.

Johnson and Whitty looked unusually rattled at their recent covid briefing.

As other have noted, Brexit is partly to blame for this. Johnson delayed putting India on the red list of travel-banned countries because he wanted to lead a trade mission there. Other countries, like Pakistan, were red-listed before India, despite having much better case numbers.

Trade deals with big non-EU countries are vital for the great ex-post Brexit rationalisation project. Banning incoming travel from India isn’t a good look if you committed to getting positive PR about trade deals.

Is the new variant 40% or 50% more transmisssable than the current dominant strain? Much depends on the answer. The odds of the health system being able to cope with a 40% figure are much better than the if it’s 50%. That’s the nature of non-linear maths.

Is the observed higher transmission rate of the India variant virological or sociological? That’s the very good question posed by Times science editor Tom Whipple. Is the virus itself entirely responsible for more cases or did infected people get off flights and then enter multi-generational households, making contact with more people than is, on average, usual?

If this is 50% more transmissable, modelling by government advisers suggest that the next wave could be worse than anything we have seen so far, even with the UK’s high vaccination rates. There are still too many unvaccinated vulnerable people. And no vaccine has 100% efficacy.

Models have been wrong many times, not least through this pandemic, but this is a very stark warning. Particularly for countries without UK vaccination success.

Given the disaster scenarios modelled by the scientists, I am baffled why Johnson is proceeding with the easing timetable. But he has form in this regard. Surely it would have been better to wait 2 or 3 weeks to gather much-needed data about this variant?