Like the moment in a horror film when a scene of calm gets violently interrupted, this weekend saw the sudden, dramatic news of a new Covid-19 variant and a government scrambling for the right response. Scientists are rushing to ascertain the level of Omicron’s danger, while experts urge ministers to risk temporarily over-reacting, instead of doing too little. This villain not only refuses to die, but seems to get worse.
But of course, the situation is completely unlike that horror film. There has not been a scene of calm in almost two years, and despite all the government’s pretences the virus has never gone away. Ministers have had since January 2020 to understand Covid, prepare an adequate response and learn from their mistakes. Their approach to Omicron shows that, once again, they have failed.
The government’s new restrictions are dramatic in two areas, moderate in two and non-existent everywhere else. In the first category, the government imposed red-listing and hotel quarantine on arrivals from South Africa and nine neighbouring countries, and home quarantine from everywhere else until the negative results from a day two PCR test. In the second, it has re-instituted a mask mandate in shops and on public transport in England, and will require all contacts of Omicron cases to self-isolate. But it has not placed any restrictions at all on hospitality venues, or even asked people to work from home.
Obviously it was important for the government to act fast, and many experts have welcomed the restrictions from southern Africa—all too mindful that ministers resisted them from India until the Delta variant had fully seeded here. But the South African government is furious that so many countries have targeted, and effectively punished, it for discovering and warning about the variant. It is also true that most of its red-listed neighbours have not recorded a single case of Omicron, whereas multiple countries in Europe have. Once again in this pandemic, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that developing countries have been singled out for harsh treatment—all the more galling given that Africa has fared far better than the UK and suffered significantly fewer deaths relative to population.
On the mandatory home quarantine from everywhere outside southern Africa, the government has not discriminated. But this has recalled other familiar errors in the UK’s policy. The first is the government’s cosy approach to business and donors. Given that all arrivals must now isolate for up to four days, the day two PCR becomes an essential public service—and yet it is fully outsourced to private companies. People entering the UK are now placed entirely at the whim of an unrestrained marketplace, with no price cap for tests and no guarantees against cowboys. Travellers routinely report tests or results that do not arrive, and that will now mean longer isolation. The government could easily ensure free (or strictly price-controlled) tests, as in other countries, to protect customers and limit the loss of individual freedom. It has deliberately opted not to.
The second problem here is the government’s wild inconsistency, another repeated feature of its Covid response. As the epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani has noted, “slowing down the import of a variant is only helpful if you’re going to use that time to prepare or act.” Aside from the limited new mask mandate, the government is doing almost nothing. The extension to the booster programme is welcome—and ought to be accompanied by a sustained and substantive increase in vaccine supply to poorer countries—but it cannot stand in isolation. The policy of the last eight months has shown that vaccines alone will not resolve our problems. The government has not even agreed to a joint COBRA meeting with the first ministers of Scotland and Wales to agree a common approach, despite urgent requests for one.
A key area of concern here is hospitality venues. It is perhaps understandable that masks are not practical in bars or restaurants, and very few people would wear them to go dancing, but that in turn poses the question of alternative measures. Covid certification for hospitality venues, and more, is now routine across the continent. It could include the options of vaccination, a negative test or proof of recovery from the virus. And yet, despite the appearance of such a policy in the government’s September “Plan B,” it refuses to enact it.
How can Omicron be serious enough to force all UK arrivals into mandatory quarantine for up to four days, but not serious enough even to require a negative test to enter a nightclub?
And so we are left with the mask mandate. The real problem with its re-introduction is not that it only applies to certain venues, but that it was ever lifted to begin with. Here, in effect, is the government’s chief sin: its total failure of communication. Masks are, and always have been, the easiest and subtlest way to reduce the spread of the virus. In other European countries they are worn by everyone indoors and on public transport, without controversy or fuss. And yet in England, as in America, they have been subsumed into a culture war which ministers have only aggravated.
The virus did not disappear in the summer. It made no sense to lift such a non-intrusive restriction, and England was the only nation of the UK to do so. New variants—and an increase in winter cases even without them—were predictable and predicted. Now, after months of the message that masks are not necessary, and constant pictures of Boris Johnson and colleagues not wearing them even when asked to, the public is understandably confused about their utility and, in many cases, actively hostile. The government had the means to ensure a basic level of protection and, in its recklessness, threw it away.
Of course, the prime minister has been constrained in what he can do. But that is not about public health, but politics. The government seems to fear Covid less than backbench revolts. As such, it speaks to a fundamental problem in the Conservative Party. The Tories are now actively placing a spurious notion of “liberty” above safety, and Omicron is simply the latest example of it.
From the start of the crisis, ministers have acted late or inconsistently or not acted at all. Business has taken priority over people. Every new measure has supplied confusion over clarity. This is no way to manage a pandemic or run a country—and both are getting worse.
