By “all” restrictions here, they really do mean “all” – no more facemasks, no more social distancing, no more restrictions on pubs and nightclubs and concerts or sporting events. When the Premier League returns after the ever-shorter football offseason, they’ll have full stadiums. The only remaining restrictions of any kind, it seems, will be some restriction on travel to so-called “red” and “amber” zone countries, which will be restricted to the double-jabbed.
All in all, the contrast with Ireland could not be greater:
People will no longer be forced to wear facial coverings from July 19th as England ends its third Covid-19 lockdown, communities secretary Robert Jenrick has announced.
Mr Jenrick said on Sunday that “the state won’t be telling you what to do” after so-called Freedom Day in just over two weeks’ time, reflecting the success of the government’s vaccination programme.
“I think we are going to now move into a period where there won’t be legal restrictions,” he told Sky News. “The state won’t be telling you what to do, but you will want to exercise a degree of personal responsibility and judgment – different people will come to different conclusions on things like masks, for example.”
For what reason are they so comfortable making this move? Well, it is that the Delta Variant, though it appears to be causing a modest to significant spike in cases of covid, is not yet translating into severe illnesses, hospitalisations, and deaths. In fact, in the UK at the moment, the case fatality ratio for Delta (the number of deaths per case) is just 0.01% – one death in every thousand. That’s basically in line with the flu. The UK is betting the house on the vaccines working. The Irish Government, by contrast, is betting the house on the vaccines not working. Somebody is getting this horribly wrong. And that somebody, my friends, is the Irish Government.
How can one say that with confidence? Well, because the consequences for either Government in being wrong are different. The UK, remember, can still slap restrictions back in place if hospitalisations and deaths suddenly start to rise. That will be a little bit politically embarrassing, in the worst case scenario, but not the end of the world. In the meantime, Britain is getting to enjoy a mostly-lockdown-free summer.
In Ireland, by contrast, it will be much harder to figure out whether we have gotten it wrong in the first place. If Dr. Holohan’s much-ballyhooed “fourth wave” does not crash into our shores with a vengeance, we will first have to figure out if that is because Holohan was right – and the restrictions worked – or because Holohan was wrong, and the fourth wave was never coming to begin with. Holohan will, of course, have the entire media establishment, and most of the political establishment, declaring that he was right, and that his foresight saved us from a terrible fate. In the meantime, the Irish must spend another summer locked up.
Over in the USA, Florida and Texas opened up their economies fully – in the exact way that the UK plans to do – at the beginning of March. Their covid curves have been flat as a pancake ever since. None of this, of course, ever warrants a mention in the Irish media. We remain the country that intends to be the most locked down in the western world, for the foreseeable future, on the basis of Dr. Holohan’s crystal ball.
No other media outlet seems to be telling people this, for reasons that are unclear, and unforgivable.