Boris’s ‘whack-a-mole’ Covid strategy is failing

Will the current cycle – lockdown; open up; eat out; restrictions; lockdown – go on forever? In their handling of coronavirus, Boris Johnson and his colleagues have become increasingly media-responsive, fear-bound, model-sensitive, sound-byte producing, u-turn prone and, quite frankly, embarrassing to all who believed the UK to be a beacon of rational thought. Has the Government lost the plot? We are not sure if it ever had one.

This week at its annual meeting, the British Medical Association lamented the Government’s lack of grip on the public health during the current pandemic and proposed a ‘near-elimination’ strategy. Put simply, this involves what the BMA called ‘sacrifice in the short-term to ensure that we can avoid a large-scale prolonged lockdown that would be ultimately much more detrimental to the health of our society.’

To achieve this, the BMA proposed a number of measures. These included better messaging, targets for the daily and weekly number of new cases, hunting out cases rather than waiting for symptomatic outbreaks, and trigger points for the implementation of specific additional measures both locally and nationally.