COVID-19 UK Political Analysis by Tim Hames – 23rd December 2020
Mutant Menace. A huge new difficulty in dealing with the virus crisis.
The speed of events in this crisis never ceases to astonish. As late as Friday morning, the core team of ministers and officials dealing with COVID-19 were aware that they might need to tighten policy to contain the virus outbreak, but thought that such a decision could await the end of the Christmas break and might be relatively incremental in character. A day later, they found themselves placing a vast swathe of the population under a new Tier Four regime, which essentially duplicates the November lockdown in England, curtailling Christmas in that part of the country and cutting festivities back severely elsewhere, as a response to a new mutated form of the virus which appeared to explain the surge in virus cases in London, the South East and the East of England. The UK, having proudly announced that it was leading the world in terms of both regulatory approval and then the deployment of a vaccine, found itself with an unwanted new first.
This is a setback of a potentially seismic order. Ministers and officials simply cannot know how damaging the arrival of the new strain of the virus will prove to be, or how quickly scientists can start to provide answers which would allow policy to be recast in order to best manage what was already an immense prospective challenge, namely minimising the number of new infection cases while maximising the speed of the vaccination drive. Almost every plan that had been drawn up in every department which is affected by the virus crisis will have to be looked at again. Cancelling Christmas looks minor in this light.
