It was an extraordinary way to end nearly two years of restrictions and lockdowns. With no explanatory briefings from either the chief medical officer or chief scientific adviser, no input from Sage and no consultation with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the prime minister told a surprised House of Commons he would unilaterally lift all Covid restrictions a month ahead of time on 24 February.
How public health could be sustained thereafter was plainly an afterthought, of little consequence to be unveiled after the recess in a document pointedly called Living with Covid. Nobody expects other than the scantest of strategies, with even the Office for National Statistics’s (ONS) highly regarded surveillance survey, which allows the UK to pick up the emergence of high-risk variants, likely to be scaled back or even scrapped after April.
