If you turn your watch back to February and March 2020, the government took a different approach to coronavirus than the rest of the world took. They kept borders open and kept social mixing. In fact, I remember being in a politics lesson when my teacher predicted that the government wouldn’t close airports for economic reasons – and he was right. Until January 2021, the government failed to close travel corridors to protect against new strains of coronavirus. Who can forget the chaos when the Alpha variant was allowed to make its way through the population. The situation can evolve so quickly that there were three days between Boris Johnson saying it would be “inhuman” to cancel Christmas, and him doing just that.
I’m a big opponent of using lockdowns as a public health measure – the social and health choices of individuals should only be curbed to avoid national emergencies, not as a public health tool. However, my view only extends to domestic policy – not travel restrictions. As of yet, the UK doesn’t think it has any cases of the new variant. We, right now, have a chance to continue socialising and avoid any limits on social gatherings, which is something we should all seek to do.
However, as soon as a case of the variant is detected in the UK, it is too late. They will have been infected by someone else, and they will have spread the virus before testing positive and isolating. This is not rocket science – it’s common sense, and it’s the principle that allowed countries like Iceland to avoid lockdowns. As soon as there’s one case, there’s more. The UK policy once centred around the R number, so it’s a concept that most of us understand well enough by now – 1 case spreads to 2, which becomes 4, becomes 8, becomes 16, becomes 32, becomes 64, becomes 128, becomes 256, becomes 512. One case spirals out of control. It happened with the original variant in March 2020, it happened with the Alpha variant at Christmas 2021, and it has the potential to very easily happen again with the Omicron variant.
The government seem to, yet again, make the same mistake here, prioritising the travel freedoms of the international community to the UK over the social freedoms of the UK population. They hope this variant will be okay – and I hope it will be okay too, and I hope that this post is proven wrong. However, we have far more to lose in civil liberties (which, make no mistake, may be necessary when the time comes, but are not unavoidable if we act now) than we do by restricting international travel to the country. When it comes to the rights to socialise, protest, and even get an education of the people in the UK, the government is too keen to play down a situation than it is to act quickly to protect an as of yet protected nation. Maybe zero Omricon won’t be possible, but there is so much freedom and so many lives to potentially lose if the variant makes it into our borders before we know more about its transmission and its lethality, and before we have the infrastructure (or, more likely, political will) to isolate and trace every case of it.
Lewis Compton 