The article by Daniele Meloni
On June 21, the United Kingdom should remove all restrictions on individual freedoms that began in March 2020 with the Covid crisis. The path seemed marked: vaccination plan among the most effective in the West and 4 phases of easing the measures to get to the fateful date. All this, in the intentions of the Tory government, if the data on infections, hospitalizations and spread of the coronavirus would have allowed it. And that’s the point.
Premier Johnson said yesterday that “everyone is seeing hospital admissions have increased recently” due to the spread of the Delta variant, until recently known as the “Indian variant”. With 7,540 positives, yesterday saw the highest number of infections since the end of February. Just a week ago the cases were just over 4 thousand, while hospitalizations rose to 1,024, registering a +69 that worries Johnson and his ministers: the government must decide by June 14 whether to confirm the end of the lockdown or extend the measures again .
Of course, health considerations cannot be separated from political ones. Johnson was the protagonist of the UK vaccination campaign, the man who proved that London can largely do it – indeed, it can do even better – outside the EU. For some time its parliamentarians have been pushing for a complete reopening of the country and have expressed themselves critically on the lockdown and excessive nationalization of the economy. While Johnson is massacred for excessive caution, the opposition argues that he was irresponsible in delaying the lockdown in both spring 2020 and last fall.
The Premier, who, beyond the rebellions in the votes on Covid, 5G and international cooperation continues to be the most precious electoral asset for his party, yesterday reiterated the importance of the vaccination plan: it seems in fact that among the new infected the the majority are people who have not yet undergone the serum, or who have only received the first dose. The decision on the end of the lockdown, Johnson said, “will be dictated by the data.” And this is where the scientific-health aspect of the pandemic comes into play. The government’s medical-scientific advisers – who have not always done the government a good service in the past – argue that the current numbers could be a sign of a new wave of cases. It is still unclear whether vaccinations also fully protect against this new variant.
Minister Hancock – also under pressure from the media and Tory MPs – said that the new variant is 40% more contagious than that of Kent, called the “English variant”. The Minister for Vaccines, Zahavi, also suggested “caution”, while the Labor opposition accuses the government of “incompetence”. For Johnson, however, the concerns come mostly from the 50 members of the Covid Recovery Group, the committee composed of Conservative parliamentarians who had already written to the Premier in November to ask him to end the lockdown and to commit him not to implement others in the future. Among them are the former leader of the Commons, Mark Harper, and Sir Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative Backbenchers: the party body most feared by all Tory leaders.
