Opinion: 'To pretend Covid is over is absolute nonsense'

Or maybe it’s more a case of how they are manipulated to adapt and change, and not necessarily for the better.

Over the past month or so, I’ve had to go into what are described as medical settings. I’ve been to the opticians, the dentists and two trips to hospital (nothing serious but thanks for your concern).

In all those places, absolutely everyone wore a facemask. In fact, at the dentists one flustered patient arrived a minute or so late and apologised for not having a face covering. She was promptly given one by the receptionist and was asked to put it on.

And in all those settings, social distancing was still being observed.

This told me something and the message was loud and clear. Medical professionals, those at the sharp end, are acutely aware that Covid is a major problem that is still making people fall ill and is still killing hundreds of people a week.

So I checked. At the time of writing, hospitalisations and deaths from coronavirus are falling.

The most recent figures available on the government website reveal the total number of patients admitted to hospital with Covid in England alone over the most recent seven day period was more than 4,000 while the number of deaths within 28 days of positive test over the same timescale was 616.

Happily, both these figures were down on the previous week.

But to pretend Covid is over, as the government would have us believe, is absolute nonsense. And yet that’s what people think.

There’s no mention of these deaths on the news. I can’t think of any other situation where if more than 500 people died of a contagious illness in a week it would just be largely ignored.

And ignoring it is what people seem to want to do. My dentists is in a shopping centre and close to a large supermarket. Still wearing my mask, I nipped in to do a bit of shopping after my appointment and not one person – not a single person – was wearing a mask.

So it’s job done for the government and its ‘learning to live with Covid’ gaslighting. I can’t help but wonder how the families of those poor souls who died feel. Not so much learning to live with Covid, more learning to die from it.

And if we’ve been brainwashed into accepting the effects of Covid as part of life and not anything to bother our pretty little heads about, the same can be said about Brexit.

When was the last time you heard a government spokesman concede that perhaps Brexit hadn’t gone quite as well as Boris Johnson would have us believe? The question is rhetorical.

The Conservative government can’t or won’t admit that its flagship policy is an unmitigated disaster, devoid of the sunlit uplands and Brexit benefits we were all promised.

OK, I can almost hear the Brexiters among you hurling abuse my way. But if you don’t believe me, how about Parliament’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee which last month urged the Government to have a 'radical rethink' about Brexit.

Committee chair and Conservative MP Neil Parish (yes, the very same Neil Parish of tractorgate infamy) said: “In 2021 farmers faced an extraordinary situation – crops were left to rot in the fields and healthy pigs were culled due to a lack of workers. The Government’s attitude to the plight of food and farming workers was particularly disappointing.”

The committee’s report said that by August last year, there were an estimated 500,000 vacancies among the nation’s 4.1 million food and farming roles with sector historically reliant on overseas workers, particularly from the EU.

It added: “The evidence we have received leaves us in no doubt that labour shortages, caused by Brexit and accentuated by the pandemic, have badly affected businesses across the food and farming sector.

"If not resolved swiftly, they threaten to shrink the sector permanently with a chain reaction of wage rises and price increases reducing competitiveness, leading to food production being exported abroad and increased imports.”

Or how about the Office for National Statistics figures released in May that show there are now more job vacancies than unemployed people in the UK for the first time since records began.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.7 per cent between January and March, its lowest for almost 50 years, as job openings rose to a new high of 1.3 million. Yet there are actually fewer people in the workforce than there were before the pandemic.

So why has this happened? Surely it’s got nothing to do with Brexit and Covid because the government would have us believe both of those problems are ‘done’.

Not according to the ONS which said this is a reflection of a reduction in the size of the workforce ranging from post-Brexit worker rules stopping EU workers coming here to slaughter pigs, pick crops, work in the hospitality industry or the care sector; added to older and clinically vulnerable workers quitting because of the lack of workplace Covid health mitigations; and a rise in long term sickness associated with long Covid.

So no, Covid isn’t over and Brexit isn’t done and we are all still paying the price whether we care admit it to ourselves or not.