It’s too much...

Although I would never dismiss the terrible tragedy of losing loved ones and relatives from a horrible virus, it really is time we put some fresh perspective into this whole scenario.

The collateral damage from our home imprisonment far exceeds the number of deaths from Covid without any underlying conditions.

Eleven million children and young people are being forced to work at home in front of computers (that’s if they have one ) and denied any social contact with their friends and the opportunity to exercise in team sports outside their home.

In March last year, Boris Johnson told us we had three weeks to flatten the curve. He’s made a number of promises and under-delivered, including:

* a “world-beating track-and-trace system”, which employs more than 200 consultants at £1,500 a day;

* the reckless Help Out To Eat Out scheme,

* locking the country down again for a month in November,

* changing his mind about Christmas family get-togethers, the cancellation of which he said would be inhumane, eventually allowing us to meet friends or relatives for one day only, and

* another U-turn when it came to schools after stating publicly there was no way schools would not reopen in January.

During this period he was happy to condone Dominic Cummings’ 300-mile journey Durham to, among other things, test his eyesight, but elderly people in care homes have been prevented from seeing friends and relatives for almost a year when we have had the ability to allow controlled visits.

As a person in his twilight years, I can no longer play tennis with one other person, even if they are in my family.

I can walk around a golf course with a stranger but not play golf with someone I know. I can go to the Range and Majestic wines and buy “essential goods” but my daughter can’t buy shoes for her children.

For much of last year we were told the whole objective of the government was to get the R number down to below one. Now the R number is between 0.8 and one, that factor is just dismissed.

Instead we have the doom-laden duo from Sage who seem to have far too much influence on our lives, on TV every other day telling us things are worse, the new virus will mutate and kill 40 per cent more people and that there is no easy way out of this crisis.

The fact is that in the past ten years, the number of beds in the UK in NHS hospitals has reduced by 15 per cent and in the same period the population of this country has increased by ten per cent.

The cost of furloughing – at £220 billion – and the cost of the track-and-trace system (which has never worked properly) at £20bn would have funded the construction of 100 new hospitals and trained almost 200,000 nurses and offered them higher salaries to attract them to the hospital sector.

We have also spent millions on contracts for useless PHE equipment, many of which have gone to companies with no experience.

The real culprit here is the criminal neglect of the NHS and investment in resources, and for much of that time under the influence of Jeremy Hunt.

It’s strange we can suddenly find the cash to pay people to stay home but not to support the NHS.

Looking at the NHS – it’s surprisingly the world’s fourth-largest employer with 1.4 million people working in it. Strangely, however, we have only 4,500 Intensive Care Unit beds for the whole country and 1,260 hospitals.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact the NHS is there to protect us, not vice versa.

This is no implied criticism of the NHS staff and their tremendous efforts and sacrifices, but it simply is not fit for purpose, with a scale and structure that clearly isn’t working.

This entire shutdown of society – the inability to travel to go to well-regulated pubs or restaurants, to play sports to attend concerts, to go to swimming pools and leisure centres, attend gyms, to have visitors in your own home to see your children and your grandchildren or your parents and grandparents – is far too high a price to pay for the obsessive focus on a virus which, looking at the number of deaths over the past ten years, is only moderately higher than average.

If there is a real crisis, why are there 40,000 retired staff still waiting for a call to come and help? Why are Nightingale hospitals still largely inactive?

The Prince’s Trust estimates one in four teenagers are now suffering from acute depression. We have stolen a year of their lives for a virus which kills far fewer than those who commit suicide each year. Now, apparently, there is an 18-month wait for mental health and counselling appointments.

Lockdown is not a strategy, it’s a lame and inexcusable destruction of our lives and financial and mental strain which will have ramifications for all of us for many years ahead.

We must never stop living to avoid dying.

By Chris Livingstone

Farnham