Covid cases are on the rise again so why are we not taking precautions? - Jayne Dowle

I checked the hospital website for guidance on Covid protocols and apart from instructions for wearing masks when visiting Covid-positive patients, not visiting if you’re positive yourself, and using hand sanitiser, there didn’t appear to be any other rules.

I’m relieved, obviously, that Covid isn’t adding to mum’s rather lengthy list of medical issues, and that she is as vaccinated as she can be.

But it all feels slightly surreal. Can it really be only three years since my children were banned from visiting their father as he lay dying from a brain tumour in a hospice? He too had contracted Covid and the entire place was on lockdown.

We couldn’t even go and see him through the window. They said their final, heartbreaking, farewells via iPad. And at the terrible socially-distanced funeral, I couldn’t even hold their hands for fear of breaking the law.

As well as relief that mum isn’t suffering, I also feel a sense of anger that we were forced to endure those draconian pandemic rules – and for what? Three years later, with Covid cases on the rise again in the UK and overseas, and the 81-year-old US president Joe Biden very publicly self-isolating after testing positive, there seems to be nothing in place at all?

I took a look at the UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency), graphs, as someone almost used to say, and found that in the seven days up to July 17, cases of Covid rose by 4.5 per cent up to 3,557. There were 197 deaths with Covid recorded on the death certificate during the same period, a weekly rise of more than a fifth, 20.9 per cent.

It's killing people in Greece too. According to the latest report available from Greece’s National Public Health Organisation, EODY, 26 Covid deaths were recorded between July 8 and July 14. A new variant, FLiRT, is believed to be to blame. There was also a 44 per cent increase in the average weekly number of new Covid-related Greek hospital admissions over the previous four weeks.

And after the Tour de France was hit by a wave of coronavirus cases in June, there are fears that the Paris Olympics will be disrupted. We shall wait and see.

UK health experts have suggested that FLiRT and another new variant, LB.1, might be able to evade immunity, which is why people who have been vaccinated are now contracting Covid again. That and no social distancing precautions.

“Increased travel and big events such as festivals often result in crowded settings where the virus can spread more easily, and there are no longer any legal restrictions like wearing masks or social distancing,” says Dr Mariyam Malik, an NHS and private GP at Pall Mall Medical.

I’m not being alarmist, but this makes me feel slightly uneasy.

Now we know that there were many rules for us and quite a different set for the denizens of Downing Street, our national psyche is in a very difficult position, psychologically. I can best describe it as a kind of Stockholm syndrome. We were held captive under Covid for so long, we’re puzzled by freedom – and at the same time, left rudderless.

I railed against the more unfathomable social distancing rules, refused to bang any NHS pans to salve Boris Johnson’s conscience, and wouldn’t wish to turn back the clock to 2020 and 2021, ever. But am I being unreasonable to wonder why even as it stalks amongst us, Covid seems to be ignored by those now in charge of British public health?

I fear Covid has almost become a national embarrassment. With the ongoing UK Covid-19 inquiry set to reveal further disturbing and highly inconvenient truths about how the pandemic was so badly mishandled, you can see why the new government might want to step away from the poisoned chalice.

Yet, the government also has a duty to inform and protect its citizens, without causing panic, of course. No information is almost worse than disinformation. Time for new Health Secretary Wes Streeting to sit down and take a long, hard look beyond the graphs.