The Uk dying toll from Covid-19 could pass the 100,000 mark this 7 days, a depressing milestone in the development of the pandemic. As a proportion of the populace this represents a single of the worst fatality fees in the environment.
This time a year in the past the virus was confined to the Chinese town of Wuhan and its environs.
If there was a time to near the borders, it was then, and certainly once the pandemic experienced been declared by the Environment Wellness Organisation.
But it would have taken a government blessed with extraordinary foresight to have performed so. In any circumstance, the key vector for the condition appears to have been the a lot of hundreds of British visitors returning from Alpine ski resorts in February and March. Really should they all have been quarantined at a time when there had been couple of recognized situations?
With hindsight that may perfectly have have created a big difference to the spread of the contagion and it is evident that some ministers were proposing the closure of all borders at the time. But it was politically inconceivable. Moreover, when imposed this kind of controls cannot be lifted. This is the predicament facing ministers this week as they ponder a raft of new measures principally developed to halt new variants of the virus entering the country.
The irony of the arrival of a vaccine is that the prospect of a return to normality seems to have receded alternatively than advanced, with faculties now not likely to reopen until finally right after Easter. With no a vaccine the Authorities would have no choice but to contemplate scaling back again restrictions after cases started to subside.
But ministers now fear that mutations will enter the state and render the different vaccines ineffective. Matt Hancock, the Health and fitness Secretary, disclosed yesterday that 77 circumstances of a virulent South African variant have been recognized from travellers into the British isles. A compact number carrying a Brazilian mutation have also entered the place.
Clearly, stopping all travel not matter to rigid quarantine rules will reduce this possibility. But the Government ought to also accept that, as has been noticed with Australia and New Zealand, these are not stopgap measures but semi-long lasting controls. The logic of this policy is that for as prolonged as mutations threaten to undermine the vaccine programme then standard journey to and from the Uk will be not possible. For a place that depends so greatly on its intercontinental connections this is a significant, perhaps irrevocable, stage.