DIDN’T we do well, everybody! More than 2.3million Covid cases in the week before Christmas and tens of thousands more over New Year.
Hardly anyone in intensive care and no spike in deaths.
Omicron, the mildest of mutants, is spreading immunity like wildfire.
By the end of the month, experts believe we will be waving goodbye to killer Covid and learning to cope with a new version of the common cold.
More than nine out of ten will have had all three jabs, or Covid itself, or both.
Barring lethal but unlikely new variants, Covid is petering out. The panic should be over.
There is one challenge remaining . . . the perpetually pleading National Health Service and its cheerleaders in the media and public sector unions.
Can it cope? Course it can.
Thanks to Boris Johnson’s drive on vaccinations and the pursuit of freedom, Britain is leading Europe — and possibly the world — out of lockdown mania.
In the face of unfounded and near-criminal Sage hysterics about 6,000 deaths a day, it was the Prime Minister who took the lonely responsibility for giving Christmas back to England.
The same gift was denied to the Scots and Welsh as shroud-waving duo Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford remained in lockstep with their EU comrades.
Europe is back where it was at the start of the pandemic with house-bound voters in open conflict with panicky leaders.
Here in Blighty, the war is effectively over. Fewer are seriously ill — and nine out of ten of those are unjabbed.
Leaner, fitter
Far from Sage’s reckless doomsday predictions, of the average 132 deaths with Covid recorded over the seven days to January 1, six out of ten were admitted specifically for the virus — an average of 70 per day. This is similar to the death rate in a bad year for flu and pneumonia.
Now we need to follow Health supremo Sajid Javid’s advice and live with Covid.
Despite tax rises — thanks, Boris — and the soaring cost of living, there is much in this happy New Year to look forward to. Unleashed from Covid’s dead hand, the economy is set to outpace all the G7’s richest nations, including powerhouses Germany and Japan, for the second year running.
Businesses that survived the pandemic are leaner, fitter and raring to go. A rising tide floats all boats, boosting jobs and wages and helping pay off the colossal costs of Covid.
All the same, it’s a stretch before Boris can claim victory.
First, he needs to abolish the test-and-trace racket which has cost this country an eye-bleeding £37billion and counting.
We do more testing than any other country — double the rate in France or America and five times that of Germany.
Right now we can’t even test properly, if at all, because of supply line chaos. So what’s the point?
Second, slash self-isolation from seven days to five and then abolish it altogether, ASAP.
If Covid is the new common cold, we should take it in our stride, with masks only for those who choose to wear them. If herd immunity is within reach, why slow its progress?
Third, take a stick to cash-guzzling NHS managers and ensure we never have another winter hospital crisis again.
Fourth, sack chaos theorist Neil Ferguson and abolish the concoction of Communists known as Sage.
It won’t do simply to change its name, as we did with Public Health England. This incompetent quango was quietly rebranded as the UK Health Security Agency.
What the UKHSA was that all about?
Caught flat-footed
Fifth, leave those kids alone. Stand up to selfish teaching unions and ban masks, Covid tests and isolation for all schoolchildren.
They’ve had enough of remote teaching, absenteeism, the lifelong cost of a wrecked education and the incalculable impact on young minds.
Yet millions of schoolchildren are still being used as hostages by the trade union wing of Labour’s socialist politburo.
Remember, Boris, parents are Tory voters too. Keir Starmer may be basking in a 16-point poll lead but this mirage will evaporate as voters recall Labour’s authoritarian attitude to power over two years of emergency rule.
As Omicron peaks and fades, Starmer has been caught flat-footed yet again on the wrong side of the debate on political leadership.
