Are you sitting comfortably Winnie
I would urge anyone with an open mind to lookup Dr David Martin on Rumble, the whole thing has been a long time in the offing and it stinks to high heaven, it has made some people very rich whilst polarising society. Moving on though to the here and now......
Omicron is clearly a lot milder than it's predecessors, as you know I work in Pharmacy and the demand for LFTs is phenomenal which leads me to believe the high positive numbers is to a large extent down to more testing. I believe the numbers weren't massively different in the community with Delta, just that there was a different ratio of known to unknown then vs now.
Masks are I believe pointless because everyone uses single use surgical grade masks over and over again which effectively renders them useless, perhaps with social distancing indoors they would marginally help - the resurgence of the common cold pre-Omicron and post unlocking is I think fair evidence of that. The trouble is there's always a spike after removal of restrictions and at some point they have to be removed so the key is capacity to deal with the fallout, I think we are more or less where we need to be with capacity (in the sense that hospitalisations are well below the same period last year) except for one thing - isolation rules. So an impact based decision has to be made on availability of essential workers vs the workload - Omicron is rife already, the vulnerable cohorts are vaxxed so give them high protection in hospitals but let asymptomatic +ve workers go to work without contact with the vulnerable.
Plan B without doubt is a mechanism to blame the public for going to pubs, clubs and the football/darts/etc
In summary - amend isolation rules to preserve capacity, the vaccine & immunity from previous infection provides enough immunity so let's crack on with life.
FACT - the overall deaths in 2021 is less than all years to 2018. Covid is therefore being allowed a disproportionate amount of the UK's resources.
Take care all.
WCV