No masks, no free tests, low sick pay – the government is back in Covid denial

theguardian.com:

If you’re reading this in the UK, odds are that by now you’ve had coronavirus: 7 in 10 of us have watched the dreaded red line appear. You may have been stuck in bed with it twice or even three times by now; by April 2022, England alone had recorded almost 900,000 reinfections. When the public asked to “return to normal”, I’m not sure a regular hacking cough was what they had in mind.

It is an odd situation. Last week, Covid infections were reported to have soared by 43%, while hospitalisation from the virus rose by 23%. An estimated 1.7 million people in the UK tested positive over those seven days. Two million of us now have long Covid, with about two in five of those – or 826,000 people – having symptoms for at least a year.

And yet, listen to Boris Johnson or his ministers and you’d be forgiven for thinking none of this was really happening. As a new coronavirus wave threatens to hit the country once again, the government appears more interested in scrapping human rights than protecting human lives. Welcome to sick man Britain: where the public are left to catch coronavirus repeatedly, and ministers pretend everything is fine.

Back in February, Johnson said the government had created a plan to start “living with Covid”, but what it really did was form a plan to catch and spread Covid. After all coronavirus prevention measures were dropped on 1 April – from the legal obligation to isolate if you had Covid, to the end of most free testing – the public were left wide open to mass infection. Even hospitals were told by ministers to ditch mask mandates, though some worried trusts have defied the rules and kept them. That all precautions were pulled back just when most people’s vaccine immunity was beginning to fade, and the