Coronavirus - is enough being done to contain it?

Concerns over the Indian variant & it's potential threat to the easing of restrictions. This is pretty much all Johnson's making, on Apr 2nd the governmemt added Pakistan & Bangladesh to the red list but India remained exempt. The PM said yesterday during the briefing that the reason for India's exemption was that at that time there was not an identified variant of concern coming from India, however that is not the only criteria that sees a country added to the red list, an increased number of cases is also a factor & India's cases were spiralling out of control

Finally the Government added India to the red list on Apr 19th, 17 days later but it did not take affect until Apr 23rd which in turn saw a massive spike in UK - India flights over those days.

There is speculation as to why the government delayed adding India to the red list, during this time it was set to travel to India for Brexit trade talks, perhaps they thought the optics would look bad for PM Modi & you don't want to piss off your prospective trading partner. Either way it's just another example of how Johnson's government have made an absolute mess of this whole thing and yet

Tories + 10 pts

The Indian one going around now is the first real feast of the vaccine as if it works properly then it doesn't really matter if the Indian one if got by lots of people as it will have little effect people feel ill for a few days then get over it, the fact the has been no increase in people going into hospital seams to say it's working so hopefully we can keep hearing back to normal

I would say there is not much evidence being shown that tells us (the public) if the vaccines are effective against this variant & I strongly suspect that either way the Government has been shown some kind of alarming evidence that the Indian variant isn't at all affected by the vaccine and has decicded to keep this evidence to themselves. If that was proven to be the case it's a damning indictment on Johnson's handling of this.

Also my instinct tells me that any inquiry into this will not see Johnson himself giving evidence of any kind even if he was called to do so,and he would rather probababy sacrifice the careers of the rest of his cabinet by tossing them into the inquiry's line of fire to save his own neck.

When Pakistan and Bangladesh were put on the red list on 2nd April. The infection rate per 100,000 in India was already 3x the rate in Pakistan and because of India's population size was 90,000 per day against less than 10,000 in Pakistan.

Thousands of people arrived from India between then and when India went on the red list on 23rd April. There is strong suspicion that the delay was due to Johnson being due to go to India to discuss a Trade Deal.

It looks like a clear difference in approach where Johnson ignored the science for India.

(15-05-2021 11:19 )lovebabes56 Wrote:  I strongly suspect that either way the Government has been shown some kind of alarming evidence that the Indian variant isn't at all affected by the vaccine and has decicded to keep this evidence to themselves.

Rubbish.

Even if they did, the scientists would blow the whistle.

^The scientists are still looking into the effect but this seems to be what is happening.
The Indian variant seems to be more transmissible than the original covid-19.
The vaccine seems to be working on the variant.
Hospitalisations are still reducing countrywise and aren't even increasing in Bolton and Blackburn.
So far there are only 4 confirmed deaths due to the variant.

Throughout the pandemic the Government has been slow closing our borders. In answer to a question about it yesterday, Boris said that we have one of the strictest sets of border controls in the world (yeah right) and all those entering from India had to self isolate for two weeks. Obviously that has gone really well!

Travelling from the airport to wherever they are going to self isolate obviously gives plenty of scope for transmission as does mixing within their household. Unless the whole household is self isolating together as opposed to just the ones arriving from abroad again people affected unknowingly could infect others.

When the situation in India started to become bad we should have closed borders straight away and stopped all flights immediately rather than our Government’s practise of allowing a grace period allowing dozens of flights in during that time.

Bet that will make uncomfortable reading in any inquiry.

JOHNSON OUT - DARELLE OLIVER IN!! LOL

Government denies claims that it was 'too slow' to ban travel from India as it says the variant of India was not on a list of 'variants of concern'