Matthew Taylor, CE NHS Confederation, #r4today just now.
"We don't have a living with COVID plan, we have a living without restrictions plan, which is completely different."
In a nutshell, from the front line.
To be clear, 200 people died of COVID yesterday because someone upstream in their infection chain thought "it's only the flu, and I want to get on with my old life." Ditto day before. Now that we don't have free rapid tests and mask mandates, it's even harder to be responsible.
What happens when you stop trying to hold back a highly infectious and harmful virus.
This is an air pollution monitoring station on Marylebone Road, you probably won't notice until it's pointed out to you.
It's there because vehicle exhausts kill ~13,000 a year, and the government want to track and control the risk factors.
There are all kinds of restrictions imposed so that the air we breathe is cleaner: bans on domestic fires, expensive filters and catalysts on vehicle exhausts.
The main risk factor for catching COVID is your chance of bumping into someone infectious with it. Double the case rate, double the raw chance of encountering the virus.
For reasons that should become clear in tomorrow's programme, I've been reading about the Plague of Athens, 430 BCE. Obviously ties in with #COVID19 - an emergent infection to which there is no immunity. Here's Thucydides account from 'The Peleponnesian War'
It reads like a pandemic of the classical era ...
"It began first in Ethiopia..."
"People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head..."