UK voters have ‘bigger worries’ than Dominic Cummings
VOTERS have “bigger things to worry about” than the Dominic Cummings controversy and have not raised it unprompted in focus groups in the UK, a leading pollster has said.
James Frayne, founder of the Public First research agency, said the behaviour of the British prime minister’s chief adviser “would not make the top 100” in the list of what families were worrying about this weekend.
It came as a poll in the UK — conducted for the Telegraph — showed that a third of the public say they would have would have done the same as Cummings if they had felt the welfare of their child was at risk.
Police last Thursday said that Cummings “might” have contravened public health regulations during his 14-day stay in Durham but that it warranted no further action.
Frayne claimed the Cummings saga was “beyond an irrelevance” to the majority of the public, who were far more concerned with job security, schools reopening and being reunited with family and friends. He said that, while opinion polls showed public disapproval for what Cummings did, they involved people being asked for their view on a specific subject, rather than asking them what subjects mattered to them.
However elsewhere in the UK, it was revealed yesterday that Britain’s disastrous decision to abandon testing for coronavirus occurred because health systems could only cope with five cases a week.
Newly released papers from the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) show routine testing and tracing of contacts was stopped because Public Health England’s systems were struggling to deal with a handful of cases.
At a meeting on February 18, advisers said PHE could only cope with testing and tracing contacts of five Covid19 cases a week, with modelling suggesting it might only be possible to increase this to 50 cases. Advisers then agreed it was “sensible” to shift to stopping routine testing, despite acknowledging that such a decision would “generate a public reaction”.
The decision to give up on testing those with symptoms of coronavirus is now seen as the key reason the UK has the highest death rates in Europe.
Over the next month, the UK government says it will roll out a national contact tracing scheme — a full 14 weeks after officials raised the country’s poor readiness for such a scheme.
England is now recording around 8,000 new cases of Covid-19 every day and the NHS “test and trace” system is promising to warn up to 10,000 people a day that they have been near someone who has tested positive.
The end of routine testing in the UK came on March 12, when UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced that anyone with symptoms of coronavirus should simply stay at home for a week.
On this day the UK recorded 421 new cases. However, after the virus raged uncontrolled through the UK that month, Boris Johnson’s government was forced back to nationwide testing — announcing a “five pillar” plan on April 2, which finally led to a nationwide tracing service launched last week.