The Guardian view on Covid in 2022: new year, old pandemic
In the battle with Covid, the year 2021 has turned out to be a reality check. Misleading claims at the start of the pandemic in 2020 that lockdowns would suffice to “send coronavirus packing” were replaced, at the start of the year, by another simplistic conceit that vaccinations would accomplish the same goal, enabling economic activity and social life to resume at full power. It has not turned out that way.
An evolving and sometimes stopstart combination of national restrictions, individual behaviours and repeat vaccinations has kept the worst ravages under some control. Yet the spike in Omicron cases and this week’s preparation for new hospitalisations show that the crisis is very finely balanced. As we bid farewell to the old year on Friday, it ought to be clear to all but the most dogmatic ideologues that 2022 will not be a shining new virus-free era. It will be another volatile mixture, not quite the same as 2021, but not so very different either.
Boris Johnson always shies away from this truth. He dislikes giving bad news even when he is popular, and especially when he is not, as at present. He pretends that simple solutions are just around the corner, even when, as now, he can no longer count on his own party’s support to implement them. That is why he has bet the farm on simply getting through the Christmas and new year season with a combination of modest and potentially contradictory policies but without bringing the NHS to its knees. He tells the public to party on, but at the same time to take regular tests; to act responsibly, but to splash the cash in bars; to observe private rules, but to spurn public ones. The essence of his policy is to cross his fingers and hope something turns up. It is desperately cynical.
Mr Johnson does all this because he has lost his authority over Conservative
MPs and the country. Lockdown and social distancing options are now closed off to him by the right wing of the Tory party. The vaccines route may soon become almost as prohibitive, because his party will oppose the necessary measures to incentivise the unvaccinated minority to comply. The reality is that Mr Johnson is more than ever reliant on the decency of others. If England comes through the holiday period infection spike, it will be thanks to the public, not to the prime minister.
Just as he did earlier on in the pandemic, Mr Johnson has launched his latest policy with another airy promise that he knows he cannot keep. In times gone by he promised a worldbeating contact tracing system by June 2020; it never happened. A month ago, to combat Omicron, he committed to a million booster jabs a day by this weekend; the target has never been met. Before the holidays, he said that people should take a test and socialise; all too often, those tests are simply unavailable. He is taking a tremendous risk.
Mr Johnson is not alone in trying to balance public health caution with respect for the public’s frustrations and fatigue. Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, Mark Drakeford in Wales and Paul Givan in Northern Ireland are navigating these same issues. None have got everything right, and although the temptation to inflate small differences for political advantage is ever present – as Emmanuel Macron is also showing – most of the UK national governments are in approximately the same place on Covid because their publics are too. As 2022 dawns, the reality that we all remain in this together should guide them all.