I'm pro taking precautions on the balance of risk. When the hospitals were overwhelmed with covid cases like in March/April then it was sensible to have tight restrictions to get the caseload down to a level where it could be managed through isolating local outbreaks. Use government support (expensively) to keep the economy afloat till the caseload was down and then have a reopening with appropriate precautions (wearing masks, some distancing, increased cleaning, ventilation) to minimise the risk.
An effective test and trace system, run by public health experts and co-ordinated through local authorities, with the co-operation of the public, with powers to introduce local restrictions when outbreaks start, would have been able to keep the virus at a low enough level to allow more and more things to reopen.
Unfortunately the government has done a really poor job. They have used the pandemic response as a way to dish out huge sums of taxpayers money to favoured companies - eg Tory party donors or tech firms that Cummings has contacts with through previous campaigning. The PPE was a shambles because they didn't award the contracts to the best firms but to their own contacts. Test and trace in other countries is run by public health professionals - here they handed it over to a Conservative peer Dido Harding who is woefully out of her depth and so it has been a shambles. The apps never got off the ground and seem to have been more a way for Cummings to allow favoured tech firms access to peoples' personal data. They messed up a strategy on care homes during the peak of the pandemic because they were more bothered about the media handling and getting the numbers in hospitals down so the virus ripped through care homes and vulnerable elderly people were allowed to die out of sight.
They also lost the co-operation and trust of the public - which was there at the start - through Cummings being seen to have been able to break the rules. Also it doesn't help that social media disinformation campaigns (which they have tacitly encouraged when its been spreading misinformation about migrant rapists, Labour paedophiles and the EU wanting an army) have been saying the virus is all a myth, its 5G, Bill Gates wanting to implant chips in us which a lot of people believe and share on their facebooks hence all these anti-mask protestors.
As a result of the failure of test and trace, when they've tried to reopen things and the caseload has picked up again they have had to rely on the blunt instrument of local lockdowns, and are now warning of national lockdowns again as they can see the caseload following a similar trajectory to early February. We also had the stupid attempts to stoke a culture war by making a big deal about forcing people to go back to the office to try to create a battle with trade unions and rally their support base, but that hasn't even got off the ground before they've backtracked on it.
Just allowing it to rip through the population is not a credible option as when the hospitals get overly full we would get situations of people dying at home, unable to get in to hospitals, with their families stuck with their decomposing body for several days due to backlogs of being able to collect and dispose of the corpses. In that sort of scenario, you aren't going to get people turning out to rugby league matches even if there are no government restrictions.
So we're approaching where we were in March where there will need to be major lockdowns again and there's no sign the government will be able to get on top of the virus when the caseload drops again as the test and trace is still a complete shambles and it will be until they transfer it out of the hands of Dido and Serco and let the health experts run it the way they want to. So we'll be in this kind of destructive cycle for a while longer.
The pandemic would have been very difficult for any government and other countries with better governments and better health infrastructure than us are struggling too, but Boris and his cabal of hopeless suck-ups in Cabinet have been particularly unsuited to dealing with it. Had this happened a couple of years ago on Theresa May's watch I think some of the things would have been done better and she would have been better suited to leading in this situation and less motivated to sacrifice public health in pursuit of handing contracts to cronies.
