Hopefully, a Merry Christmas to All...

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The Christmas un-lockdown is almost upon us. There are very vocal critics of what really is going to be a fairly obviously ludicrous hiatus in the Covid-19 safety regime. All medical opinion seems to be firmly set against it, along with the Opposition and a significant tranche of the Tory party itself. 

Epidemiologically, even from a lay-person's standpoint, it would seem to be counter-intuitive, especially given the now apparently adaptive nature of the virus, mutating rapidly as we speak. Add in the fact that we are just weeks away from vaccinating significant numbers of the population which would much reduce the impact of the virus in the near future and it looks on the face of it to be a short-sighted attempt to play to the gallery and gain brownie points. You would think by now that populist box-ticking would have taken a back seat to plain common sense, given the scale of the challenges we still face. But no, it would seem that being voter-friendly is still uppermost in the Governments' mind.

However, this pandemic has hit the least well off and most vulnerable in our society the hardest; psychologically as much as financially and in physical health terms. It's one thing being in a psychologically vulnerable state in a tiny house in a provincial town with no social care or support to speak of, and being in a similar mental state in a large house with care and support on tap.

Many people are looking forward to some measure of psychological and emotional respite from the stress of this last year in the form of Christmas and family contact. The difficult thing will be balancing safety against 'normality'. For my part, losing Christmas 'normal' for one year isn't going to impact on me in the slightest; but for many, loneliness and isolation will take their toll with devastating personal consequences. There's no way to call this one without being wrong, at least in part.  

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