 It has been just one week since Sajid Javid took over the job of health secretary after his predecessor Matt Hancock was caught on CCTV doing a big old smooch and even in that short period of time, Javid has already made it clear that he'll have a very different attitude to managing the pandemic. In a departure from Hancock's mantra of data, not dates, Javid has said that he considers July the 19th a hard deadline for ending the coronavirus restrictions. Writing in the mail on Sunday, Javid said, we are on track for July 19th and we have to be honest with people about the fact we cannot eliminate COVID. We also need to be clear that cases are going to rise significantly. I know many people will be cautious about the easing of restrictions. That's completely understandable, but no date we choose will ever come without risk. So we have to take a broad and balanced view. We are going to have to learn to accept the existence of COVID and find ways to cope with it, just as we already do with the flu. So Javid is looking at where we are now with infections up 66.9% on the previous seven days, hospitalizations up 24.2% and says that that is a reasonable risk when compared to the burden of continuing restrictions. Bear in mind, absolutely everybody, Chris Whitty, Patrick Valance, thinks that in the next few weeks, infections are going to increase even further. So Dahlia, one of the things that Javid argues in this piece is that there is a healthcare case for ending coronavirus restrictions. So there is a backlog of elective procedures. People's mental health is worsening, rates of domestic violence are going up. Do you have much sympathy with this argument? I mean, I have huge amounts of sympathy for the argument because obviously lockdowns are horrible, right? And it's true that there's a backlog of elective procedures, that there's a mental health crisis, but scrapping masks and scrapping all these restrictions and preventative infrastructures like contact tracing, even when there's a clear risk that the infection is still so high, it's possibly the most counterproductive way that you can actually deal with it because it's precisely those sort of small but sustainable over the long-term changes like mask wearing, et cetera, and providing furlough to isolate as well. I think those measures are sometimes missing from the conversation. That's what prevents us from having to go into these very extreme lockdowns for such a long period of time. So what you actually cared about was preventing the harmful effects of very restrictive lockdowns. Then firstly, you wouldn't sort of batter the possibility of mental health provision and safe shelters for violence victims through years of austerity. But you would also, in the more immediate term, support those kind of everyday long-term sustainable restrictions. That means we don't have to let things get so bad that we have no choice but to enter into the most restrictive lockdowns. And that's kind of been the character of how the UK has responded to the pandemic. And it's why we're going to have so many knock-on effects in this way. So I think that this is really Javid covering up for his real motive here, which is sort of saving the economic interests of big business, especially in the hospitality and the service sector, which kind of makes up a huge part of the UK economy, with sort of quite a disingenuous concern for what are actually real issues. Because those issues are not things that Tories seem particularly concerned about in any other context. But I think also, what disturbs me so much about this is how learning to live with the virus, which is a sensible and important policy, is being weaponized in such a misleading and anti-science way. Because of course, we need to learn to live with the virus. It's a really resilient virus. And no one believes that constantly locking down is sort of a sustainable or desirable way to live. No one wants that. But living with the virus cannot mean just going back to 2019 or sort of being deluded that we're living without it. It has to be sort of adapting our social expectations, our norms, things like checking in on contact tracing before you go into a restaurant, things like wearing masks on public transport, these kind of low effort, low inconvenience, but incredibly high return on safety measures. There is no reason why, as I mentioned before, wearing masks on public transport shouldn't be a long-term thing. And yet these are the measures that the government are scrapping for those, as I mentioned before, those sort of cheap optics of being able to announce freedom day, even though ironically it's these policies that mean that we're going to be much more likely to have to go into restrictive lockdowns again. But I also think, and I'm going to end it here, kind of the crucial thing to note here is the data shows that hospitalizations are low and that's obviously great. But the long-term adverse effects of catching coronavirus can't only be measured by hospitalizations. I know many people personally who were never hospitalized from COVID, but they are still suffering from the long-term effects of long COVID for coming up to nine months. And that's the data that is routinely forgotten, even though it actually represents the experiences of a lot of people, especially people who are working in those hospitality industries, working in those industries that are at really high risk of COVID and who aren't double vaccinated yet. And that is partly because, you know, society doesn't know how to reckon with or accommodate for things like chronic illness. We think about sickness as something that you just sort of, you get sick and then you get cured and it's all fine. So simply saying, well, you know, hospitalizations are low, so it's all good. It's deliberately excluding a huge part of the story of COVID, basically. Do you think that Javid's previous role as Chancellor is relevant to the story? Because it means that he's not simply making the case for health in cabinet meetings. We've essentially got two Sunax making the same arguments for unlocking faster in order to stimulate the economy. Oh, 100%. But I think it's so important that we cut through that to say, because when people hear, oh, you know, such a Javid's priority is the economy, that sounds super benevolent. We all benefit, you know, this idea is we all benefit from, you know, a good economy and that, you know, that's just as important to our health as, you know, these other kind of public health measures. We have to remember that in Sunax and Javid's books, the economy is about protecting the interests and the profits of a tiny group of business owners and, you know, business elites. It's not actually about, you know, stimulating the economic benefit and the economic welfare of the country as a whole. And that is encapsulated by the fact that as part of the scrapping of these measures, we are going to see a rollback on furlough, which is an essential economic measure to help everyday working class people take, you know, protect themselves. And also, you know, to make sure that they aren't really severely financially hit by having to self isolate. So it is true, yes, that this idea of prioritizing the economy is part of that the kind of agenda, but we mustn't mistake prioritizing the economy with looking after the economic well being of everyday people. It means something really, really specific.