 We are deep into the third wave of the pandemic which means that now COVID has got itself a nose piercing and gone all sex positive. Oh wait no I am hearing that it's still just a very deadly virus tearing through the fabric of our society. Over 5,000 people have died from coronavirus in the past week. Hospital capacity is reaching breaking point with reports of hospitals and leads running out of critical care beds and others experiencing oxygen shortages due to the strain on local capacity but luckily the media know exactly who to hold to account for this mess. You. So why are the rules of this lockdown not as tough as they were last spring? The key question surely is are the rules tough enough? There is anxiety in government, real fear that we're all just not sticking to the rules like we did back in spring. Obviously all of us need to reduce contact with other people as much as possible in order to drive down the r-rate. But there's little evidence to suggest that the fatalities and hospitalizations of recent days are the result of too many people getting a coffee in the park when really they ought to be jogging. Tough talk about fines and flat whites are just theatre. It's not about suppressing transmission, it's about keeping focus away from the fact that what we're seeing is the result of failed policy. Because of the time between a positive covid test result then deteriorating and being hospitalized and then dying there's a lag of a few weeks between changes in recorded infections and changes in fatalities which suggests that the deaths we're seeing now are likely a legacy from mid to late December. And I wonder what was going on then? To ban Christmas, to cancel it I think that would be frankly inhuman. The government was threading legal action to some councils because they wanted to stop school term early. A national priority is to keep schools open. From the 23rd to the 27th of December people will be allowed to have a Christmas spot. It is with a very heavy heart I must tell you we cannot continue with Christmas as planned. A lot of people are trying to escape before midnight in order to see their r-rises. For the most part the infections in December weren't the result of a wave of illegal raves or I don't know illicit Tupperware parties. They were driven by secondary schools, contact occurring within households and people doing all the things that the government had been insisting for months were covid safe until they changed their minds at the last possible minute. Okay well what about all these rule breakers then? Maybe I don't know what the kids are getting up to these days but I don't think that anyone's getting on the tube from canning town at 8am for the purposes of indoors socialising. The reason why road and public transport use hasn't reduced as much as it did in the first lockdown is because more businesses are open which means that workers don't have the option of staying at home. What's more self-isolation rates tend to plummet when people can't afford to stay at home. According to Sage, fewer than 20% of people in England self-isolate for the full time period when told to do so and data from the Department of Health suggests that the proportion might even be as low as 11%. Is that just because the UK is full of bastards who don't care about other people getting sick? Well maybe. Or it could be down to the fact that Britain's statutory sick pay provision is amongst the worst in Europe and two million workers aren't even entitled to it anyway. So people are caught in an impossible choice. Work sick or self-isolate poor. Rent, bills and groceries don't just magically get cheaper when you're sick. So it makes no sense that people aren't given an amount that they can actually live on. As it stands, the government's statutory sick pay policy actively disincentivises people to self-isolate, which is good news if you're a novel coronavirus looking to party before vaccine herd immunity comes along to spoil the fun. Where we are is the result of weeks and months of government dithering. We're still in the phase of consequences. The problem isn't that too many people are out in the park, it's that not enough people are getting paid to stay at home.