Above: UK Restaurant

There has been truly a zealous enforcement of Covid regulations by Belfast City Council which has prevented some restaurants from opening their outside facilities. The same zeal with which Helen’s Bay swimmers were threatened with arrest (Nov 2020) and pregnant women were told to go away from medical facilities and have their miscarriages at home (Nov 2020). Apart from lack of common sense, all these events have one thing in common – a complete absence of any scientific or medical basis.

I’ve seen the affected outdoor facilities. They are well ventilated and there is minimal chance, as on Helen’s Bay beach, of anyone contracting Covid 19. 

Exactly how these regulations were concocted is not clear but they are being relentlessly enforced and threatening the survival of an already heavily persecuted hospitality industry.

The vaccines either work or they don’t, but all the increasing evidence is that they do. Lockdown temporarily controlled the surge of infection but the increasing evidence is that the current low infection and mortality rate is due to vaccination. The ubiquitous medical “experts” that plague our local press seem to think that lockdown is a harmless strategy. Not so. They never, ever, consider the ill effects such as social isolation, a tide of mental ill health, rise in domestic abuse, missed cancer diagnoses, increasing poverty, unemployment, personal and national financial ruin etc., the extent and duration of all of which have yet to be fully realised. For example, it is estimated that the 2008/9 financial crisis resulted in a million people of working age contracting chronic health problems both physical and mental.

The bleat that “we must go carefully if we don’t want to return to lockdown” reminds me of a naughty child being told that the bogeyman is coming. Well the bogeyman never did come and I doubt very much if another lockdown for this virus will either.

Lockdown needs to end now. Right now.