Free PCR and possibly also lateral flow tests will be axed within weeks as part of Boris Johnson’s plan to live with Covid, though tests are likely to remain free for vulnerable people and within hospitals and high-risk settings. The Sun has the story.
Brits are currently told to get a highly-accurate PCR test after coming into contact with someone with Covid, but this advice is also set for the chop as the nation gets back to normal.
PCR tests which were previously needed for travel could cost more than £100 privately.
Free lateral flow kits could also be scrapped under money-saving plans reportedly being pushed by the Treasury.
Everyone would have to start paying for rapid self-tests except the oldest age groups, according to the Guardian.
People who catch the virus would also stop being told to take an LFT on days five and six to further reduce their use.
Ministers are poring over a menu of Covid options this week before making final calls.
The PM is desperate to end all Covid rules – including the legal duty to self isolate – by the end of the month.
Government insiders said PCR tests were hugely expensive and were less needed now cheaper lateral flow tests are widely available.
Advice for workers to take lateral flow tests regularly will also be scrapped.
And ministers may also scale down the Office for National Statistics Covid monitoring programme, which tests a sample of the population every week to find out how widespread it is.
Pity it appears some recommendations to test will remain, despite Omnicold plainly not warranting any special consideration as a contagious disease.
Worth reading in full.
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Good for him. Reform’s problem is Tice. The electorate suspects he’s a globalist in sheep’s clothing, and that manifested in the local elections.
Tice’s night time “olympian” partner Isabel Oakshott seriously dented any pretence of Reform’s anti-establishment stance when she wrote Handicock’s diaries.
Standing down 317 candidates in 2019 also added deeply to this suspicion.
Tice does indeed to pee or get off the pot.
With respect that seems to me like wishful thinking.
People who are naturally on the political right keep voting Tory in huge numbers. They have to stop for another political force to emerge on the right. They have had many chances and if the penny hasn’t dropped by now, I can’t see it happening in my lifetime. We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.
“We probably need a disastrous societal collapse for people to wake up.”
Oh, I think such a collapse is absolutely inevitable tof.
Looks that way
This has been going on for so long that there’s even a German word for it: Politikverdrossenheit (Fed-up-with-politics-ness). People are generally convinced that they keep getting shafted by corrupt/ otherwise non-desirable career politicians and have mentally disengaged themselves from political public life, yet, enough of them keep making the same crosses on the same boxes of ballot papers and then hope that this will somehow magically fix things (which it never does).
This is mirrored on the side of the actual political actors: By the time some group of people with a positive vision regarding what they want society to become and how to achieve that has percolated through the parliamentary system to positions of actual power, it’ll have turned into yet another group of short-termist establishment politicians playing to the tune of the machinery they believe to have conquered while it has really conquered them.
The system is f***ed and making more crosses on pieces of paper so that someone else will hopefully do something about it is not going to help.
Yep the system is indeed f…ed. ————-But as Churchill said “Democracy is the worst form of government…apart from all the rest”. ———We have to somehow operate within that f…ked system or become anarchists instead.
I’m not sure the electorate at large know what a globalist is.
Our area didn’t even have a candidate from Reform – I might have held my nose and voted for them, despite revising my opinion of them fundamentally.
I was born in London.
At age 1 I moved to Australia with my parents as a “10 pound Pom”.
I had a holiday there when I was 8, and another when I was 52, 9 years ago.
How times change!
As with San Francisco, Melbourne, New York and Seattle, Lefties certainly know how to destroy a decent city.
The fact that Khan looks set for another term says it all.
No desire to live there again.
if only those of the small government centre Right had one third of the commitment, energy and activism of those on the Left we may be in a better place.
We’re too busy working
I fully acknowledge that small c conservatives are busy but they are effective, practical hardworking people and that is why I considered that one third of the commitment, time and energy spent by the Left would be enough to turn the ship around.
Good point!
We also don’t like telling other people what to do or how to think.
Well done Howard Cox!
Just waiting for the Fake News to call him Hitler, anti-semitic, far right and an anti-vaxx science denier who wants to kill Gaia. They can dust off their 10 year old copies and regurgitate.
Too many people, too many cars, too many trains, too many planes, too many beggars, too many criminals, too many drugs, too many knives, too many guns, too many of almost everything you can think of…………..How can a total clutter like that be sorted out? Especially when boat loads of more clutter arrive in their thousands each week.
Time for a change. Sadiq has shown his incompetence and is destroying a once great city. Vote for the new guy or forever be ruled by the WEF.