I will be on BBC Radio Scotland with @dgurdasani1 tomorrow morning (and in Scotland there is much more sympathy to a systematic 'zero COVID' strategy) so hopefully we can explain why it makes sense... https://twitter.com/AliMFreeh/status/1360655128248938498

and critically, it is important to address the caricatures which suggest zero COVID is based on a naive belief that we can easily and immediately eradicate the virus worldwide and support perpetual lockdown until that date.

To the contrary - we call for a comprehensive set of policies, involving enhanced support as much as restriction, to suppress infection. These include effective test and trace, support for self-isolation, ensuring all public spaces are COVID compliant - and vaccination for all.

And with such an integrated strategy it means, when there are outbreaks, they can quickly be identified and isolated with targeted measures that are not too disruptive of everyday life.

In other words, a zero COVID strategy (which means zero tolerance of any level of infection) is the antithesis of lockdown. It is the failure to implement such a strategy - and hence the loss of control over infection - which leads to lockdown.

We could have implemented such a strategy last June, but we didn't, we were complacent, we accepted significant levels of infection and that is why we are in the mess we are now.

And if we don't learn and reopen again without any such strategy in place, it is likely that we will find ourselves in such a mess all over again.
And it will be absolutely no consolation to reflect 'we told you sa'.

The bottom line?
Zero COVID makes sense because it offers a strategy to save lives and save the economy by avoiding lockdown.