Patrick Christys: I've had enough of planet Omicron, I want to live on planet normal

We should be rolling back Plan B, not talking about more restrictions.

Go to Plan A and just live our normal lives.

We’ve been double jabbed with good news.

Yesterday we were treated to some stats from Imperial College London and South Africa which appeared to show that Omicron is milder and now it’s official.

The UK Health Security Agency has revealed you are 50-70% less likely to end up in hospital with Omicron than other. strains.

The report shows people catching Omicron are: 31% to 45% less likely to go to A&E and 50% to 70% less likely to be admitted to hospital for treatment.

There was an article in the Independent today that actually, without any kind of self-awareness whatsoever, outlined the symptoms of Omicron and said that it was difficult to tell the difference between that and a common cold without doing a test.

Yeh…so what are we running from? Do we lockdown for the common cold?

The sad fact, though, is that we currently have hundreds of thousands of people missing Christmas with their families because they came into contact with someone whose symptoms are little more than a sniffle.

I think we were right to be cautious, we were right to be wary, we were right to not just let rip but we’re not there anymore are we?

Our government can’t have it both ways - we either listen to the science or we don’t.

And at the moment, science is shouting NO MORE RESTRICTIONS!

Certainly, no more mad ones, bonkers rules and regulations that dictated our lives for far too long.

Do we all remember that week where all we spoke about was whether or not a scotch egg constituted a substantial meal.

I couldn’t help but feel that that entire debate appeared to ignore the fact that most pub don’t actually serve scotch eggs.

You could jog around a park, but you weren’t allowed to walk.

You could have been running around, torn your hamstring or wanted to just take a quick break and you manage to hobble to a park bench and then out of the bushes comes PC Plod and you’ve been fined.

You weren’t allowed to go round to your own partner’s house to have sex but you could book a hotel room and bonk the night away.

A caring daughter was arrested for taking her elderly mother out of a care home, you know, the kind of care home where 40% of Covid deaths were recorded during the first wave, and wanting to bring her home.

Gyms were closed so that we could preserve our own health.

Grieving relatives weren’t allowed to comfort each other at a funeral, and when they did attempt to put an arm round their distraught mother, a security guard would come up and wrestle them apart…meaning there was even more physical contact than if they’d have just let the comforting take place.

We had a situation where church services were cancelled at exactly the time when people needed religious comfort.

You had to wear a mask in a shop, unless you were singing in which case it was fine.

Currently in Wales you can’t go into the office but you can move your office to the pub.

People who were already dying from non-covid related illnesses were forced to wither away alone, in total isolation, whilst their relatives, who also didn’t have covid, had to sit at home and hope a kind nurse held their hand.

A good friend of mine, his father was in a hospice. Terminal cancer. He had been given a year to live. He didn’t have Covid, my mate didn’t have Covid, he was given a year but died in 10 months and my friend wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to his dad.

We told people to Eat Out To Help Out then blamed selfish restaurant and pub goers for spreading the virus.

We told children to go back to school and then locked down the next day.

We have just been confronted by data that shows Omicron could be some kind of silver bullet - it could be a way out of this madness. But more than that, for far too long our politicians infantilised us. They babied us. We were the helpless, idiotic masses who had to be controlled for their own good.

Well what’s just happened now? Boris and Whitty and Javid told us to be responsible, they told us to use our own judgement to make sure we protect mass public health.

And we did that. In many parts of the country pubs and restaurants were empty, some people cancelled Christmas parties, some people didn’t, some people went into work, some people didn’t.

And collectively, as a nation, we demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that we are capable of using our common sense and our own personal judgement and, frankly, having control over our own lives. We held up our end of the bargain, the queues for booster jabs looked like line for a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, up and down the country.

We don’t need politicians now to enforce any more restrictions, in fact, it’s them who need us. If they expect us to believe that they are at some point going to let us return to normality, that we are ever going to be allowed to live with this virus, not in fear of it, then they have to demonstrate that to us very, very soon.

I’ve had enough of living on Planet Omicron, I want to live on Planet Normal.