Oh dear, what a shambolic few months it’s been for the United Kingdom in the island’s battle against Coronavirus. From the woeful handling of the pandemic via Boris Johnson‘s highly controversial and blatantly inept Conservative government, to amassing one of the highest death rates in Europe. Now, with Brexit looming and still no deal agreed, the U.K’s festival scene has been put under considerable doubt for 2021 thanks to a new strain of the virus found in Kent, an area shortly East of the nation’s capital, London. With health minister Matt Hancock warning that the new strain scientists have discovered is “50% more aggressive” than the COVID we’ve come to know since the Wuhan days, the EU has now banned travel for any U.K citizen planning on entering a European nation as the world – India has also now taken the same measure – starts to lock the Brits out for the safety of their own nations.
With British folk now considered peak spreaders of the Coronavirus disease, the country has once again been placed into various degrees of lockdown regionally, with the new ‘Tier 4’ announcement warning residents to act ‘as if they have Coronavirus’ in these areas to avoid passing it on to anyone they come into contact with. However, various members of the nation still fail to understand that their disobedience of the rules will ensure further lockdowns in future, and a prolonged future for the disease, with many idiots on Twitter boasting that they’re set to flaunt lockdown rules over Christmas to meet up with family members, and travel to high-risk areas. The defence of such blatant stupidity seems to boil down to the same reasoning: That residents refuse to be ‘controlled’ by the government, and that COVID-19 is a ‘scam’. Though with this thought process in mind, quite why a government would intentionally aim to ruin their own economy seems rather baffling and of course, these remarks are nothing more than the result of a severe lack of intelligence.
Whilst ministers have added that the new strain may still be battled expertly by the Pfizer – and recently approved, Oxford-AstraZeneca – vaccines, the future of U.K festivals such as Creamfields is currently looking bleak for 2021 unless nationals start to (finally) abide by the rules.
Image credit: University of Oxford
