@TitOfTheIceberg
Yes, I'm a bit perplexed as to how its always just one more lockdown to get Covid under control, but none of the lockdowns have ever succeeded in getting Covid under control.
I think you're making up your own narrative here. Right at the beginning, it was made clear that we'd probably be looking at a cycle of lockdowns of varying severity, so the message has never been "just one more". And the purpose of them is to get Covid to a level whereby the health service can function, which the last lockdown demonstrably did (e.g. the Nightingale hospitals were stood down; many trusts were able to restart other treatments). We're now at a point where the relaxation of restrictions coupled with the new variant is seeing hospitals becoming overwhelmed again, with the risk not only of being unable to treat Covid patients but anyone needing urgent medical attention - heart attacks, RTAs, cancer diagnoses etc. And so the cycle will have to continue, shit though it is, until the vaccine starts to make a discernible difference.
To be fair
ICeberg, everyone, including the government, are making up their own narrative.
We don't know if lockdowns are effective in stopping virus transmission at all. It might be that in the future research shows that what they actually do is to create the perfect conditions for more infectious strains to thrive by slowing down community transmission. Particularly if used for a long period. Or maybe not. We just don't know. Using lockdowns to try and prevent virus transmissions is completely untested and unproven in Western modern day society.
They are based on some vague notion of "science", not on evidence, and that "science" seems to be based on preferred government advisors who are unaccountable. Neil Ferguson is not a virologist, he is a physicist.
Equally, we don't know that the "relaxation of restrictions coupled with the new variant is seeing hospitals become overwhelmed again". WE know that hospitals are becoming overwhelmed but we don't know if those two factors have caused it, because thats not evidence, its guesswork. What it is is the manipulation of limited information and the deliberate creation of fear and a degree of panic within society to justify lockdowns, which themselves are designed to protect governments from blame for deaths.
So even if there are still high numbers of deaths with repeated lockdowns, the government cannot be blamed (and will presumably still remain electable) because they imposed strict lockdowns of a similar type imposed elsewhere. (we are now about the strictest country in the democratic world in the UK in terms of loss of personal freedoms but lets not go into that - the government is now almost beyond reproach).
The original message was to "save the NHS" with a "short, sharp circuit breaker". There was little guidance as to whether this would involve repeated lockdowns or not, the only evidence is that the Coronavirus Act 2020 contains a 2 year sunset clause and gives the potential for secondary legislation to be made to create lockdown conditions within that period.
But similar crisis occur in the NHS almost every winter, so applying the same logic to a bad winter flu season would see us locked down again, on the basis of new legislation. God forbid that there is a new virus, since there have been several such virus scares in recent years, because we will be looking at repeated lockdowns every few years.