@Tealightsandd
Watch what happens to New Zealand when they open the borders. Or will they stay closed forever?
I have family in NZ (and Australia). They're in no rush. No desperate need to open up. Their economies are booming.
And, the UK is not a special country that everyone desperately misses. When sensible places like NZ, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vietnam etc open up, they have many other countries they can open up to, without needing to include high risk countries like the UK. We'll be at the back of the queue. Quite understandably.
Meanwhile life is free and normal in NZ. And most of Australia (remember that Sydney and Melbourne are as representative of Australia as London is of the UK). Booming economy too.
As an added bonus, they're doing their bit for climate change.
NZ and the U.K. are so fundamentally different that there really is no comparison between the two.
We have got cases incredibly low during our previous lockdowns and if elimination was the goal we may have been able to achieve it at that point. There will be an awareness of that as a potential option in Government.
The reality is elimination only works if you can maintain it with incredibly tight border controls combined with very strict lockdowns for very small case numbers. Our supply chains simply do not lend themselves to that level of control. We have thousands of lorries coming into the country everyday, NZ are too remote for that, their supply chain is different and more easily controlled.
In the U.K. it seems likely that, even if we'd managed to eliminate covid initially, we'd have been in a constant round of strict lockdowns to manage small outbreaks caused by our supply chain. You can't change the supply chain infrastructure overnight. We have a huge population to feed and we produce nothing like enough food domestically to meet demand.
The option of elimination has been discounted, rightly or wrongly it isn't happening here and that is why the government are not pursuing strategies that work towards it. It is not as simple as saying "we should have done what NZ did" it wasn't possible for the U.K. to do so.
In light of that I can see the logic of the decision that has been made. In the absence of elimination we have prioritised vaccination. We have prioritised those at highest risk, we have accelerated second doses and we are endeavouring to avoid the highest number of cases occurring in Winter to minimise pressure in the NHS. People may not agree with it as an approach but there is logic to it.