LABOUR’S 10-point plan for living with Covid is as follows:

– Retain volunteer responders to assist with vaccination (next winter)

– Prioritise testing and make it fit for the future

– Fix sick pay

– Playing our part in vaccinating the world

– Prioritise children’s learning

– Launch exercises to learn lessons

– Publish a “road map” for future decision-making

– Transform the “front door” of the NHS and use Covid’s legacy to build resilience and bring waiting lists down

– Transform social care

– Turbo-charge research and innovation

Much in this 10-point plan for living with Covid is welcome, but it ignores the immediate crisis — we have to stop people dying from the virus before we can live with it.

Close to 300 deaths per day, 100,000 positive cases and over 20,000 Covid hospital patients is neither acceptable nor normal.

The Tories’ narrative that the pandemic is over and their removal of essential protections in order to assuage the party’s right wing has to be challenged.

The brilliant NHS vaccination programme has reduced our risk of death dramatically. But there are no guarantees that omicron’s inevitable successor variants or mutations will not be more vaccine-resistant and deadly. 

Not only do we need to keep promoting vaccination — including by calling for employers to give staff paid time off to get jabbed and recover — we need the protective and mitigation measures of a “vaccines plus” strategy.

These include continuing personal protection measures such as: 

– Social distancing and wearing masks in indoor public places, including schools, colleges and workplaces; 

– Setting indoor air quality standards, with CO2 monitors and Hepa filters being installed in all classrooms and indoor public venues;

– All NHS, social care, teachers and those deemed at high risk being issued with free FFP2/3 masks; 

– Financial support for all those required to self-isolate or shield, and for businesses and self-employed who are taking a hit from the economic damage caused by the continuing unpredictable high levels of employee and customer absences.

Labour rightly says the test and trace system needs fixing. The first step there must be to dismantle the current discredited outsourced system and hand it (along with the necessary funding) over to the public health professionals in local authorities and the NHS, which should always have been in charge of it. 

It should go without saying that both lateral flow and PCR tests must remain free and readily available to all UK residents.

The right to work from home or flexibly has been a long-term demand by many, especially parents and carers, and the experience of the past two years means that now is the time for it to be legislatively enforced.

Adding these immediate essential measures to Labour’s longer-term plans means we can stamp down hard on the virus and make it possible that we may be able to live our lives without the constant threat of chronic disease or death hanging over us. 

But unless and until this deadly virus is suppressed to the lowest levels possible, both in Britain and globally, we won’t be able to say we are living with it.

Joan Twelves is a member of the Zero Covid Coalition steering committee.