BRITAIN has veered between general lockdowns and periods when we let Covid-19 generally run free.

Boris Johnson saw the choice as being between “lockdown” and his occasional preference for allowing infection to spread, “letting the bodies pile high in their thousands,” because his government ruled out a more traditional way of virus control — quarantining infected people.

The free marketeers thought a traditional quarantine would have been too great an interference in society. They thought proper public health measures would interfere with “the economy” and, as a result, messed up both health and the economy.

We have a big, expensive apparatus to “test and trace and isolate” with a £22 billion budget. There are huge problems with the privatised testing and tracing contracts, but even if they worked, the whole systems falls down when it comes to isolation. Without self- isolation — which is a version of the basic principle of quarantine — the virus cannot be contained

If you look on the government’s website, you can find a paper from the Covid-19 Rapid Survey of Adherence to Interventions and Responses (Corsair) study.

It says: “Self-reported adherence to test, trace and isolate behaviours is low.” Researchers found only 52 per cent of those with Covid-19 symptoms self-isolate for 10 days. Only 22 per cent of those who have Covid-19 symptoms asked for a test.

Why the lack of self-isolation? The Corsair study says there is a big hole in the system that could be filled, because “practical support and financial reimbursement are likely to improve adherence to test, trace and isolate behaviours.”

It’s really simple — the government puts ads on the telly telling people to self-isolate if they have symptoms. When it works, the privatised “contact tracing” service might ring people up to tell them to self-isolate because they have been “contacts” of the infected.

But the government has not provided any way for people to feed themselves or their kids when self-isolating.

The legal minimum statutory sick pay (SSP) is just £95 a week. Most good employers pay more: surveys suggest about 57 per cent of employees will receive “company sick pay” — usually full pay — when off sick. But 26 per cent of employees — some six million workers — only get SSP.

The TUC also found nearly two million, mostly female, workers do not even get SSP. Because they earn below the SSP “lower earnings limit” of £120 a week, they receive nothing. Add to this all the phoney “self-employed” delivery drivers and the like, who will also get either SSP or nothing.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which represents “developed” nations, looked at sick pay, which its says is a key response to Covid-19.

Many nations increased sick pay in response to the pandemic and the OECD found that, on average, mandatory sick pay replaces 70 per cent of wages in their 37 member countries and covers 100 per cent pay “in many countries in northern and central Europe.”

Britain is at the bottom of the OECD sick-pay league table, with our miserable SSP replacing only about 16 per cent of average wages.

Ministers know this is a crucial problem — both from the Corsair study and from their own admissions. Back in March 2020, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady challenged Health Secretary Matt Hancock on BBC Question Time, asking If he could live on the £95 a week SSP. Hancock answered honestly: “No.”

The government could easily have solved this. It passed the big, powerful Coronavirus Act 2020, containing all kinds of emergency powers — but it did not include a duty for all employers to pay wages to those told to self-isolate.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak in particular is resisting the imposition of any new sick pay duty on employers. The Conservatives are so scared that the pandemic will result in better social laws that they preferred to let the virus run free rather than institute any new reform. Nor did the government create any support services for those needing extra support — especially young parents.

In the poor Indian state of Kerala, health and social workers will knock on the door of anyone told to self-isolate and check if they need any help with getting shopping or food or any health advice. Kerala’s Communist Party government know this basic support is the key to self-isolation.

Here, if you are lucky, you get a phone call form a privatised “contact tracing” call centre that tells you to ring the council, which may or may not be able to help.

The Corsair study gives some other bad news. “Non-adherence was associated with: men, younger age groups, having a dependent child in the household, lower socioeconomic grade, greater hardship during the pandemic and working in a key sector.”

So young parents and low-paid workers are much less likely to self-isolate because they can’t afford it. So too are key workers, not least because they are very likely to be low paid and not have proper sick pay.

The government has tinkered around the edges of this problem. It created the Self-Isolation Support Grant to give a bit of cash to the poorest people told to self-isolate. But it’s only available to workers in receipt of benefits. Even then, most applications are refused.

Ministers also gave a special subsidy to private contractors working for the NHS so they could pay proper sick pay to their cleaners, catering staff and the like, because these health staff do not ordinarily get full sick pay — in itself a scandal. However, this was limited to only big NHS contractors and was actually stopped for some parts of the pandemic.

Overall, the government’s refusal to pay sick pay has stymied self-isolation, so the expensive test-and-trace service doesn’t really work. Instead, Test and trace acts as a sort of giant Keynesian make-work scheme, pumping cash into the economy through favoured contractors without really dealing with the disease.

The refusal to pay sick pay or have other social support in place to make the quarantine work has left the government with just two choices: letting the bodies “pile up” or generalised, socially and economically harmful lockdowns.

Neither is a great choice, but rather than propose the most minimal social reform or put any duty on low-pay, low-responsibility employers, the government has done both.