Cummings row lingers on as UK defends easing of lockdown

Bloomberg

The UK government came under pressure from its own scientists to show caution in easing the pace at which it’s lifting the lockdown, as the behaviour of the prime minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings faced fresh criticism from senior scientists and academics.
Foreign secretary Dominic Raab defended the decision to allow some loosening of restrictions after a group of more than 20 experts wrote a letter to the Observer newspaper flagging their concerns and arguing that public faith in the government’s handling of the virus has been badly damaged by Cummings, who has been accused of flouting the lockdown rules he helped create.
“Scientists do not always agree,” Raab said in a Sky News interview on Sunday. “That’s the way we get better advice from them. As elected politicians we’ve got to take the judgment calls and be responsible for those.”
The UK has reported almost 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus, the most after the US, and it has kept the country under lockdown for more than two months. The restrictions have led to a decline in fatalities, but the scientists advising the government on the pandemic fear an uptick in new cases if the economy is reopened too quickly.
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam said at the daily Downing Street briefing that easing must go “painstakingly” slowly and likened the coronavirus to a coiled spring.
John Edmunds and Jeremy Farrar, members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, told Sky News that
an “untested” system to track and trace the spread of the virus exacerbated the risk of wider contagion.
The letter to the Observer noted that the medical needs of those affected by other diseases are being neglected and stated there’s an estimated backlog of 100,000 undiagnosed or untreated cancer cases.
Such concerns may prove politically damaging as controversy remains around Boris Johnson’s adviser, who admitted to driving more than 250 miles to seek help with childcare from his family at a time he feared he and his wife had contracted the virus.
Public trust “has been badly damaged by the actions of Dominic Cummings, including his failure to stand down or resign in the public interest, and Boris Johnson’s subsequent unwillingness to remove him,” the letter said. An opinion poll for the Guardian newspaper found that support for Johnson’s Conservative Party took another hit in the wake of the furor over Cummings. The survey by Opinium shows backing for the Tories has fallen 8 points in the past week — the main opposition Labour Party now trails the government by 4 points.
Johnson has tried to convince the media and the public to move on from the Cummings affair, going so far as telling some of his senior advisers not to answer questions from the press when he shared the daily briefing with them on May 28. Johnson wasn’t on the podium when Van-Tam was asked whether he thought the lockdown rules applied to everyone and the health officer weighed in.