I loathe Boris, I loathe what he's done to my country, I loathe the way he takes the credit for what the NHS has done and the vaccine rollout (step forward Kate Bingham - and have you thought about standing for PM?)

I particularly loathe his flim flam and his brazen dishonesty.

However, just because Boris gets away with ridiculous boosterism and empty-headed jingoism, is no reason for you, Umair, to try to do likewise in the opposite direction.

There is no question that infection rates in the UK are very high. Yet if you stop for a second to look, you can see that the deathrates and the hospitalisation rates are still low and only rising slowly.

This is an indication that the vaccines (all of them) are working and working relatively well.

There is no doubt that government incompetence has made all the outbreaks much worse than they needed to be. In particular Boris's tendency to dither meant we got a big dose of the Delta variant from India before he finally closed off people flying in from India about two weeks after he should have.

So 95% of the covid cases in the UK are apparently the Delta or Delta+ variants. Were you aware that the Delta variant seems to produce different symptoms from the original strain? Most notably loss of a sense of smell has fallen off the list and most of the other symptoms are things like headache, runny nose, cough - much more similar to the common cold. The five other coronaviruses circulating in humans are all part of what we call the common cold viruses. Relatively mild, in other words. [information from the ZOE app by Tim Specter]

It's not possible to get rid of covid19 because it has a number of animal reservoirs - cats, dogs, bats, minks, etc. You can't make extinct a virus that can hide in another animal for a bit and then break out again in humans. This is probably what has been happening in Australia and New Zealand.

So we will have to learn to live with covid, no matter how much we wish the world was different. There is no choice.

So stop panicking, dear Umair, and get back to politics and economics where you excel.