Omicron shuts down Britain as 1million people quarantine at home

The UK’s self-isolation ‘farce’ is crippling critical services with supermarket shelves emptying, trains cancelled, bin collections axed, council services slashed and up to 25 per cent of care home staff off work and one in ten NHS staff off sick, Daily Mail reports.

According to the reports, almost every part of British life has been hit by 1million people currently quarantining at home because of Omicron – but the Government is still refusing to follow France and the US by slashing quarantine from seven days to five days for the fully vaccinated.

Despite Omicron causing very little serious illness apart from among the unvaccinated, ministers are now considering bringing in the Army to keep services running, especially in the public sector.  And with cases still hitting 160,000 per day, and a ‘tsunami’ of infections predicted in January, the crisis is only going to get worse.

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There is growing anger at the lack of action to prevent disruption to key industries caused by a lack of staff, but Vaccines Minister Maggie Throup today insisted Boris Johnson has ‘no plans’ to cut Covid self-isolation from seven days to five days. Business leader have branded the situation ‘farcical’.

This is despite expert after expert – and many Britons who have had Omicron – insisting the variant is rarely worse than a mild cold. Gloomy predictions about the number of deaths it would cause, especially without a new lockdown, have also failed to be correct.

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Experts claimed that cutting the isolation period to five days would save the UK economy £300million this month while the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated that the current rules will cost the country £1 billion, equal to 0.5 per cent of monthly GDP.

Bins across the country are overflowing because most councils have cancelled or delayed post-Christmas collections for up to a week – leaving streets littered with uncollected waste including mountains of Christmas trees.

Councils across the UK are having to redistribute staff between essential services to keep everything running, and the public sector has been asked to prepare for a worst-case scenario of up to a quarter of staff off work. But in some areas local authorities have already shut customer service centres, cash offices as well as cancelling rural buses.

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As queues formed at checkouts because of a lack of supermarket workers, and some shelves emptying especially in fresh food aisles such as milk and bread, Iceland boss Richard Walker said the number of his staff now self-isolating has rocketed by 1,000 in a week.

He said: ‘Our Covid absences have risen by almost 700 week-on-week, now at over 1,700. It would be very helpful to business if the isolation period was cut’.

Professor Lockdown, Neil Ferguson, who before Christmas had predicted Omicron could cause 3,000 deaths per day in January, said today that he believes that cases could be starting to plateau in London, where hospitals have not been overwhelmed by cases and the number of deaths and patients in intensive care has remained flat and is even dropping.

He said: ‘I’m cautiously optimistic that infection rates in London in that key 18 to 50 age group that has been driving the Omicron epidemic may have plateaued – but it is too early to tell if it is dropping’.

Yet in the health service, one in ten NHS employees were not in hospitals on New Year’s Eve due to illness, according to official figures – but less than half had coronavirus, amounting to fewer than 50,000 of the 110,000 not in work. In care homes between 20 and 25 per cent of staff are off sick or isolating in some areas.

Figures showed nearly a third of rail services have been axed at some stations in recent days with special timetables introduced by most rail companies.

Nearly one in ten rail staff across all train firms in the UK are thought to be off with sickness including Covid, while major engineering works on key commuter routes are scheduled to continue until midway through next week.

Tory MP Craig Mackinlay told MailOnline the country was in the midst of a ‘semi-lockdown’ with 1million Britons currently isolating after catching Covid as he called for the PM to slash the quarantine period to five days.

Mr Mackinlay told MailOnline that slashing the isolation period from a week could be ‘the answer’ to England’s self-isolation misery.

‘We’re almost facing a semi-lockdown because of people being off work who are perfectly well. You couldn’t make that up,’ he said. ‘The US must have done a lot of work on it… and they have come up with five days as the answer. Perhaps it.’