Last Saturday, the day that England played Ukraine in their European Championship quarter final, my newspaper carried an advert from a betting company. It advertised one of those multi-element bets which they like to offer around major sporting events. The three elements were England to win, Harry Kane to score, and Raheem Sterling to have a shot on target. The odds offered were 7/2 against. You can see the attraction. All the indicators pointed to an England win, which turned out to be the case. Harry Kane, having looked out of sorts in the early tournament matches had scored against Germany and was starting to look like his usual predatory self. Raheem Sterling’s rapid rise from press target to press darling had come on the back of tremendous form in the early games when he had, with Kane’s apparent struggles, been England’s most potent attacker. And yet the bet failed because in another strong performance, Raheem Sterling did not have the chance to get a shot on goal in an easy 4-0 win.

This tells you four things:

1. a bet is always a bet, because none of us (or, for that matter, the score predicting members of the Animal Kingdom who always pop up in the media at these times) knows the future;
2. single events are easier to predict successfully than the outcomes of combinations of events;
3. for the punter, the attractiveness of the events in those combinations can easily lead to heart overruling head; and
4. the betting companies have the advantage of good mathematicians supported by strong algorithms which enable them always to be ruled by the head.

So what’s that got to do with lockdown?

The removal of restrictions on the 19th July is the culmination of a strategy which started many months ago when the government put its faith in vaccination as the way through, invested large amounts in early orders for the vaccines which at the time were in their development stage and instituted a vaccination programme much earlier than in most other countries. In many respects, it also represents the later stages of an almighty composite bet. The remaining elements of the wager are

1.  the transmissibility of the Delta variant and future mutations,
2. the numbers of people vaccinated,
3. the effectiveness of the vaccines overall (including in people who are single vaccinated) in preventing people from contracting Covid,
4. where people do contract the virus, the ability of vaccination to prevent them from becoming ill enough to need hospital treatment or dying, and
5. the impact of Covid on those parts of our population who are not vaccinated.

How these work out over the next few months will show whether the strategy is fundamentally sound in itself but, probably more importantly, whether the timing of the lockdown release has been judged correctly.

Whilst the government has its scientific advisers alongside it, the opinion of the scientific community as a whole is divided on the issue of timing. The government does not have the advantage of the statistical analyses and powerful algorithms which are available to the bookmakers because those analyses and algorithms are based on the experience of events over many years and Covid has only been with us for 18 months. There is also a degree of heart in the decision as the government is, of necessity, driven by other factors including the state of the economy and the overall willingness of us all to comply with restrictions. And, dare I say it, because the government is made up of politicians, the need to win the next election won’t be entirely excluded from the thought process.

Perhaps it’s the suddenness of it or because I’m over-thinking, but to me, it feels rather like being in the audience of an avant garde play which challenges preconceived notions and in which you at times find yourself becoming part of the cast through whom the piece is performed even though you have no script and there’s been no rehearsal. A virus which we have been educated to fear is no longer scary, infection numbers which were disastrous and underpinned a months long lockdown in the early part of the year will be dwarfed by numbers in the months to come, but it won’t be an issue. We will all need to adjust our thinking to accept that there is an annual number for Covid related deaths which is acceptable, which is, of course, a situation which we have accepted in relation to flu for donkeys’ years. I’m sure that we’ll all get used to it, but it does rely on the government’s multi-legged accumulator coming off. I truly hope, as I am sure will all of you, that it does.

And finally back to the cheerier topic of the England football team and the story of a relatively young team managed by a thoughtful and articulate person reaching a major final for the first time in over half a century, something which in all truth seemed unlikely at the start of a tournament. It’s been a real tonic for many of us and, oddly, for the charity in Boston to whom Neil Diamond donated the ongoing royalties of Sweet Caroline some years ago. We wish them well on Sunday

Do have a good weekend.

Ian Waine leads Prettys’ Corporate Services Team and has advised on a large number of corporate recovery and corporate restructuring cases over the last 30 years. He can be contacted at 07979 498817 or iwaine@prettys.co.uk.