A COUPLE of weeks ago, I was musing on the government’s abject failure to protect our borders by allowing countless flights into the country from Indian instead of putting it on the so-called Red List.

The result, of course, was that travellers from the sub-continent seeded the so-called Delta (Indian) variant of Covid-19 into our communities. In the first instance, it was towns in the North West that were particularly bad hit but it quickly became obvious the variant was much more transmissible and at the time of writing, it had become the dominant strain across the country.

I made the point that if vaccines were less effective against the Indian variant, the end of Covid restrictions scheduled for June 21 would be in doubt.

Of course, I write this column in advance and by the time it appeared in print and on social media, Public Health England had published the results of a study that revealed the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 88 per cent effective against symptomatic disease from the Indian variant while two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were found to be 60 per cent effective.

However, both vaccines were only 33 per cent effective against symptomatic disease three weeks after the first dose.

This was the cue for social media keyboard warriors, with apparent glee, to accuse me of being out of date and a doom monger, telling me they were fed up with hearing bad news and I should be more upbeat.

For the avoidance of doubt, this column was written on Monday morning and I quote the Warrington Guardian website: “As of the last count, 53 people tested positive in the past week, compared to 16 in the comparable seven days. That is a rate of 25.2 per 100,000 people.

“Still very low compared to the peaks of January and February. But much higher than a week ago.”

Is that good news because the figures are low or bad news because the numbers are increasing? I’ll let you decide.

Now it may be that the vaccines will work and the evidence indicates the second jab is absolutely vital. There also seems to be some good news coming out of Bolton, which was the town with the highest rate of Delta infections, as infection rates there start to fall.

And for those who seem to only want to hear good news, it also appears that despite the increase in infection rates, hospital admissions from the virus have only seen the slightest of upticks.

So there are some happy thoughts for you to cling on to.

Now I realise that we’ve all had a pretty tough time of it over the past 15 or 16 months and we’re all desperate to get back to some kind of normality.

I can be as cheerful and optimistic as you want, or alternatively I can be grumpy and downbeat.

But the fact remains, and to misquote Ben Shapiro, Covid doesn’t care about your feelings.

On another topic, sometimes you just have to give credit where it’s due and so at this point, I will apologise for my criticism of the cost of restoring the historic glasshouses at Walton Hall Gardens. They are a magnificent addition to what surely is Warrington’s jewel in the crown.

I don’t get to Walton Hall as often as I should but during half-term, and with a small child to cater for, we decided on an outing to Walton.

It truly is a wonderful place and it’s apparently not only me who thinks so, given how busy the car park was.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people there at one time and the glorious weather also helped.

My thanks go to those campaigners who fought so long and hard to save the hall and park back in 2010 when the council planned to lease out the hall and part of the grounds to a hotel group. What a tragedy it would have been had we lost even part of this wonderful asset.