LABOUR MPs Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon upped calls for a zero-Covid strategy to beat the pandemic at a People’s Assembly online rally last night.

Ms Abbott slammed Boris Johnson’s government for prioritising private-sector profit over human life with its “sleazy contracts” and “jobs for the boys and girls like [test-and-trace supremo] Dido Harding, who has no public health background whatsoever but happens to be the wife of a Tory MP.”

As for privateers like Serco, Sitel and Deloitte running a “world-beating” test-and-trace system, she asked: “Who ever heard of Serco running a world-beating anything?”

Mr Burgon contrasted the Covid death rates in South Korea, with nine per million, New Zealand at five per million, China with three per million and Vietnam with just one per million with the dire 688 deaths per million across the UK. Had Britain adopted a zero-Covid strategy as they did, we would have counted deaths in the hundreds rather than approaching 60,000, he charged.

Lockdown should be used to develop a suppression strategy, including by test, trace, isolate and “above all support.

“People on statutory sick pay given a real living wage. Free hotel rooms, as in South Korea, for people who can’t isolate. Help delivering food and the basics, psychological support for those isolating.”

Gawain Little of the National Education Union said the government had shown “disdain” for working-class families by refusing support to communities in northern England and by refusing to include schools in the lockdown.

With the number of cases among secondary school pupils 50 times higher than in September, “a lockdown that fails to include schools and colleges is not a lockdown,” he said. He called for the introduction of staff rotas after the lockdown as well as “nightingale schools” and recruitment of extra staff to allow “proper social distancing through reduced class sizes.”

Activist Corinne Pearson of Parents United – Boycott the Unsafe Return to Schools accused the government of making “sneaky, nasty” decisions about who is and is not vulnerable.

Children deemed clinically extremely vulnerable were exempted from attendance but the list of applicable conditions had been slashed and there was no risk assessment for families, meaning children with vulnerable household members were still required to attend school, she said.