whatsapp Covid restrictions were relaxed this week, but it was far from universally supported. A group of academics wrote to the Lancet to condemn the move as a “dangerous and unethical experiment”. Some scientists warned that letting the virus run amok would create a fertile breeding ground for new variants and urged the government to once again postpone Step 4 of its roadmap. Very few of them urged the government to reintroduce a lockdown or to revert to Step 2. This is curious because the rules in place had conspicuously failed to control the virus. Since May, the number of confirmed infections has rocketed from 2,000 a day to over 50,000. The epidemic has been doubling every two weeks. If it continued at that rate, there would be over a million confirmed cases a week by mid-August.