Nothing better symbolises the UK's open defiance of the World Health Organization than the Chief Medical Officer returning to work when he might still be infectious

The World Health Organization's guidelines on isolation are quite straightforward and specific - an individual should not have contact with others until 14 days after symptoms end.  It's acknowledged that even this doesn't eliminate the risk of transmission entirely - it's estimated that around 1% of people might still be infectious after 14 days.  But the aim is to reduce the risk to an acceptable level, and clearly anything above 1% would be totally unacceptable, given how high the mortality rate of this virus is and how easily it spreads.

It's not hard to see that the risk must be much, much greater than 1% if people ignore the WHO and instead follow the UK's much laxer guidelines - which are only to isolate for seven days after symptoms begin.  In practice, that could be as much as ten days earlier than the WHO say is safe.  A string of senior people in the UK establishment, including Prince Charles and Matt Hancock, have already abandoned self-isolation when there was a significant risk that they were still infectious.  Their excuse was that they were following the advice of the government's Chief Medical Officer.

But today the Chief Medical Officer himself returned to work only around ten days after he first started showing symptoms.  So what's his excuse for putting his colleagues and the wider community at unnecessary risk?  Essentially he's defying the WHO through his own personal choice.

And of course the length of the isolation period is not even the most serious way in which the UK is defying the WHO on a daily basis.  Even more disgraceful is the abandonment of testing and contact tracing, which the WHO stress is the key to controlling the pandemic.