Is the Covid madness really over?
Measures we would have laughed at quite recently were welcomed. It is the measures that we would laugh about now that ought to concern us.
Between now and April nearly all remaining Covid measures in England will vanish. The other home nations will tag along shortly. Even the bottomless well of “free” testing is to be capped off (an expenditure that cost £86 per working adult in December 2021 alone). Simple and moderate activity, such as the Office for National Statistics’ Infection Survey, will continue to observe prevalence, and our genomic sequencing boffins will monitor for new variants of concern. Their discoveries will no doubt inform vaccine edits in the future, much like with the flu.
As many epidemiological modellers should have learnt by now, predicting the pandemic cycle is not easy. Lord Sumption, the former Justice of the Supreme Court, has shrewdly remarked that “it would be unwise to draw overconfident conclusions from a history that has not yet played out”. But, and say it tentatively, the green shoots of recovery do seem to have battled their way past the SAGE modellers, parliamentary opposition, many voices in the media, and so-called “Independent SAGE” and may now be fully bloomed. Formal madness officially gone for now, and just the unwritten (and unforced) life-modifications to disassemble.
We know that the experts and modellers were repeatedly wrong, often epically wrong, and that they had a huge influence upon the decision to lockdown the country on multiple occasions and delay the release of restrictions. Comparing ourselves to Sweden, we can have serious doubts that claims about lives saved by lockdown are on quite the firm ground advocates seem to assume. We know many will suffer because of the government’s response, from late or missed cancer diagnosis through to the cognitive decline of dementia patients or the accumulation of a long list of troubles in the lives of children. We know the economy contracted to a degree we have never experienced before, and we must pay for it. We know our civil liberties have been diminished. We know that the evidence justifying the compulsory wearing of cloth masks was extremely feeble. And we know we have lived in an environment of angst, unease, fear, disorientation, and turmoil.
We know all this, but have we truly learnt it? An enormous challenge we have ahead is deciding how to approach every season of respiratory viruses for the rest of our lives. The five winter flu seasons in England from 2014-2015 to 2018-2019 had an average of 17,000 deaths. In the winter of 2014-2015, 28,330 people died due to influenza in England. The public has been re-educated in how to respond to pathogens, and politicians are frightened of being accused of not acting soon enough. The country has recently been spooked by the SARS-CoV-2 variant that emerged in South Africa, B.1.1.529, the Omicron strain, which had increased powers of transmissibility but led to a significantly milder course of Covid-19. Masks and vaccine IDs were lurched for immediately by the government.
The potential risk of Omicron was grossly exaggerated. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Public Health England’s successor, published data that showed people infected with the new variant were fifty to seventy per cent less likely to be hospitalised than patients who had the Delta strain. Yet SAGE scientists, such as Dr Jenny Harries, the Chief Executive of UKHSA, dismissed that Omicron would cause a milder wave and described the strain as “probably the most significant threat we’ve had since the start of the pandemic”. This was just weeks ago. SAGE repeatedly tried to talk the government into new restrictions over the festive season, but the Prime Minister remained unconvinced and elected not to go beyond the Plan B measures already in place. We do not know how close a call it was.
It is demonstrably true that a few Tory politicians have been able to rule Britain by emergency decree, often completely subverting Parliament. The UK population was put under house arrest and was under constant threat of it happening again for two years. In many settings we were forced to cover our faces on the direct orders of inept and substandard politicians. Internet censorship is rife. Surveillance has a gargantuan new justification. Prior to 2020 we accepted it as a fact of life that we may become ill due to an infection contracted from a fellow human. It was relegated to the background of our minds. As it has been promoted to the foreground and the deliberate policy of generating a national hyper-anxiety has been so successful, the toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube. Measures we would have laughed at quite recently were welcomed. It is the measures that we would laugh about now that ought to concern us. They can be imposed in an astonishingly short period of time, accepted, and then applauded by the nation with the zeal of a convert.
Let us hope the lessons have been learnt and we do not regress, but it will have to be seen to be believed.
