Covid: on the way back to normal?

By Richard North - January 3, 2022

Three days in to the new year and it’s still not possible to get a proper handle on the Covid situation. The understandable disruption caused by the Christmas and New Year break renders government statistics incomplete and unreliable, precluding any detailed analysis.

From what we do know, however – drawn from the official record – is that the people tested positive (as of 2 January) number only 137,538. For England, 123,547 positives were reported on Sunday, falling from 162,572 the day before – a notional drop of 24 percent.

Not only do these figures represent a much-anticipated downturn, they are a long, long way from Susan Hopkins’s prediction on 15 December that we could be seeing a million cases a day by the year end.

There are all sorts of caveats that might be applied to the figure, but they are so far from the dire projections of earlier last month that I think we can safely assume that the official panic has been neutralised – although the Covid Mafia will doubtless do their best to ramp up the sense of crisis for as long as they possibly can.

Nevertheless, we are told that ministers are “cautiously confident” that extra curbs could be avoided, saying there was “nothing in the data” so far to warrant more restrictions. Tempering that with caution, they stress that they will continue to watch the numbers closely, echoing my caveat about interpreting data from weekends and holiday periods.

The next key moment (sudden alarms notwithstanding) comes on Wednesday when prime minister Johnson is scheduled to review “Plan B” – the rag-bag of measures brought in during the run-up to Christmas and still in force throughout England. Then, according to the Telegraph there will be strong pressure from senior Tories to ditch Plan B, rather than allowing it to become a new normal.

There are also some technical issues to hand. Bob Blackburn, an executive member of the 1922 committee, wants to address the question of whether it is possible to re-acquire omicron infection multiple times. And, if so, what might be the length of time between getting it, shaking it off, and getting it again.

Blackburn seems to represent a sentiment common to many Tory members. “What is very clear is that we have to learn to live with it, in the same way as we have come to live with the common cold or flu”, he says. “We can’t continue in a position whereby we stop our normal way of life because some people have not been vaccinated”. He adds that he’s against compulsory vaccination, but doesn’t see that it’s reasonable to disrupt people’s lives.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, treasurer of the 1922 committee, says: “We do need a long term plan. How are we going to live our lives normally? We cannot have a situation where, every new variant that comes along, we shut down sectors of the economy. Otherwise we will have sectors of the economy that simply won’t exist”.

In the interim, it seems, the big deal is the government’s isolation policy, based on freely available testing. This is resulting in the huge levels of absenteeism in the public sector and elsewhere, but especially in the NHS, putting a new kind of strain on the service where they are struggling to cope even though hospital admissions are far fewer than feared.

The ultimate resolution of this will probably require a change in testing policy. I recall that, in the early 90s when UK Salmonella food poisoning figures were going through the roof (largely as a result of increased awareness and testing), the Dutch successfully contained their “epidemic” by introducing charges for the testing required for isolates to be included in the official statistics. Restrictions on free testing might have a similar result.

If – as is increasingly being determined that the omicron variant causes a less serious disease – then there may come a time when we see a policy shift towards protection of the more vulnerable and treatment of the seriously ill, without large-scale public health intervention other than an ongoing vaccination programme.

At that point, whenever it happens (as it surely must), it will be reasonable to assume – as many Tory MPs seem to think – that the epidemic is coming to an end. That will happen when Covid-19 has been transformed into a background, or endemic illness, treated in much the same way as winter flu.

It is unlikely that there will be any official announcement of this happening though. Rather, we might expect a gradual relaxation of measures over the spring and summer, with little by the way of renewed measures come the autumn and winter. Then will be ultimate test, when we can judge whether things have largely reverted to what passes for normal.

There is, however, always the possibility of another new variant emerging, pitching the Covid Mafia back into panic mode until we have the measure of it, and then there is always the possibility of pandemic flu or another nasty taking its place.

Already though, in the media, we are seeing a number of retrospectives, most notably in the Sunday Times which runs a long article asking: “What if we had done nothing about Covid?”.

What if there had been no lockdowns, no border closures, no home-schooling, no furlough? Thus the paper asks: What state would Britain’s health, hospitals and economy be in today if we had just let the virus rip and waited for immunity?

It then turns out that writer Tom Calver relies largely on the projections of Prof “lockdown” Ferguson and his merry band from Imperial College London, the very same that Tory MP Bob Seely notes projected that deaths could reach 4,000 per day this month, denying evidence that omicron was less virulent.

Seely has applied for an emergency debate in the Commons when it returns this week, exploring the use of Covid modelling, looking at Ferguson’s 4,000 prediction. “It doesn’t look as if it is getting anywhere near that”, Seely says. “There have got to be some significant question marks about why the modelling is so wrong, and why effectively the predictions are not working”.

This might be an entertaining use of time, and one where MPs’ time could be usefully employed, assuming any of them are up to the job of evaluating Ferguson’s miss-hits. This might even be a job for a select committee although, on past form, it’s unlikely that we would see any better results.

Between MPs and the media, therefore, we’re not going to emerge from this pandemic much the wiser, and we’ve long come to realise that public inquiries are little more than a lawyers’ bean-feast, producing little of value.

Furthermore, it looks as if academics might also have little to offer, to judge from the Observer, which trails a forthcoming book to be published by Professor Woolhouse, styled as “an expert on infectious diseases” at Edinburgh University.

I would have expected any evaluation to have focused initially on the fact that the public health system had planned for the wrong disease, assuming that systems devised for pandemic flu could suffice for a SARS-like disease.

One might also have expected some words on how the public health system in the UK had been so degraded that it was no longer capable of responding to a communicable disease epidemic involving a novel agent.

Since neither of these issues feature in Woolhouse’s musings, there is not much reason to expect much from a man whose main pre-occupation seems to be to discount lockdowns as public health policy, offering the assertion that: “They signify a failure of public health policy”.

On this, he may have a small, if unintended point, with NHS figures showing that thousands injured in household accidents were admitted to English hospitals during Covid-19 lockdowns.

Of the numerous incidents, 5,300 people needed hospital treatment after falling from playground equipment, including eight people over the age of 90. One 90-year-old woman was admitted to hospital after being bitten or struck by a crocodile or alligator.

As thousands of people turned their attention to household DIY tasks, more than 5,600 amateur builders required hospital attention after coming into contact with an electric hand tool.

Another 2,700 people sought medical attention after an accident with a non-powered hand tool, such as a hammer or a saw, and 349 were admitted to hospital after losing a fight with a lawnmower. Some 2,243 people needed attention after coming into contact with hot drinks, food, fats and cooking oils.

Clearly, Covid is far more dangerous than we first realised, and it will be good to get back to normal, where paper cuts at work represent the main hazard.