Covid: rewarding failures

By Richard North - December 29, 2021

As the Covid scenario emerges into what is very clearly a new phase, there seems to be attempts in certain quarters to rewrite history, in which context it is appropriate to remind ourselves of what the CMO, Chris Whitty, was saying two weeks ago.

That takes us back to 15 December, when we saw multiple headlines following a press conference held by Johnson and Whitty which effectively launched the omicron “scare” in this country.

Typical of the media output at the time was the Sky News headline declaring: “Chris Whitty warns ‘Big numbers’ of coronavirus patients in hospital after Christmas due to ‘phenomenal’ Omicron spread”.

The text had Whitty warning that the UK was facing “a really serious threat” from the omicron variant which, he said, was “moving at an absolutely phenomenal pace”. He asserted that daily case records “will be broken a lot over the next few weeks as the rates continue to go up”, warning that these would translate into “big numbers” being treated in hospital in the coming weeks.

There was no diffidence here, or equivocation. Whitty was extremely direct in his claims, saying, “I’m afraid there will be an increasing number of omicron patients going into the NHS, going into hospital, going into intensive care”.

He made only a token acknowledgement of the uncertainties, admitting that, “the exact ratios we don’t yet know”, but immediately countered that by declaring: “there will be substantial numbers and that will begin to become apparent, in my view, fairly soon after Christmas”.

“It will start before then”, he said, “but, in terms of the big numbers, I think that’s a reasonably, I’m afraid, a reasonably nailed on prospect”, then adding there were “several things we don’t know” about the omicron variant, only to assert that: “All the things that we do know are bad”.

We now know that this assessment was a wild exaggeration but the point is that we already knew that at the time. On the same day, 15 December, I already had published my piece headed “the march of the Omicrons”, which discussed the Tory MP rebellion over “Plan B” but also retailed the extraordinary claim by Sajid Javid when he told MPs that if they didn’t deal with the “grave threat”, omicron could “overwhelm the NHS” and child victims of car crashes would be left untreated.

We also had then the “gruesome warning” from the government’s “top public health adviser”, Dr Susan Hopkins, to the effect that the omicron had been doubling every two to three days in the UK but the pace appeared to have speeded up. She was then saying that a million people a day could be being infected by the end of December.

My response to Whitty pressing the panic button was published in the early hours of the following morning, conveying the feeling that the official response to the omicron situation had become “grotesquely surreal”, also taking in the view Jenny Harries head of the UK Health Security Agency, calling omicron “probably the most significant threat” since the start of the pandemic.

Even as what I have come to call the “Covid Mafia” were wibbling, though, I was already writing that there was an amount of information which suggested that people infected with the omicron variant had been a third as likely to end up in hospital compared with those infected with the delta variant.

I did note that these results were from South Africa and thus, while they were not directly applicable to the epidemiological expectations, they lay within the realm of expected behaviours, where symptoms in London are being equated with the common cold.

And there is the crucial point. While there is nothing totally predictable in the behaviour of biological systems, we can safely talk in generalities of the behaviour of epidemic organisms and especially fast-mutating viruses which give rise to respiratory diseases through person-to-person airborne transmission without the need of an intermediate host.

Ten days after I wrote that, cited in the Guardian was Dr Julian Tang, professor of Respiratory Sciences at Leicester University. He articulated his “gut feeling” that the omicron variant was “the first step in a process by which the virus adapts to the human population to produce more benign symptoms”.

“In a sense”, he said, “it is to the virus’s advantage if it affects people in a way that they don’t get too sick – because then they can walk around and mingle in society and spread the virus even more”.

There is absolutely nothing new about this observation. This is the sort of thing I learnt in college in the 70s, as a student public health inspector, reinforced many times over the years in the context of infectious disease investigations and a number of notable court cases in which I was involved.

This is something about which Whitty, and his Covid claque, should have been aware, allowing for more time to evaluate a fast-changing situation before recommending actions which could not avoid having profound economic, social – and health – impacts.

The nature of Whitty’s motivation for pressing the panic button can only be a matter for speculation, although a political dimension cannot be ruled out, with the good and faithful servant ramping up the hype on behalf of the prime minister in order to distract attention from his other troubles.

But now, two days before the end of the month when Susan Hopkins predicted we could be experiencing a million new infections a day, all the government can offer is a composite figure of 129,471 positive test results for the day.

Data on patients admitted to hospital are still lagging, with the last figure referring to 20 December, when 1,171 was the number recorded. As to the deaths “within 28 days of a positive test”, all the combined efforts of the government and the NHS can manage is a mere 18. They need to try harder – much harder.

When it comes to evaluating those patent numbers, though, the Telegraph has some interesting news – something we had long suspected.

“Just one-fifth of new Covid hospital patients are true cases”, the paper says, by way of a headline. In the text, it tells us that the most up-to-date NHS data show that on 21 December, there were 6,245 beds occupied by coronavirus patients in English hospitals – an increase of 259 from the previous week.

But within that increase, just 45 patients were admitted because of the virus, with the remaining 214 in hospital for other conditions but having also tested positive – so called “incidental Covid” admissions.

However, even as the evidence continues to build that the omicron hype has been ramped up out of all proportion, without so much as a blush the Guardian notes the passing of “another record” daily rise in UK Covid cases, but mildly observes> “Omicron ‘appears less severe'”.

And, effectively scaling down the scare, it cites the prestigious Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford. He has been telling the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that the omicron variant “appears to be less severe and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital”, and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”.

The most recently available government data tell the tale. From over half a million omicron cases (confirmed and SGTF), there have been 407 hospitalisations (to 25 December) and 39 deaths. Furthermore, it is being said: “Catching omicron Covid variant may protect against delta”.

The prestigious figure, of course, gets the scaremongers off the hook. Nothing is true until a knighted regius professor has informed the BBC, even if it was bleedin’ obvious to mere mortals weeks before, as is the case here.

Inevitably, the Covid Mafia will continue to cover their own backs, fudging the issues. The only guarantee we have is that they will never admit how badly wrong they got it in the first place, yet another major error to add to the accumulation already on record.

Rather, Whitty is to be rewarded for his many failures with a knighthood in the New Year honours, a classic establishment response.