As part of their justification for
removing Covid-related restrictions in England, English ministers have argued
that we need to get used to Covid, just like flu. It requires us to simply
accept a higher level of preventable hospitalisations and preventable early
deaths than would otherwise be the case. They are apparently unwilling to spell
out the numbers which they consider ‘acceptable’, but the continued references
to flu suggest some sort of parallel.
It’s not an easy comparison to make,
though, for several reasons. Firstly, in non-pandemic years at least, very few
people die directly of flu; most of those who die do so of complications such
as pneumonia. We also know that most of those who die with flu are older and
poorer than the population at large, and that fuel poverty is a key factor in
turning illnesses resulting from flu into deaths. Some of those points are true
of Covid as well; Covid also causes pneumonia and other complications, which is
why the news reports keep reporting the numbers of people who have died ‘with
Covid’ rather than ‘of Covid’. Like flu, it is also more serious for older
people. Claiming that flu and Covid are now on some sort of par is a bold claim,
but it’s noticeable that it’s one being made more by politicians than by epidemiologists.
Even if it were ‘true’ in simple numerical
terms, there are other complications. Whilst the current numbers of infections
are already way higher than flu (although it’s hard to be certain about the
extent because flu is not a ‘notifiable’ disease), there are few, if any,
experts in the field who don’t believe that they would be significantly higher
again were it not for the measures currently in place. As the government itself
admits, removing those remaining restrictions will undoubtedly lead to a surge
in infections, and that in turn will inevitably lead to a surge in
hospitalisations and deaths, although hopefully the vaccination programme will
mean that it won’t be on the same scale as in the second wave. And any comparison
with the actions taken to mitigate flu in a non-pandemic year as opposed to those
which might be necessary in the event of a pandemic caused by a new variant of
flu are misleading to say the least.
The government chooses to present figures
for the vaccination program in terms of the ‘proportion of adults’ who have
been vaccinated. This is not unreasonable in itself given that vaccinations
have not yet been authorised for the younger groups, but it also serves to
disguise the fact that, as of this
week,
only 33.7 million people in the UK have been fully vaccinated, a figure which
is barely above 50% of the population (66.6 million). Whilst more will be done
before 19 July, that will still leave up to 40% of the population open to infection,
a level far higher than is consistent with any suggestion that ‘herd immunity’
can stop the chain of infections. And free of restrictions, a large proportion
of that 40% are likely to become infected, even without raising questions about
repeat infections and the duration of the immunity provided by vaccination for
other groups.
Most of those will be younger people, of
course, and to date it seems that younger people are less likely to be
seriously ill or die. But ‘less likely’ isn’t the same as a zero probability;
some of the young people concerned will be hospitalised and some will die. Some
will develop ‘long Covid’, and be seriously ill for months. The even bigger
concern is that the more the virus circulates the more it will evolve. As some scientists
have already pointed out, removing restrictions which have been proven to work
is like building
variant factories in the UK. That there will be new variants as
a result is inevitable; the only question is whether those variants are more infectious,
more dangerous and/or more vaccine resistant than the variants already
circulating. They might or might not be; but the government is effectively
taking a massive gamble with people’s lives. It is running a major medical
experiment using millions of people, predominantly but not exclusively the
younger generations, as involuntary and unconsenting guinea pigs. Normal ethics
considerations relating to large scale experiments require that people are
given enough detail to make an informed choice as to whether to participate or
not. It’s a choice being denied by a government obsessed with the dogma of
balanced budgets and shrinking the state.
There was a rather unsubtle attempt to bully
the devolved administrations into meekly following suit yesterday, but all the
signs are that they will continue to show more sense than that. It’s hard to
avoid the suspicion that the English government simply want to avoid having a
less damaging comparator on their doorstep if things go badly wrong – and it will be hard to avoid the ‘let
it rip’ philosophy in England directly impacting on Wales in any event. We may
be lucky, we may not – both individually and collectively. But gambling on the
current government making the right choice in the light of its record to date
is not exactly what anyone would call a sure-fire thing.
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