Johnson’s doing us a favour with freedom experiment
THE huge Covid experiment – involving 56 million people – about to be performed in England may be a bit close for comfort, but at least it’ll confirm if vaccines are capable of ending the pandemic torment. From the very start of this global trauma it has been a given that herd immunity provides our only pathway to freedom – such immunity acquired through infections or vaccinations.
Enormous financial and human resources were invested to produce the vaccines we now have and at some point their true worth had to be put to the test. Whatever about his timing, Boris Johnson has now decided to do just that.
From July 19, England will scrap most of its Covid rules, including those on social distancing and mask wearing, a move that has an internal logic despite the rapid rise in infections, which have now surged to 28,000 per day, as against 1,500 in the third week of May.
Two-thirds of all adults in England are fully vaccinated (compared to over half here) and almost 90% of them have had their first dose.
Both of those figures together give a blended average, with just over one week still to go before restrictions are scrapped, that’s heading towards 80%. And that’s precisely the vaccine take-up experts say is necessary to achieve herd immunity.
If vaccinations are worth the bother at all, they’ll have to break the link between Covid infections, which are inevitable and entirely unavoidable, and serious illness resulting in deaths. Otherwise, what good are they?
At the height of the December/ January wave the UK had over 38,000 people in hospital with around 4,000 in intensive care. Now Boris Johnson has been told that daily infections could top 100,000 and translate into 2,000 daily admissions to hospitals.
All this is directly applicable to Ireland, considering our cheek-byjowl living arrangements with the UK, particularly Northern Ireland.
The Delta variant, which is much more transmissible than previous strains, is an unsurprising development – and in time is likely to be replaced by a more efficient mutation of the virus. Another extremely efficient form of the virus, Lambda, has been ripping through South America from as far back as last August and has now been discovered in the UK.
While the WHO still considers the depth and width of the Lambda threat, the only thing the rest of us can do is focus on vaccinations, to establish if they are working.
IT NOW appears that NPHET’s two central projections of between 187,000 and 408,000 Covid cases in July, August and September for the next wave of the disease are the most likely – tragically, with expected deaths ranging between 545 and 1,230. Everything hinges on how many of those Covid infections end up in hospital and in ICU. The last fortnight has already seen a significant increase in hospitalisations from 39 to 58. Thankfully, however, the number of patients in ICU has remained steady, at about 14 to 17.
We have now been burdened with some kind of Covid restrictions since March of last year. And the fact is, this intrusion simply cannot continue forever.
Bills have to be paid, lives have to be lived and taxes have to be squeezed out of us to pay off our incredibly large Covid debts. All that is impossible while we hunker down and wait for the storm to die down completely.
This crisis must not be allowed to continue for a second more than is absolutely necessary. We must be on the watch for experts anxious to extend their 15 minutes of fame with an extreme attachment to the principle of ‘an abundance of caution’.
At some stage Michael O’Leary will be right. We need to drag ourselves out of the bunkers and into the sunlight.
Boris Johnson, hopefully, will show us in the next few weeks that it’s safe to do just that. Whatever the outcome, he’s doing us a favour.