Covid may leave scar but future’s looking bright
SOME people are in the beer gardens and back at the shops, they think it’s all over – it is now. With apologies to the great, late football commentator KennethWolstenholme, we must surely be permitted a moment of exuberance at news that Covid is officially no longer a pandemic in the UK.
And unlike last summer, when its prevalence had been temporarily reduced by a long lockdown and warm weather, this time there really are strong grounds for thinking we have it on a tight leash permanently.
Our brilliant vaccination programme is reducing symptomatic Covid infections by 90 per cent. Even in March, Covid was no longer the biggest killer in Britain, having dropped below heart disease and dementia. By the time April’s figures are published it will have slid further down the rankings still.
Not only do the vaccines greatly impede the transmission of Covid, they also prevent the vast majority of recipients from developing serious illness even if they do go on to catch it.And this is all producing remarkable improvements in official data.
Where there were almost 40,000 Covid patients in hospital during the January peak of the second wave, there are fewer than 2,000 now.
Where there were 60,000 infections being detected every day, there are fewer than 3,000 now. And where deaths were averaging a thousand a day during January, they now average a couple of dozen. And all these metrics are continuing to move in the right direction too.
PROFESSOR Sarah Walker, who leads the Office for National Statistics Covid-19 Infection Survey, says that Britain has “moved from a pandemic to an endemic situation” where the virus will circulate at a low and controllable level.
Experts have largely stopped predicting any kind of significant “third wave” when the final social distancing restrictions fall away over the next few months, though we must be on watch for new variants and ready for a seasonal uptick every autumn and winter.
Britain is the first major country in the world with a big population to be able to declare that the pandemic is over, though Israel with its population of nine million and even faster vaccination rollout beat us to it by a couple of weeks.
So where do we go from here? Back to our normal lives but at a pace that each of us feels comfortable with is the logical answer. The battered hospitality and retail sectors could do with the immediate support of those of us who feel ready to be in the vanguard.
A fast-growing economy will do wonders for Britain’s ability to make good the damage to the public finances and to private businesses wreaked by Covid.
Though we avoided the mass unemployment calamity that many commentators expected at the outset, there is still likely to be a further jobs shake-out when the furlough scheme ends in the autumn.
So a buoyant economy that is creating many more new jobs is essential. Fortunately, that is exactly what most forecasters now expect to come about.
It is also time to help the NHS to tackle the huge growth in waiting lists for other lifethreatening conditions.
More investment in its frontline capacity must swiftly follow if the death toll from untreated cancer, heart disease and other illnesses is to be kept to a minimum.
It is all very well to expect the Government to lead the way on that – as indeed it should. But many of us could also take some extra personal responsibility. The Covid crisis highlighted
the poor underlying state of the nation’s health, contributing to our high death toll.
So if we really care about taking pressure off the nurses and doctors who performed so heroically, it is probably not too much to ask that we eat a bit more healthily and do a bit more exercise if we can.
OVERALL though we are entitled to face the future with a degree of optimism. We were hit by a terrible new disease that arrived with almost no advance warning. It caught us cold and then a virulent new strain caused a shocking second wave of fatalities.
But we turned it round in a great team effort based on scientific brilliance and the mature good sense of the British people. We looked out for each other, made sacrifices for each other and found our welfare state was mainly there for people when they needed it.
The fabric of our society held together. Covid will leave psychological scars on many. It has defined our lives for more than a year. But we owe it to everyone who fought so hard to see it off – and to those it took from us – not to let it define our future.
‘The fabric of our society held together. We made sacrifices’