May’s blast at Covid curbs

We can’t keep stopping and starting the economy for each new strain of the virus, warns former PM

THERESA May last night warned ministers not to tighten virus curbs despite confirmation that the Omicron variant is circulating freely in the UK.

The former prime minister said the early evidence showed the strain ‘potentially leads to less serious illness’ even if it is more transmissible.

To cheers from Tory MPs, she added: ‘When is the Government going to accept that learning to live with Covid, which we will all have to do, means we will almost certainly have an annual vaccine and that we cannot respond to new variants by stopping and starting sectors of our economy which leads to businesses going under and jobs being lost?’

Her pointed intervention came after Sajid Javid told MPs that infections caused by the mutant strain were rising quickly despite travel bans, new testing and quarantine regimes. The Health Secretary said there were 336 confirmed Omicron cases in the UK, an increase of 90 in 24 hours.

Some were not linked to international travel, meaning, he said: ‘We can now conclude there is community transmission across multiple regions of England.’

The figures last night fuelled growing speculation in Westminster that Britain could face fresh Covid curbs in January, including a renewed order to work from home.

Mr Javid said it was too early to tell how severe the fast-spreading variant was and whether it would ‘knock us off our road to recovery’.

He acknowledged that none of those who tested positive for Omicron in the UK was thought to have been hospitalised so far. Mr Javid told MPs the Government was taking ‘early action so we don’t have to take tougher action later on’.

Downing Street yesterday denied it was working to a strategy of holding off new Covid restrictions until after Christmas. Boris Johnson’s spokesman said an ‘update’ on the threat posed by Omicron would be given next week. But Whitehall sources acknowledged that the rapid spread of the new variant had dashed hopes that it would struggle to compete with the Delta variant that dominates UK cases.

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt urged Mr Javid to prepare the NHS to ensure that other vital services were not swamped as they were in previous lockdowns. He said it was vital to ‘make sure when we switch the NHS on to Omicron we don’t switch other services off’.

Experts believe the number of UK cases is likely to be in the thousands because it takes several days for samples to undergo genetic analysis in the laboratory to confirm a variant.

Overall infections are increasing in the UK, with 51,459 recorded yesterday. Hospital admissions and deaths – of which 41 were recorded yesterday – are stable.

Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said he expected Omicron to be the dominant variant in the UK ‘probably within the next weeks or a month’.

Stressing that Covid-19 was ‘going to be around forever’, he added: ‘The last time we had a big coronavirus outbreak we think was 130 years ago and that virus is still circulating ... and it basically just causes the common cold.

‘That is likely the way that this pandemic is going, so we will be repeatedly infected with Covid, we will be repeatedly infected with

‘Learning to live with it’

new variants but by and large, they’ll just be another cause of the common cold. At that point, we’ll stop worrying about it, but we’re not quite there yet.’

He said no urgent action was needed because respiratory viruses like Covid often spread less rapidly at Christmas than at other times.

However Professor Tim Spector of King’s College London said: ‘We want to tell people that if you don’t feel well that day, don’t go out, don’t go to work, work from home, because the start of that sniffle, the start of that sore throat, that headache could be a mild dose of Covid that is just breaking through

your vaccine. We should really be encouraging people not to come in.’

Data from South Africa – where cases have quadrupled in a week and Omicron makes up 85 per cent of infections – suggests it is more infectious than Delta. President Cyril Ramaphosa yesterday said the country was experiencing a ‘fourth wave’ and the fastest so far.