We’re trapped down a second wave rabbit hole

In the alternative reality of After Corona, a drop in deaths has failed to prevent an outbreak of hysteria

After three months stuck in a lockdown nightmare, this week, Britain finally passed through the Covid Looking Glass – to a strange new reality where everything plays out as the exact opposite of what it is.

In After Coronavirus (AC) Land, the broadcasters are speculating about whether the Prime Minister has gone too far in his bid to lift lockdown on July 4. The pledge to reopen pubs and hairdressers, they fret, has coincided with an alarming jump in the UK’S death toll, to 280. Meanwhile, through the gloom of world recession, the first warnings of a second wave of the virus flash like the evil, disembodied grin of the Cheshire Cat, from America to Germany. Such is the level of alarm that leading medical figures have signed an open letter calling for an urgent review into whether the UK is prepared for the “real risk” of a second outbreak.

Of course, the truth is almost the reverse of this rendition of reality.

Rather than going too far, the Prime Minister did not go anywhere near far enough in lifting lockdown. UK debt has grown larger than the size of the economy. Yet restaurants must roll out protective screens on top of the one-metre measure, and gyms, spas and swimming pools have been barred from reopening.

And it turns out the surge in the daily death rate is a mirage magnified by myopic broadcasters. The ONS’S “280” figure included 109 “historic deaths” reaching back as far as April. The death toll is clearly in decline: just 46 Covid-linked hospital deaths were reported on Tuesday, compared with 778 on Tuesday, April 21. The number of patients who died in the week to June 12 was the lowest in three months. Covid hospital admissions have gone from 3,099 on April 1 to 184 last week.

But perhaps the most troubling of AC Land’s non-realities is The Need To Prepare For A Second Wave. Particularly as there is no material evidence of a widespread second wave anywhere on the planet. If anything, a pattern is emerging of small, localised outbreaks, with relatively high detected cases but low hospital admissions and deaths.

In Germany, as the R number “rocketed” to 2.88 and 1,500 workers tested positive at a meat processing plant, the country’s daily death toll dropped to just 19 yesterday. As the world speculated about signs of a second wave in Lisbon, with authorities enforcing a curfew following a spike in new cases, the death toll dropped to just six more on Tuesday. And as American “flare-ups” fanned the flames of anti-trump outrage, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published modelling projecting that hospital rates would flatline in the so-called “hotspot” of Florida, while the national death rate continued to drop from its peak in mid-april.

A pattern is emerging of rising cases and falling deaths in countries where economies are reopening, testing is being ramped up, and the vulnerable are – finally – being more effectively shielded. These countries show no sign of lurching into a second wave; only a glimpse of life unfolding as it should have done from the beginning!

The distinction may perplex those stuck down the lockdown rabbit hole. But rather than panicking about a fresh peak, Britain should be preparing to live with Covid as a circulatory endemic infection – potentially with no vaccine.

Perhaps we need to let herd immunity take its course, while protecting “institutional super spreaders” like care homes, hospitals and meat plants with bomb-proof testing strategies. Especially as young people are now the most likely group to be infected with the disease, according to PHE data sampling. Perhaps drugs already in existence can help us treat the virus. And perhaps in the long term we will have encourage people to catch it early, like chicken pox, as the statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter has warned.

The hitch is that this option of preparing to live with the virus is completely blocked off at present. Downing Street is strangely invested in a vaccine, even though we still await the cure for HIV almost 40 years later. Our whole strategy hinges on it; as Professor Chris Whitty has said repeatedly, social distancing measures must remain in place until one is found.

It gets curiouser and curiouser. Dirtcheap drugs may be part of a solution. But, as they aren’t exactly moneyspinners, are attitudes in Britain and abroad towards them compromised by profit motives? While the UK’S recent approval of £5-a-course steroid dexamethasone to treat seriously ill patients is to be welcomed, the international demolition job on 10p-a-day hydroxychloroquine, which may help prevent Covid or treat early-stage cases, should have our guard up. Particularly as the Lancet has been forced to retract a paper that savaged the drug, and the WHO has suddenly distanced itself from the treatment for unsatisfactory reasons..

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get,” said the White Rabbit. The moral being to think before you act. Hysterical Britain urgently needs to reflect on whether the narrative it has embraced – of elusive vaccines and the race to stop a second wave – is really the right one.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion