Britain’s Covid experiment fascinates world
‘‘Let the bodies pile high in their thousands,’’ expostulated Boris Johnson in his private office, but the door was open and witnesses heard him.
This was last October, when the second wave of Covid-19 was gaining speed, but the British prime minister was determined not to reimpose restrictions such as masks and self-isolation on the public.
The bodies did pile quite high – into the tens of thousands, in fact. In the five months from November to March, Covid killed 86,049 British citizens, most of whom would have probably lived had Johnson’s government taken a less capricious approach to lockdowns.
Undaunted, he’s at it again. On Monday, with new Covid cases zooming past 50,000 a day and doubling every two weeks, Johnson announced the end of all pandemic restrictions. Go where you want, wear a mask or not as you like, crowd six deep at the bar, hug people or even sneeze at them if you feel like it, indoors, outdoors, everywhere, any time.
Other governments look on, aghast but fascinated. It would be interesting to know how many deaths it takes to achieve herd immunity in a heavily vaccinated population and here’s a mug who’s willing to roll the dice with his own people. Watch closely and take notes.
The British population does pretty much lead the way in vaccinations: Eighty-eight per cent of adults have had their first jab and 68 per cent both doses. Maybe they’re already on the brink of herd immunity, which was generally believed to kick in about 60 per cent of the population vaccinated for the original version of the Covid virus, but may be 80 per cent or higher for more recent, more infectious variants.
Or maybe the recent variants are so infectious that herd immunity is entirely unattainable – 90 per cent or above – for any vaccination programme. It would be nice to know, but not at the risk of spreading death and long Covid among our own people. But look, here comes that nice Mr Johnson and he’s willing to use the British people as guinea pigs.
One can easily imagine such thoughts going through the minds of French or American or Indian leaders, but it’s unlikely they passed through Johnson’s mind. He’s not a detail man, and it’s more likely he wandered into this position through inattention and wishful thinking.
First, bin March or April, when the vaccines were taking hold and things were looking up, he promised ‘‘freedom day’’, when restrictions would be cancelled, would be in mid-June. Then the Delta variant appeared and caused havoc in India.
In mid-April Johnson closed the gates to Indian travellers and postponed ‘‘freedom day’’ for a month. But he has stuck grimly to that date even though he had the horrible example of the Netherlands before him – it ended all restrictions in late June, then reimposed them last week when new infections ran wild. And now ‘‘freedom day’’ has arrived.
Britain’s new health secretary Sajid Javid, who has just caught Covid, blithely predicts there might be 100,000 new infections a day within a couple of weeks. However, not to worry because ‘‘the link between infection and hospitalisation or death has been broken’’.
No, it hasn’t, although that link is clearly much weakened by the level of vaccinations in the UK. No vaccine confers complete immunity and if daily infections climb into six digits even a one in 1000 rate of hospitalisation can mean hundreds a day. Johnson is gambling with people’s lives, although it’s not clear if he really understands the risk.
On the other hand, maybe he’ll get away with it. The nature of experiments is that you don’t know the outcome in advance, and this is a big, important one. If the British level of vaccinations really lets a country open up completely, despite the worst that new variants can do, that’s good news for everybody. And if that turns out not to be the case, it’s only British people who have to die.