WHITTY: WE’LL TREAT COVID LIKE FLU
He warns we’ll be vulnerable to variants for two years – but no more lockdowns
BRITAIN can learn to live with Covid just like the flu, Chris Whitty said yesterday.
The Chief Medical Officer predicted that the UK will remain vulnerable to new variants despite the success of our vaccine rollout.
However, he suggested that more lockdowns were unlikely – although some measures such as border controls could remain in place ‘for the next year or two’.
Professor Whitty said this would buy time for drugs firms to develop technology that can quickly tweak vaccines to target new variants.
Society must find a way to balance the risk from the virus with the devastating social and economic effects of lockdown, he stressed.
Addressing a Royal Society of Medicine web seminar, Professor Whitty said: ‘[Covid] is not flu, it is a completely different disease... but the point I am making is: here is a seasonal, very dangerous disease that kills thousands every year and society has chosen a particular way
‘We need to work out some balance’
around it. Every year, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 citizens die of flu, most of them very elderly.
‘If next year we say “we can deal with flu – everyone lock down over the winter”, I think the medical profession would not make itself popular with the general public. We need to work out some balance... which means you can minimise mortality while not maximising the economic and social impacts on our fellow citizens.’
He said caution was needed ‘for the next year or two’ as a future Covid variant could put the UK ‘ back at square one, a long way back from where we were’. He continued: ‘What we don’t want to be is in a situation where we look back in six months and say “if we’d only just been a bit more cautious for a month or two”. I don’t think this should be seen as an indefinite posture – I think this is a matter of probably the next year or two whilst we... find a way of responding rapidly to variants.’
He said that if we ‘scroll forward two years I think we’re going to have a very wide portfolio of vaccines’ – but until then ‘we’ve got... a difficult situation to go through’.
Variants not covered by the immunity from current jabs would have a significant evolutionary advantage over existing strains.
Professor Whitty suggested that border controls could help to combat this problem – but admitted it is ‘not realistic’ to stop new strains from reaching our shores. ‘ What you can do is you can slow it down,’ he said, adding that curbs on travel could focus on countries with higher infection rates than ours. At present, that would include most of Europe. ‘You don’t worry about any country that’s got less [Covid] than you have... but you do worry about any country that’s got more,’ Professor Whitty said.
He played down the prospect of a return to the tiered system of Covid curbs – but warned that the emergence of a variant enjoying ‘ unconstrained growth’ could require ministers to pull an ‘alarm cord’ for a full fourth lockdown. Asked about working with politicians, Professor Whitty said he sometimes intervenes ‘forcefully’. He explained: ‘If I think it’s mainly
a technical decision and I think the political leader is trying to take it, I will say “I don’t think that’s your call”. Equally, if it’s primarily a political decision... it shouldn’t be me trying to make a political decision for a political leader.’ The professor also revealed that he enjoys hiking and kayaking to escape the stresses of the war on Covid.