Might we really have to wait until June before we end restrictions?

Britain could be facing a long, slow slog to herd immunity, with Sir Patrick Vallance warning that at least 70 per cent coverage would be needed to stop transmission.

Figures suggest that if we carried on vaccinating at the current rate – about 1.8 million a week – we would not get there before June.

But might there be a case for lifting restrictions earlier?

The important thing to realise is that this pandemic has a vastly different impact dependent on age. Latest Public Health England figures show the current risk of catching and dying from coronavirus for people aged 80 or over is 1,513 per 100,000 people.

In contrast, for a 50-year-old, it is 42.7 in 100,000 and the risk continues to fall dramatically until it gets to 0.1 per 100,000 for those aged five to nine.

This matters because if everything goes to plan, we will have vaccinated all the over-50s and vulnerable by spring, which will have a huge impact on the pandemic. For although these 32 million people make up under half the population, they account for more than 99 per cent of the deaths.

In contrast, the healthy under-50s made up just 0.94 per cent of the Covid-related deaths in 2020 – fewer than 700 of the 72,178 deaths recorded by PHE in England.

To put that in perspective, there are around 1,700 deaths a year from road accidents in Britain. Prof Chris Whitty,

‘if everything goes to plan, we will have vaccinated all the over-50s and vulnerable by spring’

‘Livelihoods must also be protected, as well as the economy, personal freedoms and mental health’

the Government’s chief medical officer, recently told the Health Select Committee that society could not shut down forever and would need to determine what an acceptable level of risk and number of deaths would be – “Just as we accept that in an average year 7,000 people die of flu, and in a bad flu year 20,000 people die,” he said.

“At a certain point you say, ‘actually, the risk is now low enough that we can largely do away with certainly the most onerous things that we have to deal with’.” Of course the deaths from

Covid will not be limited to the unvaccinated under-50s. We know that one dose of the Oxford vaccine only achieves 73 per cent efficacy and after two doses that may fall to around 70 per cent.

The figures might be lower still once rolled out. But with an efficacy rate of 70 per cent, of 100 people who would be taken ill with Covid, even if they had the vaccine, 30 would still get ill.

The Pfizer vaccine is likely to be higher at one dose – JCVI suggests 89 per cent – but most people in the first phase will be given the Oxford jab.

So, based on the same death figures as last year, in a very worst case scenario we might expect around 20,000 deaths still to occur even in the vaccinated groups.

In practice this is highly unlikely because the jabs appear to lower the severity of the virus even if the person still gets the disease, and may completely protect against hospitalisation and death.

More vaccination is also likely to lower transmission rates, if only because fewer people are coughing and sneezing and spreading the virus.

Yet even in the implausible scenario that we would still get 20,000 deaths a year from coronavirus after vaccination, it may still be a price worth paying for release from restrictions.

As Prof Whitty has pointed out, in a bad flu year, around 22,000 people can die, and lockdown also comes at a high price. The ONS has estimated that the two months of lockdown between March and May caused 16,000 non-covid deaths, and predicted an extra 26,000 on top of that by this March.

They also forecast 81,500 deaths as a result of longer NHS waiting times, and a deep recession within 50 years.

The country may have a final ace up its sleeve. The ONS estimates around 1 in 10 people have already been infected with the coronavirus in Britain and so will already be immune.

The MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University thinks it could be even higher – around 10.7million infections in England alone – roughly one in six people.

And the prevalence appears to be higher in younger groups. The MRC estimates a quarter of those aged 25 to 44 has had the virus and 29 per cent of those aged 15 to 24. So the under-50s may be more protected than we realise.

Epidemiologists are naturally over-cautious. It makes far more sense for them to exercise an abundance of wariness because keeping deaths down not only saves lives, but also their careers.

While this is also true of politicians, it is not their only concern.

Livelihoods must also be protected, as well as the economy, personal freedoms and mental health.

Maybe it is now time to have the difficult conversation and discuss what is an acceptable level of risk.