Britain won’t suffer the kind of Covid crisis engulfing EU

The coronavirus situation in many parts of Europe is grim, with case numbers in several countries exceeding their highs of last winter and still rising vertiginously. Hospitals are coming under pressure and restrictions are being reintroduced, along with compulsory or nearcompulsory vaccinations.

Whereas in the summer the talk was of how irresponsible the UK was in removing all restrictions and accepting rapid spread among young adults and children, with jests about “Plague Island” and the supposed buffoonery of our political and medical leaders, Britons might now be tempted to feel that “what goes around comes around” and it was better we had our final large waves in the summer and autumn (as the Prime Minister and his medical advisors said at the time) rather than waiting, as others have done, to have a larger wave in the winter.

But is that right? Could we yet face a situation as bad as, or even worse than, those on the Continent, with Christmas blighted once again by sad tales of death and hospitalisation and by a renewed round of restrictions?

Cases in England, in particular, have fallen markedly over the past month (they’re currently down 19 per cent from their October peak, on a sevenday average basis) and are set to fall further over the next three weeks or so as case numbers in the 10 to 14-yearold age group (the main driver of the September/October rise), which have been crashing spectacularly, fall further, along with cases in the over-65s (which have started falling recently as the effects of boosters kick in). That followed the same pattern as Scotland experienced when its big cases started to tumbled in mid September.

Hospitalisations in England, similarly, are down 17 per cent from their October peak. So on the surface all seems well and more likely to get better than worse.

Could anything change that? People naturally worry that winter could mean more infections, as often happens with other respiratory diseases. But that is unlikely to be a material factor for the UK this year for two key reasons. First, epidemics have a wellknown pattern, with sharp exponential upswings then firm downswings in case numbers. When that downswing does not lead to the disease dying out, it becomes what is called “endemic”

– a disease like the common colds and flus we experience all the time. That is what is expected of Covid. And when the disease is truly endemic it may well be a bit more prevalent in the winter than the summer.

But for now we are in that downswing phase, and that effect is likely to greatly dominate any seasonality effects. Cases are falling because the groups of people who were driving case numbers up (in the summer, young adults; in September/October, schoolchildren) have now been infected in such high numbers that the virus has run out of new people to infect. That effect is expected to drive numbers down far more than winter might drive them up. Indeed, in some of the Sage models case numbers this winter fall to very low levels – at around one sixth of their current level, perhaps 5,000 cases per day.

The second reason is that the dominant delta variant of Covid is so infectious that to reach an effective infection saturation level (or the “herd immunity threshold”, as the jargon terms it), collective infections have to be so high, anyway, that increased infectiousness in the winter makes very little difference. Even if winter infectiousness were 50 per cent higher than summer infectiousness, that would only raise the saturation level by around 6 per cent, and ongoing infections as we overshoot the threshold will have got us there easily. That is also why the new, slightly more infectious form of delta that is currently taking over is of relatively little concern. It only raises the saturation threshold by less than 2 per cent.

Young adults were infected or vaccinated (or both) to saturation this summer. Schoolchildren were infected to saturation this September/October.

Other age groups have been heavily vaccinated as well as having had a fair number recover from infections. The most vulnerable older people are now getting their third, booster doses, of the vaccines, which appear to be fabulously effective and to have countered concerns about waning immunity.

So, in Britain, we can look on in sorrow as the Continent suffers, but without worrying about a repeat here. Our authorities chose to accept our final epidemic waves this summer and early autumn.

Other troubles may lurk in future, such as a new flu pandemic. But, for us, the Covid crisis is over.