‘Living with Covid’ doesn’t mean lazily accepting nothing more can be done

Living with Covid” increasingly means living with a rising risk of contracting this still potentially deadly disease, being hospitalised, dying or being left with the debilitating effects of “long Covid”. Even if all of that was considered acceptable, by those tired of it all, then surely the knock-on effects on non-Covid care are still unacceptable? 

Given the resistance that seems to be hardening within the Conservative Party to taking even moderate precautionary measures to slow the spread of the virus, there seems little chance that action will be taken before it is too late. Sadly, this has been the playbook throughout this pandemic.

Protecting Covid and non-Covid patients was always the point about the various restrictions and safeguards implemented. As the famous slogan said, it was to “protect the NHS” – from being so overwhelmed that it impacted other urgent care, let alone elective and non-urgent treatments.

The NHS has been under intense strain for more than two years, and the rush to end even modest measures such as to wear a face covering, free Covid testing and mandatory self-isolation after a positive test has only added to its problems. There seems, anecdotally, to be a particular problem with ambulance services in parts of the country, and hospitals (and schools, tellingly) are reporting high staff absentee rates.

All of this was predictable and predicted. Like every bogus “freedom day” before it, sooner or later there will have to be another U-turn – not a lockdown, but some early restoration of common-sense precautions before more hospitals break under the stress. It would delay the peak of the Omicron wave – “flatten the sombrero”. This would help save the lives of cancer patients, those with mental health problems, and to relieve the pain of those waiting for hip operations, for example. We should not wait for the hospitals to start turning people away before we do something. There is no alternative but the return of some safeguards, sooner or later.

The statistics back the popular impression that the Omicron variant and its even more infectious BA.2 sub-variant are on the rise, whatever the weather. It is true that Omicron is generally less serious in its effects than the Delta or other variants – but the high incidence is beginning to erode that effect. Though no longer routinely reported, the Covid statistics are still being gathered and are alarming.

In the last recorded week, the Office for National Statistics reports that one person in 13 in England has Covid, up by around 650,000 compared with the week before in the UK. Almost 5 million people have Covid. With such a sheer scale of infection, hospitalisations are also up and so are fatalities of people within 28 days of a positive test. During the last week analysed, 1,097 people were taken before their time. It is not a trivial illness, and some 1.5 million people have had their lives blighted by the fatigue, “brain fog” and shortness of breath. All Covid patients need urgent treatment, even if relatively few need intensive care, and there is too much strain being imposed on clinical services.

The picture would be brighter if the fourth vaccine programme was moving with the kind of urgency that the first programme and the booster programme were last year, but the eligibility for a fourth jab is very limited, and the development of an Omicron vaccine not complete. No doubt the researchers are working as impressively as ever, but that is all the more reason for light-touch precautions, nothing like lockdown, to be introduced to buy some time for the next generation of vaccines to arrive.

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“Living with Covid” doesn’t mean lazily accepting that there is nothing that can be done to stop it harming people – Covid and non-Covid patients alike. The disastrous impression has been allowed to form that “Covid is over”, and that pre-pandemic life can return without alteration. But the inconvenient truth is that life may well never return to the norms of the past.

Covid is now officially “endemic” rather than a pandemic, but it makes no difference to a parent laid low and trying to look after a poorly child, or someone who finds their appointment for an operation postponed yet again, or waiting hours for an ambulance. People have been commendably public-spirited throughout the pandemic, but they need a lead and some signals from those in charge.

When even the education secretary says he doesn’t wear a mask, ever, but does wash his hands, it betrays a lack of understanding of how this airborne virus spreads, and an even more deadly complacency. We can try ignoring the coronavirus, but it has a habit of letting its presence be known in the nastiest of ways.