It appears the pandemic’s been cancelled. Honest Boris (used cars and UK health decision maker-in-chief) has declared the country will return to normal on the 19th of July. All evil/socialist/foreign restrictions on British Liberty, like masks and closed nightclubs, will be done away with and we’ll be a Free People again… at least in England, but where else matters?
You could feel justifiably conflicted on this. On the one hand it’s crazy: crazy, crazy, crazy. Infections are skyrocketing. The more transmissible delta variant is running amok since we slackened restrictions. Vaccination may limit the casualties, but as I said here there are still many opaque long-term risks. And a smaller proportion of a huge number is still a big number. The Israelis led the world with Covid vaccination, didn’t relax until they had more done than us, and are now talking about locking down again. Did we learn nothing?
However on the other hand where is it to end? Now that the vulnerable are vaccinated infection is no longer correlated to death. There’ve been a number of sage scientists saying recently that we have to learn to live with this. It may diminish to being another common cold, or may be a recurring pain like the ‘flu. Once the most vulnerable are protected any more restriction is pointless. We need to move on.
So here’s some facts: for most, age is the highest identifier of vulnerability (the oldest are the likeliest to die); ignoring long-covid (bear with me a minute, we need to simplify for our political classes) the young are pretty safe from serious harm; vaccination confers significant protection (the dosed are very unlikely to get really sick and die); catching a disease confers immunity too.
So once you’ve vaccinated the oldies the youngsters can catch it all they like. The old won’t get sick, we can restart the economy and the young will vaccinate themselves in the pub. There’s some dirty words in this we’re not allowed say any more: is there a Herd Immunity strategy afoot? I can understand no politician would touch the Herd Immunity thing with a bargepole, but that’s what it looks like.
If that’s the recommendation of the experts (remember those, Michael?) then well and good. Truly, if that’s the scientific consensus we should be informed and understand. But there’s some questions that ought to be answered first:
- What’s the safe age? There must be an age we’re assuming above which harm is done and people need to be vaccinated, and below which they can catch it safely. What is it?
- What’s the accepted death toll? I’m not an expert, but expect this age isn’t fixed; it varies for people, and some will die anyway. How many are we prepared to kill before we change direction?
- What’s the plan and expected disease progress? We need something to measure 2. against. Oh and…
- Is long-Covid covered by this? The last I heard it wasn’t as correlated to age as acute Covid. Do we have the statistics to know?
And when we have these, and the supporting details, we ought to know:
- Who made this decision – that may have such profound effects on the life, death, and long-term health & well-being of a nation – and when?