Is the Covid gamble paying off?

A “dangerous experiment”, an “avoidable crisis”, “epidemiological stupidity” – these are just a few of the scathing comments made by a range of international experts about the UK’s decision to break away from the rest of the world and remove almost all Covid restrictions on 19 July.

Certainly, the government is taking a gamble. The UK currently has the second highest number of Covid cases worldwide and the fourth-highest number of cases when adjusted for size of population, due to a wave that has been largely powered by the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Yet as Boris Johnson continues to remind anybody who will listen, Britain also has one of the world’s most successful vaccine rollouts, with nearly two-thirds of the adult population now fully vaccinated against Covid.

In comparison, countries like Israel have vaccinated more of the population, but reintroduced vaccine passports and other emergency measures to protect against rising infections. Then you have countries like India, which have had more Delta cases, but not such a successful vaccine rollout.

This puts the UK on course for a make-or-break race between vaccine and virus not seen anywhere else in the world. And as scathing as they may be, other countries will be watching our stats with keen interest to see what happens next. As Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the Guardian: “We are a petri dish for the world”.

Heading into the first weekend, the gloomy predictions from the “Freedom Day” sceptics are yet to transpire in the stats.

Certainly, the number of people with Covid across the UK is continuing to rise. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, around one in 75 people in England were infected with coronavirus last week, up from one in 95 a week previously, and the highest number since the week to 30 January.

However, the most recent figures show that the vaccine rollout has weakened the link between infections and deaths and serious disease – despite the more transmissible Delta variant. The latest seven-day average for coronavirus-related deaths is 64, while in the second wave peak in January it was more than 1,200. The latest daily average of people testing positive is 46,000, whereas in January it was around 60,000.

And even though the estimated number of people in England with coronavirus hit a six-month high this week, the R number stayed steady at between 1.2 and 1.4. This means that, on average, every 10 people infected with the virus will go on to infect between 12 and 14 others.

Estimates for what will happen next are rough at best. This is our first “natural wave” of Covid – all the others have been slowed through lockdown and restrictions – which makes it more difficult to make predictions about the coming months. Then there is the question of unpredictable public behaviour. Prof Matt Keeling, a modeller at the University of Warwick, warned that “the public is going to control the trajectory we are on” coming out of lockdown. But if the R number stayed flat despite Britons packing out pubs and living rooms to watch the Euros, is there hope that “Freedom Day” will have a similarly modest impact?

This question is just one of the many unknowns about the next month, which explains the huge range around the central estimate that hospital admissions will peak this summer at 1,000 to 2,000 a day – in comparison to the most recent winter wave which hit 4,000.

So far, the statistics give us something to be hopeful about. But until we get a bit more data, the rest of the world will be watching the UK media coverage with bated breath. And hopefully, if it all goes to plan, we can finally move away from R numbers and mRNA to reporting on some of the other issues that have rumbled away in the background while Covid gripped the world.   

Have a good weekend.

Olivia Gavoyannis,
Reaction Reporter