6/22/2023 0 Comments Unherd covidBritain currently has a lower reproduction (R) rate than any EU member state (except Romania). With cases now on the turn in France and shooting up in Germany, Europe will soon be forgotten altogether. As Eastern Europe suffered its worst outbreak yet, the calls to be more European became calls to be more like Western Europe and then to be more like the largest countries in Western Europe. The infection rate peaked on 18 October before dropping back to levels last seen in August. No sooner had Labour leader Keir Starmer put his weight behind this campaign than it began to crumble. The least we could do was take our lead from enlightened Europe where the virus was under control thanks to face masks and vaccine passports, they said. Britain was a rainy plague island, they said. Independent SAGE, the British Medical Association, various trade unions and every social-media user with #ToryGenocide, #JohnsonVariant or #FBPE in their profile joined the call for restrictions to be re-imposed. He did this in a press release that began with the veiled threat that ‘o one wants another national lockdown…’. On 20 October, NHS Confederation chief executive Matthew Taylor – who had warned in July that ‘dropping the requirements to wear masks and to socially distance… could lead to further mutations of the virus’ – called for measures, such as working from home and a mask mandate, to be reintroduced. Both smileys and frownies looked at the data, noted that things looked worse than they did at the same time last summer, when Covid rates were very low, and warned that winter was coming.Īll it took was a mini-surge in October for tension to turn into hysteria again. Over the next two months rates rose and dipped in the manner of an endemic virus. By the end of July they had fallen by half. In the event, the number of cases per day peaked at just over 50,000 shortly before all restrictions were lifted. Independent SAGE called on the government to revert to step two of the roadmap in which socialising indoors with anyone from outside your household was banned. The prospect of 100,000 cases a day was, in their view, nailed on and there was a real possibility of this rising to 200,000. Their opposite number, the Zero Covidians – or ‘frownies’ – have shown no contrition for being wrong on an epic scale since they described England’s ‘Freedom Day’ as a ‘dangerous and unethical experiment’ in July. I’ve written enough about these lost souls, but they are not the only fanatics entrenched in an extreme position. With the chances of another lockdown dropping close to zero, these erstwhile ‘lockdown sceptics’ went full anti-vax and now scour the internet for sudden cardiac deaths of athletes and the unexpected death of anybody under the age of 60, whispering darkly about the ‘clot shot’. So why the hell are so many people still losing their minds over it? I don’t just mean the Covid-denying ‘smiley’ contingent, who adopted the Acid House logo as their emblem last autumn. Arguably, it should only be a minor news story from now on. Covid will remain a health issue for many years – possibly forever – but it is no longer a civil-liberties issue. The numbers go up a little, they go down a little, but it is nothing a half-decent healthcare system couldn’t handle. A graph of hospital occupancy looks very similar. After two surges of the epidemic – in spring 2020 and winter 2020-21 – we have reached endemicity. For fully vaccinated people, the risk of dying if you catch Covid is lower still.Ī glance at the Covid mortality figures shows us that we are more or less where we expected to be. And remember that these statistics include a large number of deaths among the unvaccinated. Since around half of all infections are not recorded, the infection fatality rate is now around 0.15 per cent, not much different to seasonal influenza. Based on these figures, the case fatality rate fell from 2.2 per cent to 0.3 per cent. In the following six months, during which restrictions were reduced to nothing, there were 4.8million recorded cases and 14,000 deaths. In the six months between October 2020 and March 2021, there were 3.8million recorded cases of Covid in the UK and 85,000 deaths.
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