As we come up to the second anniversary of ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’, the UK in 2022 feels a very different country to the one we all inhabited at the start of 2020. Whilst some changes, particularly in the use of technology, have arguably delivered an improvement for many people and businesses, there are many changes to our behaviour, perception of risk and the value of money which most definitely have not. Adding it all up, the minuses heavily outweigh the pluses, in terms of both our economy and public well-being.
Not so long ago, when we talked of spending billions, it really did mean something. The thought of spending tens of billions on HS2, for instance, made many recoil. However, we seem to have now become so desensitised to huge amounts of government spending that an arguably ineffective Test and Trace budget of £37bn receives relatively little attention.
As I write this, we are conducting around 2 million Covid tests a day. Even a conservative cost estimate of these tests at £20 each means we are looking at expenditure of £40 million a day on tests, that’s over £1bn a month to fund tests for a highly infectious virus which, for the overwhelming majority, presents symptoms akin to a mild cold. We now have to ask ourselves whether the risk posed by the now dominant Omicron variant really justifies the cost of testing and isolation.
This is a difficult conversation, as many on the left are fighting hard to see restrictions continue and for money to be poured into programmes which keep people away from work, damage our social cohesion, economy and way of life.
What we should be looking at is the real life data on the Omicron variant, which was first isolated in South Africa. Richard Friedland, chief executive of Netcare, South Africa’s biggest provider of private healthcare, has said
“The most important issue is that there was a clear decoupling between community spread, which has been very rapid, and the level of hospital admissions, we have not suspended elective surgeries, and there is no pressure on beds . We have had no capacity constraints at all in the fourth wave.”
Whilst many have tried to argue there are differences between the situation in South Africa and UK, the fact that the increase in cases here has not led to increased hospitalisation with serious disease follows the same pattern. The numbers coming out of London – which tends to be ahead of the rest of the UK – suggest we’ve already hit a peak in cases and hospitalisations. All the data suggests that infection rates, once they have peaked, will fall as fast as they increased, just as they have in South Africa.
When Baroness Hallett published her Module 2 report of the Covid-19 Inquiry on 20 November, declaring that the government’s response was ‘too little, too late’ and that 23,000 lives could have been saved by locking down one week earlier, I found myself reflecting on the surreal years I spent as Head of Research for the […]
This week, the public inquiry into the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact, chaired by Baroness Hallett, published its second report on ‘core decision-making and political governance’. The investigation was established in 2021 under the Inquiries Act 2005 and Hallett, a former judge of the Court of Appeal, appointed as its chair […]
Boris Johnson and women. There has never been a shortage of revelations about the ex-Prime Minister’s relations with the fairer sex, but this week brought another: he didn’t have enough of them. Speaking at the Covid Inquiry, Johnson admitted that ‘the gender balance of my team should have been better,’ and ‘during the pandemic too […]
