Critics said it would turn Britain into a 'plague island', but reopening in July has proved to be a masterstroke
Source - Daily Telegraph - 22/11/21
cases of Covid-19 soaring across Europe, the people who were calling Britain a "plague island" a few weeks ago no longer look so clever. When Eastern Europe saw a surge in infections in October, it was easy to blame low rates of vaccination. But Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands have since overtaken the UK. Germany and Switzerland are close behind, while exponential growth in France and Italy suggests that it is only a matter of time before most of Western Europe is in serious trouble.
This is not a good place to be with winter approaching, and it explains why England dropped all restrictions in July.
At the time, however, few seemed to grasp that. The decision to end lockdown in the summer was described as a “dangerous and unethical experiment” in a letter published in the Lancet, and the self-appointed experts on Independent Sage called for the Government to cancel “freedom day”, close indoor hospitality and ban indoor gatherings. In fact, only a few weeks ago, critics of the Government were warning of another lockdown if Plan B – mandatory masking, vaccine passports and working from home – was not implemented immediately.
We shouldn’t count our chickens yet, but as restrictions come back into force across Europe, it is becoming increasingly obvious that delaying “freedom day” would have made a winter lockdown more likely, not less. While many countries are facing their first major wave of the delta variant against a backdrop of waning immunity and cold weather, England built up a wall of resistance to Covid in the mild summer and autumn months, which has now been fortified by twelve million booster shots.
This was always the plan, a fact some Government critics conveniently seem to have forgotten. Back in July, the Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, said: "There is quite a strong view by many people, including myself actually, that going in the summer has some advantages, all other things being equal, to opening up into the autumn when schools are going back and when we’re heading into the winter period when the NHS tends to be under greatest pressure."
In the first year of the pandemic, those who favoured more restrictions could usually rely on Whitty and most epidemiologists to support them. But not any more. “We are not behind Europe in this wave, they are behind us,” Professor Paul Hunter told the Guardian earlier this month. “We are not currently seeing a surge of the same magnitude as Europe at present largely because of the high case numbers over recent months, which most of Europe missed out on.”
The “slight gamble” of opening up in July – as Professor Neil Ferguson put it – seems to be paying off. Although the number of Covid cases has been rising for the last two weeks, rates have continued to fall among the over-60s, and the number of people in hospital with Covid has dropped by a fifth since the start of November. In France and Germany, the number of cases reported each day has doubled in a fortnight. In England, cases have fluctuated at a relatively high level but have not doubled since early July, and there have been periods of sustained decline.
In short, the virus is finding it harder and harder to find susceptible individuals to infect. Those who have had their booster shot have strong immunity against symptomatic infection, while those who are unvaccinated have mostly been infected by now and have a similar level of protection.
What’s more, anyone who wants to enjoy a normal life has been able to do so for the last four months. This was a major benefit of “freedom day” that is rarely acknowledged by critics of the Government.
An exit wave was inevitable and it was better to have it in summer than in winter. We always knew that more people would die before the pandemic was over, not least because several million adults chose not to get vaccinated.
There are plenty of Government critics too blinded by political tribalism and sour grapes over Brexit to admit it, but delaying the inevitable would have caused more damage in the long run. Boris Johnson has made a lot of mistakes during the pandemic, but it is time to admit he got this one right.
Christopher Snowdon is the Head of Lifestyle Economics at the IEA
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