In the first half of June, according to the ONS, only around one in 1700 people had the virus at any one time. In Britain, new infections from Covid-19 have fallen to a trickle in any case. But it may just have done us a favour by contributing to herd immunity from Covid-19. Black Lives Matter hasn’t done a lot for community relations, stirring up tensions. Young people, fed up with lockdown, are increasingly flouting the rules by partying, going on protests and the like, while many elderly people remain indoors. Eventually, however, we have – accidentally – arrived at more or less the policy Medley advocated. Instead, we seemed to do pretty much the opposite: we locked young people away indoors while discharging elderly hospital patients, untested, into care homes where they helped spread the virus unchecked.
On March 12, Graham Medley, Professor of Infectious Disease Modelling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a member of Sage, told Newsnight: “If I could, what I would like to do is put all the more vulnerable people into the North of Scotland and keep them there, everyone else in Kent and have a nice big epidemic in Kent so everyone becomes immune, and then we can put people back together again.” All of which begs the question: why don’t we allow young people to build up society’s herd immunity while simultaneously protecting the elderly and other vulnerable people? This was, in fact, once a policy that was favoured by at least one government scientific adviser. If all age groups had the same chance of dying from Covid 19 as do children (who are more likely to die from being struck by lightning), there would be no need to do anything about the disease – it could safely be allowed to rip through the population unchecked. More cases, by contrast, are now being picked up among children and teenagers – but that doesn’t matter so much because they have a very tiny chance of dying from the disease or suffering any ill effects. That has now fallen to less than five per cent. In the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than a quarter of tests among the over-65s in March turned out to be positive. It is a very different situation from March and April when Covid-19 was running riot in care homes all across Europe and North America. However much and irresponsibly they party, however, they have failed to make any impact on the daily death toll, which is in low single figures compared with over 30 back in April. In Portugal, a rise in cases has been blamed on young people partying. The wider the infection spreads, the more it is concentrated in younger, less vulnerable age groups. In spite of Matt Hancock’s boast of reaching his target of 100,000 tests a day, we have managed to capture fewer than one in 10 cases of the disease.īut there is something else apparent from the data on Covid-19. Yet the ONS, on the strength of antibody tests, has estimated that 6.78 percent of the population (4.4 million Britons) have been infected. Look at Britain, where officially there have been 305,000 recorded cases of the disease. The number of cases recorded is no guide to the true level of incidence of infections.
Tests are now picking up asymptomatic cases which would previously have gone undetected. The more you test, the more Covid-19 you will find. It is partly because the world is performing ever more Covid tests. While more and more people are being recorded as suffering from Covid-19, fewer are dying. While the number of recorded cases globally has yet to peak the number of deaths peaked in April and is now running about half the level it was then. Look more calmly, though, and one thing becomes apparent.
Globally, according to the World Health Organisation, the pandemic is "accelerating". In suburbs of Lisbon, too, a partial lockdown is being reimposed after a rise in local cases. Choose your news carefully and there is plenty to fret about over a pint in a social-distanced pub. While bars and restaurants will be reopening in England on July 4, in the German town of Gutersloh they will for the moment be shutting their doors again after an outbreak of Covid-19 in a meat factory.
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