The next three months may well prove to be the hardest of the whole pandemic. The new variants of Covid-19 appear to be the wrong type of game-changer. After our national lockdown in March, infection levels started falling because of extreme measures — including closing schools, places of worship and non-essential retail. But the infectiousness of the ‘Kent strain’ suggests that as it becomes prevalent, a new lockdown might be unable to contain it. When ministers first locked down, they did so in the expectation of taming the virus. This time, it’s more in hope.
Boris Johnson didn’t show us any graphs when he announced the latest lockdown. He didn’t need to; the situation is clear. In England, in-patient numbers with Covid are 40 per cent higher than they were in the last peak. More than a million people had the virus between Christmas and the new year, according to the Office for National Statistics, about one person in 50. In London and the south-east, 475,000 had Covid-19: a fourfold increase in the space of a few weeks.
For months now, we have heard about the ‘R number’: the average number of others to whom an infected person passes the virus. For the pandemic to shrink, R needs to be below 1. After the first lockdown, it dropped to 0.7. The latest official estimate puts it between 1.1 and 1.3, hence the current mayhem. A recent Imperial College assessment found that the new Kent strain of Covid-19 increases the R by anything from 0.4 to 0.7 points. It doesn’t take an epidemiologist to work out the implications of this.
If the new strain goes nationwide, and the rest of the country suffers the hospitalisation surges seen in London and the south-east, even the current lockdown will not be enough. The NHS would be overwhelmed and there would be thousands more deaths.
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