Philip Thomas

The third wave: it’s here – but it shouldn’t delay our reopening

issue 12 June 2021

Lockdowns cannot kill off a virus — they just delay the spread. There was always going to be a new wave of infections as Boris Johnson phased out restrictions. The question was how big it would be and how much protection the vaccines would provide. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, summed up the case for optimism a few months ago, saying that any ‘new surges will meet a wall of vaccinated people’. His theory is now being tested: the fast-spreading Indian (Delta) variant is making its way through the most vaccinated country in Europe. What to do? And how worried should we be?

Since the pandemic began, I have been trying to answer such questions. I’m a professor of risk management at the University of Bristol, not an epidemiologist. Using mathematical principles I have been able to estimate the trajectory of Covid, with results regularly published on The Spectator website. In a field marked by vast uncertainty and monstrous error margins, the record of my modelling has been pretty good — each week it has been retrospectively validated by the latest Covid report from the Office for National Statistics. In recent weeks, I have been modelling the third wave: infections, deaths and herd immunity. I can’t say that it offers good news. But it offers a guide to the main issues we face. 

We ought to brace ourselves for a surge of infections, one that has started already and may be greater than the wave seen in January. But crucially, the NHS should not come close to being overwhelmed. Cases will be mainly among the young, who are far less likely to get seriously sick — so daily deaths will run at a quarter of what they once did, before subsiding. There is no point delaying reopening, because a landmark has been reached: Covid-19 has been downgraded into a nasty bug which is now no more lethal than viruses such as influenza.

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