Spare a thought for Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary and rising star on the Labour benches. Before Christmas he demanded the Government introduce further Covid restrictions, insisting they were inevitable. After Christmas, when the worst fears about omicron did not come true, Streeting shared his relief that the Government had not brought in the very laws he had been demanding.
The widely held view that the Government has performed poorly throughout the pandemic is not true. Certainly, when Covid first emerged, ministers were slow to lock down. When new variants emerged, and when we were unprotected by vaccines, they were also slow to restrict travel to Britain from affected countries and regions. The failures of the contact tracing programme and in the early procurement of protective equipment are well known.
But even before the vaccines arrived, there were successes. Rishi Sunak kept businesses alive and families afloat with his extraordinary interventions. British science was responsible for genome sequencing and discovering novel treatments for Covid patients. With the vaccines, not only was Britain responsible for developing one of the most widely administered jabs in the world, the Government got its policies right in procuring them early and in huge numbers, authorising them for use promptly, and rolling them out efficiently.
When case numbers increased, and ministers came under pressure in the media and from Labour to introduce tough new restrictions – first during the summer and then before Christmas – the Government held its nerve and, it seems, was vindicated on both occasions. The number of new Covid cases is now falling in London, the South East and East of England. The growth rate is falling dramatically in all other parts of England.
Add to this the news that for anybody who has received their booster shot, the risk of hospitalisation from omicron is ninety per cent lower than for anybody who remains unvaccinated, there is reason to be positive about the future. Hospitals in some parts of the country remain under pressure, businesses and public services are having to cope with staff absences, and we must accept the risk of new variants emerging in future, but it is time to talk about how we can return to normality.
There are many pressing reasons to do so. The economic and fiscal hits caused by Covid are considerable. The social consequences of lockdowns and restrictions are many, and some are not yet understood. Loneliness and isolation from society are storing up mental health problems. Millions of children, and not only from the poorest families, have experienced “learning loss” in schools. Already, signs of criminality and anti-social behaviour in urban areas are showing, and ministers and securocrats worry that the terror threat has grown as extremists have spent time at home online.
This is not to argue against lockdowns or other restrictions in principle or in retrospect. Before the vaccines saved us, we had little option but to halt the spread of the virus by limiting our own social contact. The severity and duration of those lockdowns and restrictions might have been less if we had pursued other policy options or if the capability of the state had been greater. But to pretend that Britain could have avoided lockdowns and restrictions is the stuff of libertarian fantasy.
In fact the pandemic has seen some previously sensible people on the Right take leave of their senses. What began as cries of pain about the loss of personal freedom, and understandable concern about the economic costs of lockdowns and restrictions, soon morphed, for some, into conspiracy theory and quackery. By attacking the pharmaceutical companies, undermining confidence in the vaccines, or making bizarre claims like “it has never been about the virus, it is about controlling us”, these Covid culture warriors have revealed that in the culture wars the Right can be the problem just as much as the Left.
To make the case for returning to normality now is not to give succour to these paranoic arguments. For the vaccines, rapid mass testing and the availability of antiviral drugs – and of course the positive news about the reduced severity of Omicron – mean we are in a very different world now. As Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary and former Vaccines Minister, said yesterday, we should soon witness “the transition of the virus from pandemic to endemic.”
As this occurs, there is a responsibility for ministers to promote, actively and energetically, a swift return to a normal way of life. We are better protected against the virus, but we will still need to coexist with it, so regular testing is likely to remain a function of day-to-day living for some time to come, and test kits will need to be free of charge well into the future. Despite the controversy of the misnamed “vaccine passports”, asking people to prove that they have tested negative or been vaccinated is also a small price to pay as we lift restrictions and live normally.
Ministers should be prepared to cut the isolation period for people who have had Covid from seven to five days, where the patient tests negative. They should prohibit masks for children in schools and ban online lessons apart from in the most extreme circumstances. They should compel universities to teach courses in person. They should ensure the reopening of GP surgeries and prepare the NHS to begin the long, hard task of catching up with its backlogs. They should explore incentives for people to travel to city centres, work from offices, eat in restaurants and visit cultural sites like galleries and museums. They should run public awareness campaigns encouraging us to get on with our lives.
Despite predictions from behavioural scientists that people would tire of abiding by Covid restrictions, the public has shown itself to be cautious and responsible throughout the pandemic. Whether it was the call to “stay at home”, or to “eat out to help out”, by and large people have responded positively to instructions, incentives and advice. Now we need ministers to lead us back on the road to normality. It is time to put the nightmare behind us.
