When Professor Chris Whitty first presented his case for lockdown to the Cabinet, none of them could be expected to know what the effects would be. Now they do.

Many have their day jobs dominated by the wreckage of previous lockdowns: the mayhem of school exams, the surging drugs and alcohol deaths, the sheer cost to the economy and livelihoods. In recent weeks they’ve been asked to let the wrecking ball swing again, in hope that it knocks out a chunk of the omicron variant. But what else would be hit?

“Presumably, others are modelling the harms caused by restrictions, including economic harms,” Graham Medley, chairman of the Sage forecasters, said recently. But this is precisely the problem: even now, no one is. Not properly.

There is no economic or social equivalent of Sage offering parallel advice. The public health officials are still making their case in the same way, and just last week were pushing for more restrictions – and the sooner the better, they said. But the advice was rejected last week, and again yesterday. There will be no more restrictions until at least the new year. Individually, ministers understand what’s at stake. Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, knows about the 25,500 pupils who have disappeared off school rolls since lockdown started. He thinks it will take two years to repair exams: another lockdown could make this three. Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, knows that lockdowns left a courtroom backlog so great that it now takes three years for a rapist to be brought to trial. It’s quite a shift: for these ministers, lockdown is no longer seen as a cautious measure, but a pretty extreme one.

Sage has also lost its monopoly on Covid analysis, now that independent academic modellers and financiers are joining the debate. The biggest question in the world markets today is whether omicron will overwhelm healthcare systems or not: if so, disaster looms and it’s time to sell shares; if not, it’s time to buy. So some of the finest minds in financial analysis have been repurposed to modelling pandemics, with research notes closely read and passed around by Cabinet members.

Rishi Sunak is perhaps the most economically literate Chancellor in modern times, a former financier who asked for a Bloomberg data terminal to be installed on his Treasury desk so he could do his own homework and not rely solely on whoever was briefing him. Sajid Javid was a vice-president of Chase Manhattan bank before entering politics; Jacob Rees-Mogg set up his own investment firm. Spotting trends in a sea of dodgy data was, for a while, what these three did for a living.

The analysis from JP Morgan is striking because its base case is one Sage did not present: a scenario where no more restrictions are needed and boosters save the day, leading to a political triumph for Boris Johnson. It envisages Britain pulling through without cause for another lockdown because boosters have already done enough to keep hospitalisations below those of the last peak. Its research note looks around Europe and struggles to see any other country so well placed to ride all this out.

JP Morgan’s case is fairly simple. The omicron surge has been concentrated amongst the young: and, as we know, risk lies with the over-60s. But an extraordinary 93 per cent of them have already been boosted, giving high protection from either catching omicron or getting seriously sick from it – the highest figure of any major country. This time last year, lockdown was used as a tool to buy time to vaccinate the at-risk age groups. Now, we enter the omicron wave with that work largely done.

Britain is also leading the world on two other fronts. The first is the new national sport of nostril swabbing: we’re getting through millions of lateral flow tests each day, with another 700 million on the way. This is more per capita than any country on Earth. It is expensive, but it is helping us to achieve what the goal has always supposedly been: living with Covid. Between vaccines and testing, we’re staving off lockdowns. The sick are quickly isolating, while the healthy go about their lives with more confidence.

Then come the antivirals, the wonder-drugs from Pfizer and Merck shown to stop serious illness in its tracks. The success rate is astonishing: molnupiravir cuts the risk of Covid hospitalisation or death by 30 per cent and paxlovid by 90 per cent for those whose underlying conditions make them vulnerable. There are about 1.3 million such people in Britain and they are each being sent a PCR test kit in case they get ill. If they test positive, antivirals are delivered to them quickly in the hope of keeping them safe and out of hospital. Britain has placed one of the world’s biggest orders for these antivirals. Again, expensive – but cheaper than a national lockdown.

All of these Covid defences – vaccines, tests, drugs, immunity levels – are incomparable to what we had this time last year. Which is why it’s odd that the conversation still lingers on lockdowns. The advice from Sage to ministers, sent around last week, suggests its thinking has hardly moved on from the early days, as if we had not invented any better ways of living with a pandemic than to lock everyone up.

There are several countries that do feel they have no other option. The Netherlands is back in an emergency lockdown; Germany and Italy may follow suit. The new prime minister in Sweden (where booster coverage is half of that in Britain) is calling time on her country’s famously relaxed, voluntary regime. Swedes now have Covid-status cards and, for the first time, compulsory face masks. Elsewhere in Europe, we see fines for the unvaccinated, ever-tighter use of vaccine passports – and, alongside them, intensifying protests and deep social unrest. It’s a fate Britain may yet avoid.

Omicron could still prove just as dangerous as suggested by those Sage “scenarios” of up to 6,000 deaths a day. But a happier scenario is also coming into view, and real-world evidence is backing it up – that Britain gets through this with minimal deaths and no more restrictions, thanks to the most successful booster programme in Europe. This is why the PM is waiting an extra week: he’d like to see if his jabs work. Covid has been full of surprises. This could be one of them.