Pretending Covid has gone away is putting everyone who uses the NHS at risk

‘Living with Covid’ should mean the government setting rules and guidelines, because if the lockdowns taught us anything, it is that vague requests to use common sense don’t work

The numbers of Covid patients in hospital are as high as they were in January this year, and that is why the NHS seems to be in constant crisis (EPA)

So now we know what “living with Covid” actually means: trying, and failing, to ignore it. Living with Covid means putting permanent but unsustainable pressure on the NHS, and indeed in schools and other public services. Some hospitals are heading for crisis again.

As a nation, we seem to have fallen under some sort of spell. We are victims of magical thinking – if we pretend Covid has gone away, then it will go away. The variant of that, a variant of concern you might say, is that we just accept that we probably get it, but it’ll be alright because it’s not that serious anymore and we need to get on with our lives.

I sometimes look around the supermarket and notice I’m the only person wearing a mask. And then I am very clear on why Covid is on the rise again.

If only Covid would go away if we ignore it. If only we could hit the reset button, and live as freely and easily as we did in 2019, all would be well. But we can’t, because it’s coronavirus, and it’s not going to go away.

Indeed, it will carry on mutating as nature intended, and fresh “variants” will crop up every so often to frighten us, and, sooner or later, a more deadly one may emerge again. Omicron was one such variant, not more deadly but much more infectious than Delta – milder, but not “mild”. Omicron is still in fact capable of killing you, or at least landing you in hospital, and leaving you with debilitating long Covid, unable to taste your food or think straight. Some 1.5 million of us have got it.

The story may turn out to be the same with the current new variations on the deadly theme, BA.2 and, newest of all, “XE” which, for some of us, is no longer just a smart Jaguar saloon car. These new coronavirus mutations haven’t got Greek letters so they’re not proper “variants of concern”, apparently.

XE is a mere “recombinant”, which doesn’t sound that cuddly, and the experts don’t know enough about it. Recombinant means bits of DNA in an organism changing, which is normal in fact. Professor Susan Hopkins, the UK Health Security Agency’s chief medical adviser, tells us that recombinant variants are not uncommon and usually die off “relatively quickly”.

“This particular recombinant, XE, has shown a variable growth rate and we cannot yet confirm whether it has a true growth advantage. So far there is not enough evidence to draw conclusions about transmissibility, severity or vaccine effectiveness.”

But the problem with Covid isn’t Covid, if you see what I mean. The problem is the growing number of Covid patients preventing non-Covid patients from getting long-overdue and urgent care (and indeed non-urgent care – anything from an ankle operation to having your ears syringed). Covid also kills and harms people without Covid and who don’t even know they’re sick, as cancer and other conditions aren’t being detected and attended to in time. That’s why we should bear down on Covid.

Things would be bad enough even without the NHS backlog; but after two years of postponements and missed appointments, the pressure on the NHS is unacceptable. Even if there was no Covid at all, it’d be rough. Covid patients deserve treatment, but they’re adding to the burdens. It’s leading to increasing public disillusionment, and to more folk having to pay for, say, a new hip through a private provider (often the same surgeons who would treat you on the NHS in a year’s time, if you can wait).

It is, therefore, undermining the very basis of the principle of social insurance. That is also deeply damaging. Not everyone who is old is poor, and if you can borrow or use £10,000 of your life savings to buy treatment, mobility and get release from pain, I don’t blame you. I do blame a government that fails to keep modest precautionary measures in place and callously regards Covid as not much worse than the common cold or flu.

Omicron is milder but not “mild”. It’s not trivial, even if some people think it is, nor is it a hoax. It is true that Omicron isn’t killing people at the rate Delta and other predecessors once did, even if you’re more likely to get it (and the BA.2 version is apparently even more wildly infective). It doesn’t take up as many intensive care beds.

The problem, though, is that it can make key workers so ill they can’t work (and shouldn’t, to control spread); and that it can still result in a hospital admission, though shorter and without the same level of concern as in the past.

Those extra admissions, the extra calls on GPs, the extra calls for ambulances are the problem. The numbers of Covid patients in hospital are as high as they were in January this year, and that is why the NHS seems to be in constant crisis.

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What should we do? We could learn to live with Covid – and that means learning to live in a new way. Wear a mask. Take a home Covid test before visiting a school or family gathering (especially one with older or more clinically vulnerable people). Ration the amount of Covid risk we take by going to the pub or restaurant, cinema, football or gym. Lose some weight. Give up smoking. “Living with Covid” should mean the government setting rules and guidelines, because if the lockdowns taught us anything, it is that vague requests to use common sense don’t work.

We need to do these things now, to save lives. It’s not that easy to scale up resources in the NHS quickly, even without Brexit-induced labour shortages. The quickest way to reduce the burden is to bring back precautionary measures – “non-clinical interventions” as they say.

This is not a new lockdown. Masks can and should be worn in crowded spaces such as public transport. We should have compulsory self-isolation until symptoms pass. We should have free lateral flow tests so workers and parents can judge whether they and their families have Covid or hay fever. We should have better surveillance and PCR tests readily available. Working from home should be the default right for a working person.

We could speed the rollout of booster jabs and any new anti-Omicron vaccine with the same urgency and excitement as we did when the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was first discovered.

None of these things would destroy civil liberties (unlike the government’s legislative programme) and they would save lives. We could do them in the morning. But we won’t, because we’d rather not live with the reality of Covid, and accept that the world of 2019 is gone forever. Now, please wash your hands.