A flunami has divided the UK into ‘have-shots’ and ‘have-nots’

With a tidal wave of flu, Covid and norovirus engulfing hospitals, schools and the economy, Sean O’Grady has an idea: let’s revive the ‘Stay home, protect the NHS’ Covid slogans

I wouldn’t want to sound smugger than I usually do, but I got my flu vaccination many weeks ago, just as I did with my Covid booster. I am a walking antivaxxer’s nightmare.

As we contemplate our Christmas reunions, office parties, and school nativity plays getting cancelled by a microorganism, we are divided into the “have-shots” and the “have-nots”. When the dreaded question is asked by way of small talk, but also a casual method of social segregation, “Have you had your jab?” I am happy to reply, “Yes, on the first day it was available.”

As I say, smug, even if the conspiracy theorists think that I am succumbing to government thought control, or something. “Sheeple” or not, my compliance with public health advice means I now feel reasonably well protected as we go into what seems like an unusually disruptive flu season. Aside from Covid, which is sadly never going to go away, and the “vomiting bug”, we’re now being assailed as never before by the flu, and specifically the H3N2 flu variant, or “the nasty one” – as we scientists like to term it.

We could see the flu bug coming, as we can every year, albeit not the virulence of the version presently circulating, but so few of us outside the high-risk categories bothered to take the necessary precautions (and to pay for it) that schools are closing, workplaces are thinning out, and family Christmases are being cancelled. It means our already miserable GDP performances will take a hit through workers being off sick and people not going out.

‘So few of us outside the high-risk categories bothered to take the necessary precautions that schools are closing, workplaces are thinning out, and family Christmases are being cancelled’ (Getty)

What’s even more depressing is that so soon after the Covid pandemic, we seem to have forgotten the protocols to get through any spike in an airborne respiratory virus, which is what the flu is – and, just like the coronavirus, flu can put you in hospital and, if you’re a bit vulnerable, finish you off. Remember when we thought (rightly) that the Covid vaccine would help protect us and return life to normal? Most people – including some who today practise the antivaxxer faith – couldn’t wait to get down to the nearest community centre to get a jab.

Yet now we’re so complacent that many of us don’t bother with our (admittedly extortionate) Covid boosters, preferring to delude ourselves that “Covid is over”, and continue to deceive ourselves that the flu is just a runny nose and a cough. Until, that is, there’s a typically British last-minute panic when it’s pretty much too late, just like our now well-documented tardy response to Covid back in 2020. This is the worst side of the “Dunkirk spirit” at work: turning a self-inflicted episode of disaster into a heroic tale.

It is on display in our hospitals once again. I notice that the BBC spent some time filming at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, which has the busiest emergency department in England, and we saw brilliant NHS staff triaging and managing the huge wave of sickness in their usual calm, effective manner. Yet in a way, it was also like seeing those scenes from the early days of the Covid outbreak in northern Italy, the wards overcrowded and the clinicians not wearing proper PPE. We should not, I presume, have a shortage of proper masks, gowns and gloves as we did when Covid hit, so why are the doctors, nurses and ambulance crews not wearing them? Have we forgotten how weakened the NHS was when its staff couldn’t go to work because they too were sick and infectious?

I have an idea. Why don’t we revive the very simple and effective public health messaging of 2020? “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives” was an excellent, clear slogan. It is what everyone should do if they’ve got the flu, or Covid, or the vomiting bug and the like. We should get Chris Whitty back to do a press conference. At the moment, we have some very muddled messaging about what to do if we are sick, and, as we saw during Covid, the British do not respond well to ambiguity and nuance in the guidance. We crave clarity.

Instead, Downing Street tells us that wearing a mask to prevent the spread of respiratory illness is “something people can consider” and that we should exercise “common sense”. Even worse, the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch says, absurdly, she is “still traumatised” by wearing face coverings during Covid, and objects to them as a “barrier to social interaction” – which is true, but not as traumatising a barrier as sneezing on an elderly relative and putting them in intensive care. If Granny is a vaccine refusenik, and you’ve got the flu, then don’t invite her round for Christmas dinner. It’s the wiser, kinder thing to do.

Anyway: Have a healthy, happy Christmas, and please get yourself jabbed. Now.