Vaccines were supposed to get life back to normal – so why are scientists warning of lockdowns until 2026?
IT is nearly a year since Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old grandmother in hospital in Coventry, became the first person in the world to receive a Covid vaccination outside of a clinical trial.
Photographs and footage of the landmark moment on December 8 2020 were shared by media outlets worldwide in what hailed as the “start of the fightback” against the pandemic.
READ MORE: Why the Delta variant has left herd immunity through vaccines alone mathematically impossible
The outlook for the year ahead looked much brighter with Professor Sir John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, famously predicting “with some confidence” on BBC Radio Four that life would return to normal by Spring 2021.
And yet much of Europe now finds itself engulfed by spiralling Covid cases and fresh restrictions.
The UK has maintained a fairly high case rate since spiking in July, while cases in Europe remained much lower
Austria has gone from locking down the unvaccinated only to a nationwide ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown for 20 days from Monday.
In Germany, 12 of the country’s 16 states with the highest hospitalisation rates will limit public spaces such as restaurants, theatres, and football matches to the “vaccinated or recovered” only after warnings that the country faced a “really terrible Christmas” unless urgent measures were taken.
Margaret Keenan receiving her first Covid jag on December 8, 2020
The Netherlands has adopted a ‘lockdown-lite’, with bars, cafes and restaurants required to close at 8pm; Denmark has reintroduced its coronapas scheme; and both Slovakia and the Czech Republic are limiting entry to restaurants and other public spaces to the ‘vaccinated or recovered’.
Europe is now the epicentre of the pandemic once again – not only in terms of cases, but deaths.
According to the World Health Organisation, Europe was the only region globally where Covid deaths increased last week.
This is probably not the ‘new normal’ most people anticipated when the vaccine rollout began. But that was before the Alpha and Delta variants came along to spoil the party.
READ MORE: Covid hospital admissions falling rapidly in patients over 75
According to reports this week, UK Government does not expect the pandemic to be “over” for at least another year based on three working scenarios – optimistic, middle, and pessimistic – drawn up by scientific modellers.
Under the optimistic “steady state” scenario the virus will transition to become an endemic infection by 2023 thanks to a combination of antiviral treatments, vaccinations – including boosters – and testing, with no problematic new strains emerging.
Here, the virus is in retreat throughout 2022, the economy rebounds to pre-pandemic levels, and by next winter Covid has attenuated into a routine infectious disease which no longer piles pressure on the NHS through surges in deaths and admissions.
The worst-case scenario – considered highly unlikely, however – envisions lockdowns required off and on until 2026 as dangerous new variants emerge causing existing Covid treatments to fail and eroding the vaccines’ effectiveness not only against infection – as occurred with Delta – but also serious illness and death.
READ MORE: The strange case of Pfizer CEO’s ‘fraud arrest’ and the media ‘news blackout’
The central scenario – considered the most likely – predicts that Covid will not become endemic (meaning it is constantly present in the population at a fairly low baseline level with each infected person only passing it on to one other due to high levels of natural and vaccine-induced population immunity) until some time between 2023 and 2024.
In the meantime, it will continue to put pressure on the NHS in winter, when some mitigations – such as facemasks, Covid passes and working-from-home – may be required, but without a need to reimpose lockdowns.
Essentially, it forecasts two or three more years of life as it is now.
The UK is ahead of Europe on boosters and was also exposed to the Delta variant earlier than Europe
The pressing question right now is whether the UK is behind, or ahead, of the curve in terms of Europe’s Covid surge.
Unlike Austria, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands – whose case rates were comparatively low from August until a mid-October surge – the UK experienced a spike in July after which cases fluctuated at a fairly high but steady level.
In Scotland there are signs that infections are levelling off again after a spike linked to schools returning after the October break, with cases in England – where half-term was later – only starting to increase now.
READ MORE: Does Portugal’s experience tell us it’s time to start vaccinating five-year-olds?
It is possible that the UK is benefitting now from having been exposed to the Delta wave much earlier than than the continent (topping up vaccine protection with natural immunity), as well as from earlier vaccine rollouts which mean that boosters have now been administered to over 20% of the UK population compared to 10% in Austria or 5% in Germany.
This may also go some way to explaining why infection rates in Denmark and the Netherlands – despite 76% and 73% of their populations having had two vaccine doses, compared to 67.5% of people in the UK – are battling record infection rates.
The Dutch government only approved boosters for over-60s on November 2, and Denmark – which has had consistently low Covid rates since December 2020, and thus comparatively little Delta circulation – held back on boosters until mid-October.
The picture is not universal in Europe, however.
In Portugal, Spain, Italy and France cases are climbing but remain well below the levels of neighbouring countries – including the UK.
France and Italy have had Europe’s strictest Covid passport schemes in place since the summer, covering a wide range of venues as well as some public transport and workplaces. Portugal and Spain meanwhile have Europe’s highest vaccination rates
Portugal and Spain may be buffered by having the highest vaccine coverage in Europe (88% and 80% respectively), while France and Italy have coupled good vaccine uptakes (69% and 73% respectively, against 72% in Scotland) with the strictest Covid passport regimes in Europe.
Vaccination is still our strongest weapon against Covid, but Delta shifted the goalposts.
For now, we have to weigh up how to retain as much of our hard-won normality as possible, safely.
Covid passports – whether by spurring uptake or restricting access to crowded public spaces to the fully vaccinated, Covid negative, or both – have kept economies from Israel to Italy open.
It may not be the ‘normal’ we expected a year ago, but with nine out of 10 Scots already fully vaccinated it may be a small price to pay for now.
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