Richard Dobbs

As feared, Covid-19 is not going quietly. The arrival of the Omicron strain in Britain - with cases already identified in  Chelmsford and in Nottingham - is clearly not the news we wanted as we prepare for the Christmas holidays. The Prime Minister will hold a press conference later today, likely to mark a distinct change in tone. For a while, it was possible to feel that our vaccine programme, supported by better treatments, mass testing and non-pharmaceutical interventions had started to defeat the virus. So, we started to turn our focus to other activities such as levelling up, addressing the NHS waiting lists, climate change, violence against women and girls, and bickering with the French.

I am considering cancelling my second Covid-19 vaccination. I received my first jab in March, and at the time I happily booked the date for the second one in June, confident that by then we would be continuing to see a fall in infections. But last week the story changed. The B.1.617.2 variant, first identified in India, could, according to Sage minutes, be 50 per cent more transmissible than the variant identified in Kent. Early numbers suggest we could be at the start of an exponential growth in infections. The lesson of the past year is that if you wait to act until you’re certain of the data, you’re too late in changing your plans. Here, therefore, are four areas to consider now.

As Britain celebrates its vaccination success, we’re in danger of missing something important. A great many people have been offered the vaccine, but have turned it down — and we hear very little about them. No. 10 briefings trumpet the numbers vaccinated in the past 24 hours but are silent on the numbers who have refused. This matters, because if vaccine passports are on their way, granting access to pubs and so on, the unvaccinated will be excluded. More importantly, the unvaccinated will be vulnerable to the virus as we unlock. We need to know more about them. Dig deep enough and rough figures are there. Let’s look at the over-seventies in England.

The Spanish flu pandemic a century ago resulted in around 50 million deaths worldwide. Its second wave was over ten times more deadly than its first. History is repeating, with the global death toll from Covid-19 this second winter already three times that of the first. In the UK, the number of deaths in this second wave is close to double the number we suffered in the first wave. The death toll in the first wave, while tragic, is somewhat understandable. A deadly pandemic came out of the blue, and we had to work out the best way of responding. But we cannot use this excuse to explain the higher death toll in our second wave, as we have had months to prepare this time.

In all the excitement about the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, it was easy to miss news of the other great hope for getting our lives back to some form of normal. Vaccines are not expected to have much impact for most of us this winter and it will be several years before they suppress Covid-19 globally. For now, a mass testing programme — not any jab — is probably the best chance of putting Covid back in its box. It has been piloted this week in Liverpool and it might be coming to us all in the near future. No one’s exactly sure yet how it will work, but you could start by imagining a world in which every other morning we all self-administer a rapid saliva test at home, with the results available within ten minutes.

It’s hard to deny that Boris Johnson’s government has so far had a ‘bad war’ against the pandemic. Our death toll is high compared with other countries and our economy is in worse shape. We face rising cases, increased hospital admissions and more restrictions. It’s all so bleak; yet that is why now is precisely the moment for Boris to imitate his great hero, Winston Churchill. In the coming months, Britain can play as pivotal a role in a global victory against the virus as we did in the second world war. The war analogies only go so far, of course. We are fighting a virus, not an evil ideology. But there are similarities. Like the second world war, Covid has caused UK government debt to exceed GDP.

This morning, Matt Hancock claimed on the Today programme that the government is now working as fast as it can on developing a mass testing programme, which is ‘incredibly important’ if we want to ease coronavirus restrictions. The health secretary is right to finally focus on mass testing.

We are going to hear a lot about Test, Trace and Isolate (TTI) in coming weeks, as we approach autumn and fears of a second wave of Covid-19 grow. Now we have moved away from national lockdown but do not yet have a vaccine, the test-and-trace system is our main bulwark against a resurgence of the disease. But how good a defence is it? A study published in the Lancet Child and Adolescent Health this week suggests there is a huge amount at stake.