The government’s roadmap to end England’s third lockdown, Covid-19 Response – Spring 2021, is a recipe for future disaster. Despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s repeated declarations that it represents a cautious approach to lifting the existing restrictions, and that further steps would be guided by data and not by dates, it is a desperate gamble to reopen the economy and its success is dependent on the hope that the country can vaccinate its way out of the pandemic. The result, even on the most optimistic scenarios, will be thousands more deaths in the months to come, and tens of thousands of people of all ages suffering the little-acknowledged debilitating effects of Long Covid. In reality, caution is anyway being thrown to the winds in the demand that all primary and secondary school students will return to school on 8 March, a move endorsed by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.
The roadmap says nothing about keeping the reproduction number R below 1 to prevent an exponential rise in coronavirus infections. It admits that vaccination is the government’s sole strategy for managing the pandemic in the future. There is no plan whatsoever to reduce transmission to zero. Quite the opposite: Johnson claimed ‘There is therefore no credible route to a zero-Covid Britain or indeed a zero Covid world. We cannot persist indefinitely with restrictions that debilitate our economy.’ The examples of countries such as Cuba, New Zealand, Australia and China show that a strategy of virus suppression is not only viable but essential to minimising the effects of the virus on humanity as a whole. Yet with the explicit support of the Labour Party, the ruling class is once again putting profit before public health. The consequences of a fourth wave will be disastrous for working class people, as it will provide ideal conditions for the emergence of deadly vaccine-dodging ‘escape variants’ of the virus.
Roadmap for chancers
The phased unlocking begins on 8 March when all schools reopen for face-to-face teaching. Outdoor sports and the rule of six come in on 29 March. Pubs and shops will reopen ‘no earlier than’ 12 April, and hospitality venues from 17 May. All legally enforceable social contact restrictions will end ‘no earlier than’ 21 June 2021, as nightclubs reopen. Although there will be five weeks between each phase to enable analysis of infection data, Johnson claimed that: ‘we cannot escape the fact that lifting lockdown will result in more cases, more hospitalisations and, sadly, more deaths. And this will happen whenever lockdown is lifted, whether that is now or in six or nine months.’
Johnson set out ‘four tests’ that would have to be met before moving to the next phase, notably the ‘successful deployment’ and effectiveness of vaccines in reducing hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19; the prevention of ‘unsustainable pressure’ on the NHS, and the emergence of any new variants of concern. It is claimed that this unlocking will be ‘driven by the data not the dates’, so why are there dates in the roadmap in the first place? There will be constant pressure from the business class represented by the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Tory MPs to rush through these phases with no pauses, for economic reasons. This is implicitly admitted by the claim that this roadmap is an ‘irreversible road to freedom’.
SAGE advice
The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) presented a report on 7 February 2021 summarising modelling studies by Imperial College London and Warwick University. This shows the consequences of four possible scenarios for easing restrictions in England. All four scenarios, modelled on different speeds of easing restrictions, lead to a ‘substantial resurgence in hospital admissions and deaths’ and the report concludes ‘it would be inadvisable to tie changes in policy to dates instead of data.’
SAGE advises ‘a careful evaluation of data before any further unlocking was allowed. Several weeks between steps are required to determine if that change has significantly increased transmission.’ The models assume four million doses of vaccine administered per week (as opposed to the current three million a week) from 22 March, an 85% coverage with two doses of all over 50s (and 95% of over 80s), and high public adherence to social distancing and mask wearing from the end of lockdown. Even the most optimistic scenario, where primary schools open on 8 March and secondary schools on 5 April, and restrictions end 5 July instead, predicts a fourth wave in September 2021 to January 2022 resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. If all restrictions were lifted by 21 April as the CRG demanded, 62,000-107,000 people in England would die. The scenario that most closely resembled the government’s roadmap estimated that a further 150,000-280,000 people would be hospitalised, and 32,200-54,800 people would die between February and the end of June 2021. All these deaths are preventable. The government has shown it is prepared to sacrifice these lives for the economy.
SAGE has also advised that reopening schools would lead to a 10-50% increase in the R number, and studies, including one from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, show that opening all schools without additional mitigation measures such as full mask-wearing, social distancing, and ventilation/air filters, raises the R number from the current 0.8 to 1.0-1.5; and opening primary or secondary schools alone increases R to 0.9-1.2. These studies do not take into account the new, more transmissible and deadlier ‘Kent variant’ B117 now dominant in the UK. SAGE advised on 4 February 2021 that ‘relaxation of measures over six or nine months results in much smaller subsequent epidemic waves than relaxing measures over three months…[which could] lead to hospital occupancy higher than the January peak.’ This has been ignored as has Independent Sage’s ‘A sustainable suppression strategy’ report of 19 February 2021.
Vaccination – an inadequate strategy
Johnson’s roadmap depends completely on the rapid rollout of vaccination and extremely high rates of take-up among all sections of the population. But vaccines are never 100% effective; they do not provide perfect protection against transmission, infection or illness. Vaccine efficacy shown in clinical trials is always higher than vaccine effectiveness in real world use, and not everyone is, or can be, or wants to be vaccinated. Hence even if all adults in the UK (79% of the population) were vaccinated with an 84% effective vaccine, only 66% of the population would be protected against severe disease.
Further, the UK, US and EU prioritisation of their economies have allowed the emergence of new highly virulent variants of coronavirus, leading to new surges in infections. In Britain since the emergence of the more transmissible B117 variant, B117 has independently mutated further producing a ‘Bristol variant’ of concern ‘B117 with E484K’. Others have also emerged: a ‘Liverpool variant’ ‘A.23.1 with E484K’, and variant B.1.525 both under investigation. The E484K mutation found in the South African variant B.1.351, is an escape mutation enabling the virus to escape the vaccines. Hence the new Novovax vaccine had an 89% efficacy in the UK clinical trial, but only 49% efficacy in South Africa. In addition, studies are showing that allowing vaccinated vulnerable and unvaccinated ‘mixer’ populations to socially mix, during periods of high virus transmission, puts the highest pressure on the virus to produce an escape mutant – a very high-risk strategy, and exactly what the UK is doing (Julia Gog, University of Cambridge, 23 Feb 2021). Thus the Zionist state of Israel is now seeing a rise in cases especially in younger people despite high levels of vaccination. Vaccination rates in the UK, as well as the risk of catching Covid-19, are also stratified according to race and levels of deprivation, meaning that already entrenched inequalities will make Covid-19 a disease of the poor and ethnic minorities.
Hidden from sight: Long Covid
Criminally, the government’s plans fail to acknowledge the risks of spreading the numbers of people who experience the little-understood syndrome of Long Covid. Covid itself is not flu, or just a respiratory disease. It is a multi-system syndrome which can also take the form of neurological disorders, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease. According to an Office for National Statistics report in December 2020, 10% of people of every age, including children, who had tested positive were still reporting symptoms such as fatigue, headaches, cough, muscle pain, loss of taste/smell 12 weeks after infection. They included people who had suffered minimal or no symptoms initially; a later study published in February 2021 estimated that the number of people experiencing symptoms which continued after five weeks in December 2020 was 301,000. The long-term impact of this syndrome on patient health is of course unknown at this point. It has equal prevalence across all age ranges: the requirement for all children to return to school on 8 March without adequate preventative measures such as mandatory masking or testing, or proper class room ventilation, could result in hundreds of thousands of Long Covid cases among young people.
It is completely wrong to keep comparing Covid-19 to the flu as Chris Whitty, Boris Johnson and CRG keep doing. Clinical epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani describes a situation where ‘there is media bias around discussing an elimination strategy – which is considered “unrealistic” or not possible in the UK – where the rhetoric from government and its advisers has been “acceptable deaths” or “living with it”’, and has stressed the dangers of large numbers of Long Covid cases as a consequence of the government’s approach to reopening schools. However, Johnson is desperate to restore profitable production given the state of the British economy, and he will find no meaningful opposition from Labour on this score. For socialists and the working class, there is no alternative to virus elimination. We demand a Zero Covid maximum suppression strategy now.
Charles Chinweizu
