The vital importance of a public health system to protect the public from mass infection during an epidemic or pandemic, ensuring high rates of vaccination, testing and contact tracing, and isolating or quarantining infected people has been evident over the past two years of Covid-19. The recent outbreaks of the viral disease monkeypox and almost 500 cases of fulminant hepatitis of unknown origin in children should remind us of this fact. But the decision of the newly-formed UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to cut 40% of its jobs and suspend routine Covid-19 testing in hospitals shows the contempt which the Tory government holds for such preventative measures.
In March 2022, the government abandoned all protective health measures against Covid-19, launching a social murder policy of ‘living with Covid’. This was predictably followed by a rapid surge in infections in April, huge pressure on the NHS system and a shortage of workers due to the infections. Infected people were no longer required by law to isolate, and could attend work and infect others. The Tories chose uncontrolled transmission, emphasised ‘personal responsibility’ rather than government responsibility, removed all public health measures to protect the public from mass infection, and ended free testing. This deliberate policy, implemented to revive the stagnating British economy, puts at risk 25% of the population who are classed as vulnerable, and those who remain unvaccinated.
According to estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), one in 13 people in the UK had Covid-19 in the week ending 26 March, a record 4.9 million people or 7.3% of the population. This fell to around 1.27 million people in the week to 13 May, 2% of the population, which is still a high level of infection. 1.8 million people in the UK are now ‘living with’ Long Covid. Almost 200,000 people have joined those that are not working or job-seeking because of long-term ill health, mainly due to Long Covid. Since ‘Freedom Day’ on 19 July 2021, over 48,000 people have died from Covid-19, almost 28,000 of them so far in 2022. A Leicester University study shows that 71% of those hospitalised with Covid-19 had not fully recovered a year later, reporting symptoms of fatigue, muscle pain, poor sleep and breathlessness. There have been a total of about 750,000 Covid-19 inpatients.
Covid-19, the most dangerous pathogen
In 2020 and 2021 Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in England and Wales and is the third leading cause so far in 2022. In addition to the current mortality burden of approximately 1,000 deaths per week in the UK, it is becoming clear that Covid-19 is one of the most dangerous pathogens to befall humanity with studies showing:
- Excess mortality of approximately 14.9 million deaths between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 according to a 5 May estimate by the World Health Organisation (WHO). This number is almost three times the reported official death toll.
- A Lancet study published 10 March which separately estimated the Covid-19 pandemic excess mortality at 18.2 million people worldwide, between 1 January 2020, and 31 December 2021.
- A study by Patrick Heuveline published in Population and Development Review on 12 March showed that ‘global life expectancy appears to have declined by 0.92 years between 2019 and 2020 and by another 0.72 years between 2020 and 2021’. This unprecedented two-year fall in life expectancy is ‘the first decline in global life expectancy since 1950’ and comparable to the rare declines seen in Rwanda in the period before and after the 1994 genocide.
Life expectancy is a marker of human progress, and in the last two years, humanity has gone backwards as the capitalists allowed the virus to run rampant and mutate into a form that is essentially vaccine evasive, in order to protect their profits.
Omicron wave
The Omicron (BA.1) variant of coronavirus was first detected in November 2021, and although the overall risk of severe outcomes from an Omicron infection was lower than it was for the Delta variant, it has since led to higher death rates than during the Delta wave, because it is so transmissible and therefore infects higher raw numbers of people. In the UK, between August and October 2021, when the more severe Delta variant was dominant, the death rate was 16 per 100,000 people. Between November 2021 and January 2022, when Omicron BA.1 dominated, the death rate rose to 22 per 100,000. According to the US Centres for Disease Control, the US Omicron death toll (peaking at a seven-day average of 2,400 daily by 9 February 2022) surpassed the highest seven-day average of the Delta variant (2,068 deaths per day in September 2021).
Recent studies show that with the supposedly ‘mild’ Omicron variants, the risk of severe outcomes is ‘not much lower if at all’ than the original ancestral strain. The outbreak in Hong Kong, dominated by the BA.2.2 Omicron variant, has led to very high levels of fatality especially amongst the unvaccinated. The overall case fatality rate in its fifth wave which peaked in March 2022 was 0.72% by 7 April, but 3.2% for the unvaccinated. This was comparable to the rate in Wuhan in April 2020 (4.5%) when there was no vaccine available. The death rate of infected people over 80 who have not been vaccinated in Hong Kong exceeds 15%.
Hospitalisation rates in England among children under 10 did not significantly differ between Omicron and Delta, and Omicron led to a rise in hospital admissions of very young children under one year. Another US study published in JAMA Paediatrics in April 2022 showed that Omicron in children caused three times as many hospitalisations for respiratory infections compared with prior variants, because Omicron replicates more efficiently in the upper airways rather than in the lungs.
Three Omicron subvariants have now been designated as variants of concern (BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5) by both the UKHSA and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. BA.1 was 5.4 times more likely to re-infect than Delta, and has now been overtaken by BA.2 which is 30-50% more infectious than BA.1. The basic reproduction number (R0) for BA.1 is about 8.2 while the R0 for BA.2 is about 12. BA.2 (like BA.1) is better able to evade the antibodies induced by vaccination or a previous infection, while maintaining good transmissibility.
Boosters the only strategy
Two doses of a Covid vaccine only provide 13% protection against symptomatic disease with BA.2 (9% for BA.1), meaning a third (booster) dose is vital. Population-wide, the effectiveness against infection of two doses wanes after five months from over 90% down to 44% (AstraZeneca vaccine) or 63% (Moderna), but rises to over 90% with a third dose. The effectiveness of the third dose also wanes from 90% protection against hospitalisation to 66% after four months.
The British government has been offering a fourth dose since March 2022 but only to over-75s, care home residents, and people over 12 with a weakened immune system. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation now recommends a fifth dose in the autumn, for over-65s, care home residents and staff, frontline health and social care workers, and over 16s in vulnerable groups. Yet only 60% of the UK population has even had a third dose, less than 50% of the under-40s while only 67% of over-75s have had the fourth dose by 11 May. About 20%, mainly children, remain completely unvaccinated. In England only 8% of 5-11-year-olds, 37% of 12-15-year-olds and 55% of 16-17-year-olds had had a second dose by 18 May 2022.
This is a consequence of the mixed messaging and anti-vaxxer sentiment fuelled by the government’s narrative that children are unaffected, Omicron is a ‘mild’ disease, and the pandemic is really ‘over’. The capitalist media now invariably refers to the pandemic in the past tense if at all. It claims the public is ‘pandemic weary’ even when polls show the majority of people still want mandatory masking, vaccination and isolation of infected people. We are weary of capitalism prioritising profits over public health, and we are not fatigued by public health measures (pejoratively and falsely termed ‘restrictions’) to tackle the pandemic once and for all.
Charles Chinweizu
