It simply isn’t plausible that we could go from being at herd immunity for summer to having a new wave ten times as great this autumn
www.telegraph.co.uk
I want to explain here why that is a preposterous idea, entirely unsupportable by any analysis.
First let’s be clear on the current situation. There are about 800 hospitalisations per day in England. That compares with around 1,600 hospitals and an average of roughly 100 beds per hospital. So at present there is less than one hospitalisation per day per hospital occurring for covid. That did not swamp the NHS this summer. Neither did it come anywhere close to doing so.
And that should be no surprise. Hospitals run with about 20 per cent spare capacity, normally. Although extra demand per day can add up (so it’s not quite as simple as saying that there’s less than one per cent extra demand versus 20 per cent spare capacity), the NHS has shown that it could cope with much higher levels than this. In January 2021, peak hospitalisations av eraged about 3,800 admissions per day – nearly five times as high as at present – and the NHS was not swamped. Furthermore, we know from the experience of other developed countries’ health systems that much higher covid loads than this can be handled. This summer in Florida, for example, the health system coped with around 40 per cent higher hospital admissions, per head of population, than England had at its January peak.
The lockdown last winter was not to avoid 3,800 admissions per day. That was what we had with the lockdown. That lockdown was to buy time for the vaccination programme and to avoid a far higher load of admissions than we experienced. Furthermore, the winter lockdown was not just about hospitalisations. It was also to limit the number of deaths. Even as it was, from November to March, over 70,000 people died of covid in England. By contrast, deaths have ceased to be a major issue since March. Vaccination has provided such excellent protection that between March 8th, when the schools returned, and September 5th, just 6,765 people have died from covid in England. To justify a lockdown this autumn on the basis of hospitalisations alone, with far fewer deaths occurring, we would need a vastly greater level of hospitaliations than was feared had we not had last winter’s lockdown.
So, we would need much more than five times as many hospitalisations, at peak, as we have seen this summer, for there to be any risk of the NHS being swamped or anything close to a justification for another lockdown. But that does not mean we would need five times as many cases – we would need far more than that! This autumn, a much higher proportion (perhaps even most) of the new infections will be school-age children. Children are much less likely to be hospitalised by covid than older adults even if the adults are fully vaccinated and the children are not. So having merely five times are many cases will not come anywhere close meaning five times as many hospitalisations.
To get the level of hospitalisations required to come anywhere near justifying another lockdown – ie much more than five times as many, at peak, as we had this summer – we would need in the order of order ten times as many cases as we had over the summer. And we would need to have that happen even though, over the summer, with no restrictions in place at all, cases in the UK went down in July, rose very slightly in the first half of August, then started falling again in the second half of August, meaning that we are at or about the herd immunity threshold (the level of collective immunity at which the virus cannot accelerate its spread for a sustained period) for summer.
It simply isn’t plausible that we could go from being at herd immunity for summer to having a new wave ten times as great this autumn. The mathematics of epidemics do not allow that for a disease as infectious as the delta variant. Perhaps there are other risks that might lead to new restrictions in future months, such as a new flu pandemic. But there is no longer any possibility that the coronavirus could create such a wave of infections, threatening to swamp the NHS, that it could justify a new lockdown this autumn.
Related Topics
Vaccines
