{"id":1859,"date":"2022-02-23T15:55:29","date_gmt":"2022-02-23T15:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=1859"},"modified":"2022-02-23T15:55:29","modified_gmt":"2022-02-23T15:55:29","slug":"covid-lifting-the-remaining-measures-is-a-dangerous-and-senseless-move-expert-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2022\/02\/23\/covid-lifting-the-remaining-measures-is-a-dangerous-and-senseless-move-expert-view\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID: Lifting the remaining measures is a dangerous and senseless move \u2013 expert view"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kit Yates<\/a> is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath.<\/em><\/p>\n

There cannot be many people who wouldn\u2019t want to return to the carefree ways of 2019. To be free from the concern that you might unknowingly spread a deadly disease to a loved one, a friend or the person next to you on the bus.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m afraid I have bad news for you, though. Our pre-pandemic world is gone, and it\u2019s never coming back. We have a new disease in our midst. Despite the frequent comparisons, and contrary to what some would have you believe,\u00a0COVID is not flu<\/a>. It is both more transmissible and more severe.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t hope to behave exactly as we did before COVID and expect the consequences to be the same. The outcome of going \u201cback to normal\u201d is that millions of people will catch COVID each year; businesses and schools will face regular disruption; and we will have a population that is generally less healthy than before the pandemic. This is distinctly not what normal life used to be like.<\/p>\n

This is why the Westminster government\u2019s actions to remove<\/a>\u00a0free testing,\u00a0scrap<\/a>\u00a0self-isolation for people with COVID and\u00a0do away with<\/a>\u00a0the UK\u2019s genuinely world-leading COVID surveillance systems are of such concern.<\/p>\n

Mathematician John Edmunds, who sits on the government\u2019s scientific advisory panel, Sage, confirmed last week that removing the legal requirement for self-isolation\u00a0had not been discussed<\/a>\u00a0within the advisory group. Edmunds warned that axing this fundamental COVID-suppressing measure would be dangerous.<\/p>\n

If the moves haven\u2019t come from the government\u2019s own scientists, then where have they come from? These decisions appear to be politically motivated rather than guided by science and public health interests \u2013 moves designed to win favour with the public by restoring \u201cfreedoms\u201d and to distract from the ongoing partygate scandal<\/a>\u00a0engulfing Number 10.<\/p>\n

But on this, it seems that the government may have misread the room. A\u00a0recent YouGov poll<\/a>\u00a0asked: \u201cDo you think people should or should not be legally required to self-isolate if they test positive for COVID-19?\u201d Only 17% of those polled said they thought people shouldn\u2019t legally have to isolate.<\/p>\n

Self-isolation is one of the most effective measures we have to limit COVID\u2019s spread. Only those who actually have the disease are asked to isolate, making it one of the least restrictive disease-control measures on society as a whole.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not as if isolation for infectious diseases is without precedent. We\u00a0exclude children from school<\/a>\u00a0when they have chickenpox, norovirus and\u00a0E. coli<\/em>\u00a0among other infectious diseases. For vomiting and diarrhoea, you shouldn\u2019t go in to work until 48 hours after the last episode. Despite relatively few people dying from vomiting and diarrhoea, it\u2019s generally considered desirable to try to prevent the spread of a transmissible illness.<\/p>\n

Many infected with COVID will be too ill to work even now the legal requirement to self-isolate is removed. Relaxing this requirement will not instantly solve the current COVID-related staffing crises<\/a>\u00a0many sectors are experiencing. Encouraging people to work while infectious will only serve to increase transmission and may lead to a\u00a0spike in infections<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The irony in all this is that, with the removal of free COVID testing and the dismantlement<\/a>\u00a0of the UK\u2019s gold-standard infection survey, we may not even know if such a spike materialises. No government interested in protecting the health of its people can seriously believe it\u2019s better to be less informed when it comes to tackling an infectious disease.<\/p>\n

While some will welcome the removal of COVID monitoring as marking the pandemic\u2019s end, what it really signifies is an end to caring about the people who will become infected. For a significant minority \u2013 the clinically vulnerable, elderly and children (the majority of whom are unvaccinated) \u2013 this will make life\u00a0much more uncomfortable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For these people, and many more besides, the clamour to \u201clive with COVID\u201d seems misplaced. We don\u2019t reach a level of road traffic fatalities below which we decide to remove seatbelts, increase speed limits or raise the legal blood alcohol limit. Instead we continuously try to reduce traffic accidents with measures that don\u2019t impinge too heavily on people\u2019s lives. We should be trying to do the same with COVID. There may come a point when it\u2019s appropriate to remove the remaining measures, but the scientific consensus is that we\u2019re not there yet.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, there are things we can do to restore as much of our pre-pandemic life as possible while minimising the disruption and ill health caused by COVID. Improving air quality through ventilation and filtration can dramatically reduce the risk of transmission in indoor settings. Getting the whole world vaccinated will not only protect people from severe illness but will\u00a0reduce the potential<\/a>\u00a0for new variants to emerge. Improved sick-pay policies will help reduce\u00a0presenteeism<\/a>\u00a0and mean people don\u2019t have to choose between infecting colleagues or potentially losing their job.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, we need a plan for how we will act to limit the impact of another wave \u2013 measures we can put in place rapidly to avoid the lockdowns that characterise the failure of public health measures. At a time when the UK is looking to scale down its COVID-surveillance capacity, we should be doing the opposite: ensuring we have the earliest possible warnings about new variants and indeed other emerging diseases.<\/p>\n

If we want to talk about \u201clearning to live with COVID\u201d, then we have to demonstrate that we have learned from our experiences over the last two years. We should be striving to make improvements that will reduce the impact of COVID for all. If we close our eyes and pretend that nothing has changed \u2013 hoping for the things to return to how they were \u2013 then we will inevitably find ourselves in a new normal that is significantly worse than the old.<\/p>\n

This blog was originally posted via The Conversation on 18 February 2022<\/a>. All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath. There cannot be many people who wouldn\u2019t want to return to the carefree ways of 2019. To be free from the concern that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1186,"featured_media":1860,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[137,109,116,118,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-covid-19","category-data-politics-and-policy","category-evidence-and-policymaking","category-health","category-uk-politics"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2022\/02\/COVID-self-test.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}