Battle against Covid-19 remains finely balanced

With all the heady talk of opening up, new freedoms and crowds attending matches, you’d be forgiven for thinking the pandemic was over.

Our ability to turn the ship around 180 degrees so quickly is impressive; after months of harsh lockdown and even calls for more restrictions, the air is now thick with complaints about the many deprivations we are enduring.

Even politicians who were flag-carriers for a “zero-Covid” policy – and all that would imply – are now to the fore in seeking the early removal of emergency powers the Government might still need as Covid continues to circulate. Lobby groups whose businesses have been closed for the best part of a year are threatening to sue over a week’s delay in reopening.

It’s almost as if last Christmas hadn’t happened. And yet, in epidemiological terms, exactly the same scenario is unfolding. An existing strain of Covid-19 is being supplanted by a new variant arriving from Britain that is even more transmissible and more resistant to vaccines, at a time when society is being opened up.

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Last January, thousands died as the B.117 variant from the UK swamped the country and hospitals were overwhelmed. The variant went from zero to dominant in little over a month. The spike in cases far exceeded anything seen in the first wave last year.

Immediate threat

Today, the immediate threat comes from the so-called Indian variant. Almost 5,600 cases of the variant have been sequenced in the UK, and 98 in Ireland. That doesn't sound like much, but B.117 started small too. Only Germany has more Indian variant cases than Ireland among EU states. And because it takes several weeks to get the results of sequencing, our figures are out of date. In the UK, cases and hospital admissions are up 25 per cent, by the latest figures.

Given the ease of travel between the Republic and Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, it is only a matter of time before the Indian variant becomes dominant here. It may yet turn out to be less of a threat than some have predicted, but for now there is every reason to minimise importing cases and to effectively track and trace known infections.

That is why the Government has delayed reopening the common travel area and is urging travellers from Britain to avail of free Covid-19 tests. France has just re-imposed quarantine restrictions on the UK and Germany did so a week ago.

The big difference between now and last winter is vaccination. Getting fully vaccinated protects you against serious illness from Covid-19, hugely reduces the chance of infection and also makes it less likely that you might infect others.

But with less than half of adults having received one dose and about 15 per cent per cent being fully vaccinated, the battle between the protective effect of immunisation and the threat posed by an emerging, highly infectious new variant remains finely balanced.

The most vulnerable groups are protected through at least part vaccination, so public health officials are reassured that more cases won’t translate into the same ratio of hospitalisations as before.

There will be more cases, but milder ones among younger, unvaccinated people. Vaccination rates have to be maintained and even accelerated in order to limit the size of a future surge in cases.

Behind schedule

In that context, the latest problems with vaccine supply are a cause for concern. The vaccine rollout is already a few weeks behind schedule and there is no prospect of the target of giving 82 per cent of adults at least one dose by the end of June being achieved. By then, it is likely about 40 per cent will be fully vaccinated, not the 55 per cent targeted.

Though comprehensive figures are not available due to the cyberattack, Ireland's vaccine rollout seems to be falling behind the EU average. An undersupply of up to half a million Johnson&Johnson doses will slow things down even further.

One way to compensate for the effects of easing restrictions would have been to limit the beneficiaries to people who are fully vaccinated, but the Government has opted not to go down this route.

Ultimately, vaccines work, and the way out of the pandemic is through immunising as many people as quickly as possible. That remains work in progress.