Chancellor says future Covid measures should only apply to the most vulnerable

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A government adviser said future anti-Covid measures should only apply to the most vulnerable.

At the start of the pandemic last year, the elderly and people with chronic illnesses were asked to protect at home as the country went into lockdown.

Professor Andrew Hayward, from the Institute of Epidemiology and Healthcare at University College London and a member of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats (Nervtag) advisory group, suggested that different bases could return for people in different categories.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think in general when we go into some kind of epidemic rather than a pandemic situation, the potential damage the virus can do at a population level is much less.

“You can’t really justify such broad population control measures, and we tend to target control measures more at the most vulnerable.

“And so I think not only in testing, but in all forms of control, as we move into a situation where we come to live with this virus forever, we target measures for the most vulnerable rather than have more disruptive measures.”

Germany will scrap free testing for asymptomatic people from 11 October, and Professor Hayward believes the UK could follow suit.

On Tuesday, Professor Andrew Pollard, chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) and the European Medicines Agency’s scientific advisory group, said herd immunity would not be possible due to the delta variant.

Professor Hayward added that we still need to know what “living with Covid” means and said that only if a vaccine emerges that protects 95 per cent of severe diseases as well as infections, will we have a chance to eradicate it.”

“I think it’s a very remote possibility,” he said, “and we need to get used to the concept that this is going to become what we call an endemic disease, not a pandemic disease, so it’s a disease that’s with us all the time, probably seasonally transmitted, like influenza, where we see endemic winter diseases.”

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