Why Neil Ferguson’s critics miss the point

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I can understand how gratifying it is to quote Professor Neil Fergusons’ words to him just over a week ago when he told Andrew Marr that it was almost inevitable that daily cases of covid hit 100,000. per day following governments’ latest roadmap step out of containment. “The real question,” he added, “do we manage to double down or even higher?

Almost from the moment he said these words, new Covid infections started to drop. Between Sunday July 18 and Sunday July 25, they went from 48,161 to 29,173. Naturally, that will be fuel for anyone who criticizes model Fergusons for having plunged us into weeks of confinement last spring. Not only does this show her modeling is, to put it mildly, not everything is cracked to be it also indicates that you don’t necessarily need a lockdown to cause a sudden change of direction followed by a sharp decline in covid infections.

Ferguson argues that a week’s delay in implementing the lockdown in March 2020 cost thousands of lives, while modeling by Simon Wood of the University of Edinburgh, for example, has questioned this , suggesting that covid infections could have subsided before the lockdown was called.

Still, something makes me a little uncomfortable promoting Neil Ferguson as a scarecrow or, in fact, celebrating the current drop in new infections. Rather, all of this misses the fact that the raw number of infections doesn’t matter much anymore, now that vaccines have blunted Covid’s ability to cause serious illness and death.

Look at the infection chart and you can see that we’ve just had a big third wave. On the other hand, look at the graphs of hospitalizations and especially of deaths; there is no third wave worthy of the name. This is what vaccination gives us: the ability to tame covid in a disease that, like the seasonal flu, we can easily live with.

Yet the statistics for daily covid infections seem to grab us like nothing else. Where we could have looked at how the FTSE 100 fared today, or we looked at football results, or, every four years, the Olympic medal table, the daily covid numbers have become our One stop shop to judge the health of the nation. We need to wean ourselves off the covid infection numbers because at some point it’s very likely that we will have a fourth wave of infections. This is how epidemics often progress, with several peaks and valleys, with no obvious trigger for a change in direction.

If we are to view the current decline in infections as a moment of great rejoicing, it follows that we must respond to any subsequent increase in infections with fear. It is perfectly possible that the chart of new infections will start to follow higher. again in the next week or two, as the full effects of the relaxed rules on July 19 trickle down to infections. At this point, Professor Ferguson might just be back to chuckle a little at those who taunt him this week.

Yet the reality is, unless the virus evolves into a new, much deadlier form, we don’t have to worry about a fourth wave. The government will no longer need to reimpose restrictions on our daily lives. We will be able to continue as usual, as we do almost every winter in the event of an influenza epidemic, with the government just taking care to ensure the delivery of the vaccination booster shots, if the drop in antibodies in the general population warrants it. As the Chief Medical Officer has said on several occasions, we have to decide as a country what level of Covid deaths we are prepared to accept.

If the answer is 20,000 per year or less, the number of those who succumb to the flu in a bad year, we are almost certainly already at the point where we can live safely with Covid without obsessing over the numbers. daily infections.

So let’s leave Professor Ferguson alone. The limits of her modeling and that of everyone else were clear from the start. The only thing that has changed since spring 2020 is that, thanks to vaccines, we can safely end our obsession with counting new cases of covid.

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