One of the few positives of the year-long global fight against Covid-19 is that it is no longer an unknown enemy. Until the vaccines began to arrive, information was our main weapon against the virus. We all became familiar with R numbers and growth curves. Previous lockdowns and the introduction of tiers, with different levels of restrictions on our lives, gave us a chance to see in real time what was relatively effective in limiting numbers, and what was not.
One thing we thought we’d learned is that full national lockdown, while psychologically and economically damaging, was an effective way of curbing, then reducing, levels of infection. Then came this week’s grim headlines about Britain’s “record number of daily Covid-19 deaths”. Official data shows the number of Covid-19 patients in hospital and on ventilators remains far higher than during the April peak and remains on an upward trajectory.
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