We risk going over a cliff chasing second wave red herrings

In the surreal new non-reality of After Corona, this was the week the second wave struck. The virus ripped through food processing plants in Leicester, prompting a chaotic local lockdown. It battered the shores of California, as scientists warned new cases nationwide could reach 100,000 a day. As infections rose, even exemplary countries like South Korea struggled to tread water. To all this, the WHO soundtrack rumbled thunder: “the worst is yet to come.”

Meanwhile, in the empirical world, neglected facts collected on the margins like flotsam. Case spikes have coincided with increased testing. It is no great surprise that, after three months of pandemonium north of the equator, hotspots from Texas to Brazil, are now breaking out in or near the Southern hemisphere, in parallels with the pattern of seasonal flu.

It also turns out Covid-19’s rise and decline may be even more predictable: Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt’s long-awaited paper pre-published this week finds that coronavirus grows according to the Gompertz curve in mathematics – spreading much slower than implied in some models, and certainly not exponentially, even in the very first days.

Sadly, even simpler breakthroughs than this are lost on hysterical Britain. Second wave fear was so intense this week that nobody noticed the end of the first one. On Tuesday, while the media speculated over whether Walsall or Wandsworth might be next for local lockdown, ONS data revealed weekly deaths have dropped to below average for the first time since the crisis hit. Oxford University’s Prof Carl Heneghan declared “we are now back to normal”; an observation that is, regrettably, as fantastical as it is accurate.

Especially given the zeal with which No 10 is propagating the idea of a second wave in Leicester. The Government has been murky with what it knows and still refuses to confirm whether the infections spike in the East Midlands town merely reflects an increase in testing. In contrast, hospital and death figures, rather than running out of control, appear to show a downwards trend.

The number of registered Covid-related deaths in Leicester dropped from 39 in the week ending April 10 to nine in the week ending June 19, the last week for which full data is available. There does not appear to have been an uptick in recent days, with seven new deaths announced by the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust since last Wednesday. That may not be the whole picture, but it hardly speaks of a city overrun.

Of far greater concern ought to be the mysteriously high death toll in the southern estuary and the North. Leicester may account for 10 per cent of all cases – as Matt Hancock so eagerly stresses – but for the week ending June 19, the Thames Valley accounted for 10 per cent of all deaths. Manchester and Liverpool combined also made up a fifth of the weekly toll. The whiff of a care-homes scandal radiates from these two forgotten regions.

After all, Thames estuary hotspot Kent and Medway has suffered the third highest care homes fatalities in the country. Meanwhile, all of the deaths in Chadderton, which has the highest toll in Greater Manchester, were in just one elderly institution. How fortunate for our pro-lockdown leadership that the media is so easily distracted from the care homes elephant in the room, with second wave red herrings.

This failure to properly analyse the pandemic as it unfolds is dangerous. We can’t get a grip on the crisis until we give the actuals as much attention as the potentials. Alas, that would mean facing an inconvenient reality: lockdowns – be they national or local – are a total con. Britain’s certainly has not protected care homes, nor has it stopped bad hospitals buckling under nosocomial outbreaks (many of the hospital trusts that suffered high deaths also have the worst overall mortality scores in the country).

Meanwhile, the number of people dying at home has exploded in several areas, including those threatened by local lockdowns. Since January, deaths at home have more than doubled in Redcar, and almost tripled in Stockton-on-Tees. National shutdown, in deterring people from seeking medical attention, may itself have already cost lives.

Instead of “whack-a-mole” lockdowns the Government should brush up on its metaphorical Twister skills; as the virus potentially writhes its way into our lives permanently, as a circulatory endemic infection, our leaders must also show tireless flexibility, protecting care homes, while snuffing out factory flareups, and helping the NHS to juggle Covid patients with cancer backlogs, while preparing for winter flu.

There is a little good news, however. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, then the toxicity of herd immunity is happily fading in the summer sun. A Swedish study has found that up to a third of healthy, asymptomatic people may have immunity. New University of Nottingham modelling suggests the threshold for herd immunity may be 43 per cent, rather than the assumed 60 per cent.

And so, as the first wave ends, we find ourselves at the beginning, debating lockdown versus herd immunity. Knowing what we know now, we can’t let history repeat itself.