the times | Friday April 8 2022 23
News
Exams in the same subject in England
will be spaced at least ten days apart to
avoid Covid-19 disrupting GCSEs and
A-levels, which ministers insist will
return to normal this year.
Almost 200,000 children are still off
school because of the virus and unions
say that widespread absences are
hampering revision for the first exam
season in three years.
However, ministers are confident
that Covid rates in schools have peaked
and will have declined significantly by
the exam season in June.
Officials believe that the wave will
have “worked through the system” by
the time pupils take exams.
This week figures showed 179,000
pupils off because of Covid on March 31,
down from 202,000 on March 17. This
includes 120,000 children known to be
infected with the virus and 34,000
Exams staggered to avoid disruption
Chris Smyth Whitehall Editor missing school because of restrictions
imposed to manage outbreaks, up from
17,000 two weeks earlier.
Masks and Covid tests in schools
have been dropped and ministers are
determined not to reintroduce them for
exam season even in the face of a
resurgence of the virus.
“The plan is to keep them as normal
as possible — an entirely pre-pandemic
arrangement,” a government source
said. “Exams are naturally socially
distanced anyway”.
However, Nadhim Zahawi, the
education secretary, has told schools
that pupils should not sit exams in any
subject within ten days of another
paper in the same subject.
He hopes this will mean even if pupils
catch Covid, they will be able to take at
least one exam in every subject and be
awarded a grade through the normal
special consideration process for
illness.
The National Association of Head
Teachers agreed the move “should
mean students won’t miss all of their
exams in a subject and will therefore
still be able to be awarded a grade for
their qualification”.
But Paul Whiteman, its general
secretary, criticised a decision to stop
reporting Covid absence figures in
England and Wales, saying it was
“symptomatic of the government’s
wider attempts to try to pretend that
the pandemic is over”.
He said: “With exams looming for
many students this is a very worrying
time. There has been so much disrup-
tion over the two years of exam courses
and now ongoing teacher and pupil
absence is having a negative impact on
teacher-led revision and exam prepara-
tion work.
“More disruption now could be
seriously damaging to pupils’ exam
chances and education recovery.”There was a figure Boris Johnson had in
mind: 50,000 deaths.
Last August advisers are said to have
let it be known that so long as Britain
was on course to be below that annual
toll, the prime minister would not con-
sider more coronavirus restrictions.
The subtext was: it’s over.
Back then, at the end of our long-
awaited final exit wave, reaching such a
statistic seemed absurd.
Today, talking about waves — exit
ones or otherwise — seems itself a little
absurd. Like a stone thrown by an
expert skimmer, the ripples that fol-
lowed have all merged into one, bounc-
ing along the surface of society to pro-
duce a single surge that has persisted,
with some choppiness.
Throughout that period Covid-19
deaths have never been high enough to
cause a societal crisis but never low
enough to end an NHS one. Rarely
have they fallen below 100 a day.
The result is we are chipping into
Johnson’s margin. According to death
certificates in the six months since, we
have had more than half the allotted
deaths: 31,000. There is little chance,
though, of more restrictions, in part
because after so many deaths among
the vulnerable, excess deaths are low.
Instead we are, in a sense, “living with
Covid”. There is also a growing realisa-
tion, especially in the NHS, that this
could be more relentless than expected.What will happen next?
Infection rates are higher than ever,
especially in the elderly. There are more
people in hospital with Covid-19,
although not necessarily because of
Covid-19, than at the peak in January.
Are we now all but certain to reach
50,000 annual deaths? Professor Gra-
ham Medley, from the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
thinks that there is still a reasonable
chance we could see less Covid-19 in the
next six months than in the previous.
“I expect that we will continue to see
a slow decline in hospitalisations,” he
said. “The summer might see very little
Covid activity.”
The virus will not go away, however.
The Omicron variant seems to be ten
times as likely to cause reinfections, and
about one in ten of those who are infect-
ed at present have had it before.
This offers a glimpse of our future,
Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at
the University of East Anglia, said.
“When you look at the other corona-
viruses they typically cause repeat in-
fections every three to six years, which
for the UK equates to about 40,000 new
infections a day on average,” he says. “It
is never going away, at least in our life-
times.”I thought Covid-19 was now no worse
than the flu. Why should we care?
There is a paradox here. For the individ-
ual, Covid-19 has never been less dan-
gerous. Significantly fewer than one in
1,000 infections results in death. Partly
that is because Omicron is milder than
Delta. Mainly it is because of vaccines.
The typical person on a mechanical
bed is 55, male, less well off and far moreNews
Covid waves are over
but choppy waters
may be here to stay
likely to be unvaccinated. According to
intensive care statistics, of those who
get severely ill about 50 per cent are
unvaccinated.
For most of us, then, the virus really is
comparable to influenza. The paradox?
For society it is still a lot worse. The
reason why is that over the course of a
year it is able to infect far more people.
Gradually this may cause fewer prob-
lems, Hunter said. With each reinfec-
tion, we should get more protection.
Vaccination status will become less sig-
nificant, because the unvaccinated will
all have been infected. “Each successive
wave will see a smaller and smaller pro-
portion of severe cases till it settles to a
typical level,” he says. It will take time.What does this mean for the NHS?
By now the NHS had hoped to be deal-
ing with its backlog. Instead, trusts are
declaring critical incidents. “The NHS
isn’t where it expected to be,” admitted
Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS
Providers, which represents hospitals
in England. “In late January and early
February we were talking about how
quickly and steeply the number of
people in hospital with Covid-19 would
drop and how long the tail would last.”
Instead, numbers went up. The good
news is that in most cases the patient
was there for another condition.
The bad news is that from a logistics
perspective this does not help much. In
a hospital, infections require isolation,
protocols and more space. On top of
that there are staff absences. Other in-
dustries may be able to reduce staff iso-
lation times but hospitals cannot.
Omicron, Hopson said, is causing
them to assess what changes they
might need to make in the longer term.
“It shows, yet again, that it is impossible
to predict how Covid-19 will develop
and that the NHS is going to have to
think very carefully about what level of
Covid incidence we can expect, at what
points in the year and the impact this
will have... The last eight weeks sug-
gest that all of this could have a signifi-
cantly greater impact on the NHS than
we might previously have thought.”
A senior health source said the gov-
ernment needed to support the NHS to
look honestly at capacity planning,
continuing infection control and activi-
ty levels that the service could realisti-
cally achieve under different scenarios
of Covid prevalence. There is nervous-
ness, the source said, that the centre of
government genuinely believes the
negative impact of Covid is largely over.Outside hospitals, though, is the
pandemic over?
There are big unknowns. We are still
grappling with what long Covid means.
Immunocompromised people are ask-
ing for more guidance and treatment.
We still don’t really know how many
infections a year we could expect in the
medium term. But from a policy, if not
virology, perspective it very much
seems like we are entering endemicity.
A few days ago our PCR test capacity
dropped overnight from 850,000 to
420,000. Isolation rules are gone. You
have to go back to the summer of 2020
to find a time when we conducted fewer
laboratory tests. This week the React
community testing survey, run since
May 2020, reported that it was ending.
It went out, quite literally, on a high.
There is an air of the last days of
Rome to Britain’s once vast coronavirus
infrastructure.
The question is, have the barbarians
really left the gates?contract worth £123,000 for PPE
disposal and the Department of
Health says it is “piloting opening
the sale of excess PPE stock to the
market” to “reduce the costs to the
taxpayer in storing excess stock”.
Labour has criticised the waste of
taxpayers’ money. The government
has previously insisted that itdeliberately erred on the side of
saving lives by making sure the
NHS would not run out: “Having
too much PPE was preferable to
having too little in the face of an
unpredictable and dangerous virus,
given this was essential to keep our
NHS open and protect as many
people as possible.”With storage
fees costing
£7 million a
month, officials
hope to sell
three million
items including
aprons, visors
and gogglesThe NHS is facing a far
more disruptive spring
than expected. What
can it, and we, expect,
asks Tom Whipple