Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Could we be asked to self-isolate if we catch flu?

(Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

How will coronavirus change our approach to seasonal illnesses? We are heading into the NHS’s most difficult months as winter flu season is upon us, and ministers have been urging people to get a flu jab in order to keep demand in the health service down. Matt Hancock, meanwhile, has been justifying the enormous expense of the beleaguered test and trace system by suggesting that it could continue once the pandemic dies down, being used ‘for everything’. He also told MPs last week that he wanted to end the culture of presenteeism in Britain, saying: ‘If you have flu-like symptoms you should have a test for it and find out what is wrong with you and stay at home. We are peculiar outliers in soldiering on and going to work and that culture, that should change.’

The NHS has never really had much surge capacity built into it

This hasn’t had as much attention as it perhaps deserves. If there is to be a test and trace system for seasonal flu and other illnesses, then it may well follow that there will still be a call — even if informal — for people to self-isolate when they have symptoms. Protecting the NHS has been the core argument throughout the pandemic, but it is not only relevant in a pandemic. Every winter, politicians brace themselves for a difficult flu season where higher-than-usual numbers of cases lead to a cash-strapped NHS struggling to cope. It does not require a huge leap of the imagination to envisage test and trace asking people to stay at home when they or close contacts have contracted the flu — not least because the NHS is going to be struggling for a good few years as a result of the backlog in elective cases delayed from the first lockdown.

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Isabel Hardman
Written by
Isabel Hardman
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

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