Is zero Covid achievable? A scientific debate about the virus

Throughout the year Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford, and Simon Clarke, associate professor of cellular microbiology at Reading, have written for The Spectator about the virus and the government’s measures to contain it. They have had very different outlooks, but can they agree about what will happen next? They start by looking back at their early predictions.

CLARKE: During the first wave I said: don’t lock down too quickly because there will be a cost. People won’t like it. But if we had acted sooner, perhaps we wouldn’t have been locked down for quite so long and the death toll probably wouldn’t have been so high. I might also have changed my early resistance to masks, though I still don’t think they’re all that great at stopping transmission in either direction. The decisions to change policy were made by politicians. It first happened in Scotland where Nicola Sturgeon stood up and said she thought that they were needed. Then Boris Johnson said he thought that there was evidence for their effectiveness. I’ve yet to see that evidence. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve been convinced. But that ship has sailed, in many respects.

HENEGHAN: The thing that surprised me is we’re now at the end of December and we’re still in restrictive measures. I thought that somehow by the middle of summer we’d be returning to normal. But testing showed throughout summer that this pathogen has become endemic. It is out there and is going to stay out there. The idea that you remove it and have ‘zero Covid’ has now been put to bed: you can’t turn off the tap and make viruses disappear. The question is: when does it start being seen as a seasonal pathogen rather than a pandemic? That’s a really important question and there are two ways to deal with that: either the population builds up immunity through continued infection, or with a vaccine that confers immunity.