As the Omicron variant spreads rapidly across the UK, there is now a palpable fear that it will take many years before life returns to normal. This sense of dread is compounded by a fresh wave of warnings from global scientists predicting that with the coronavirus mutating at speed, the world could be hit with another pandemic, one which could be even more virulent and deadlier than the coronavirus.
One of those voices belongs to Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at Oxford University and the head of the team that developed the AstraZeneca/Oxford University Covid-19 vaccine. So it is puzzling, then, that the government remains resistant to calls from the scientific community to impose more stringent Covid mitigation measures to slow down the transmission of this heavily-mutated new variant.
Instead, we have ministers encouraging the public to celebrate Christmas as usual, without any limits on social gatherings. These exhortations are uttered against an exponential rise in Omicron cases, warnings from the UK Health Security Agency that more than a million people in the UK could be infected with the new variant by the year’s end and data from a cluster of Omicron cases showing that three doses of a Covid-19 vaccine may not be enough to prevent symptomatic illness with the new variant.
There is some good news, however. Face masks are the single most effective public health measure when it comes to reducing the spread of the virus, and wearing one is associated with a 53% risk reduction in Covid-19, according to research published in the BMJ.
Academics and health experts, including those at the World Health Organization, believe that if everyone adopted this simple measure for the foreseeable future, alongside hand washing, social distancing and visiting only well ventilated public spaces, we could keep ourselves safe, contain the current crop of coronavirus variants and potentially halt the appearance of new ones.
It’s a pity, then, that it has taken the emergence of a new, highly transmissible and potentially deadlier strain of the coronavirus to force the government to re-introduce a measure that should never have been rescinded in the first place. Face coverings offer up a lifeline to world which is rapidly growing weary of governments that fail to introduce compulsory basic infection control measures to keep their citizens safe from harm.
