Is removing Covid self-isolation rules ‘victory or surrender’?

People in England who test positive for Covid-19 will no longer be legally required to self-isolate from late February, Boris Johnson has announced.

Revealing the plan to scrap all quarantine requirements, the prime minister said that based on “current encouraging trends in the data” it was time to “end the last remaining domestic restrictions, including the legal requirement to self-isolate if you test positive”.

Johnson had originally set 24 March as the date on which all self-isolation would end. By bringing forward the date he will make England the first major economy to replace legal requirements for people to self-isolate with guidance.

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But the announcement has stirred up a chorus of dissenting voices across both the political spectrum and among medical experts.

‘Covid can still bite’

The move has been met with cynicism by opposition politicians, said The Independent.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the announcement was “designed to dig Johnson out of a political hole”, adding that there is “no plan to back it up”. Liberal Democrat Layla Moran, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, echoed this criticism, describing the prime minister’s decision as “foolhardy”.

Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds, told Sky News that the move was “crazy” and “goes against all the fundamental principles of public health”. Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, warned that while “we’ve largely taken the poison out of the bite of Covid-19” it “can still bite”.

“The idea we just have to pretend it’s gone because we say it is is foolish,” Sridhar said. “This is clearly being done to distract from the problems Boris Johnson is facing over breaking lockdown rules.”

Concern has also been raised over how the end of self-isolation will impact on those who have been shielding throughout the pandemic due to immunity reducing illness. Campaign groups and charities representing those with blood cancer, kidney disease and other immunocompromised people said the government has “failed to set out plans for how vulnerable groups will be able to return to a normal life”, The Guardian reported.

End of the pandemic?

From a legislative point of view, once England has removed the last remaining Covid restriction “the pandemic will be over”, said The Times. “But will it also be over from a virological point of view?”

Professor Peter Openshaw, an expert in viral infection at Imperial College London, told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One that “it would be wholly wrong to say that the pandemic is in any way over”.

“We don’t know what’s around the corner,” he warned. “There could be another variant, perhaps based on Delta or something else with higher pathogenicity, which could come back to bite us anytime, and I’m pretty sure that next winter we’re going to see it back,” the Daily Mirror reported.

Meanwhile, Dr Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, told Sky News that while case levels are declining, they are still “huge” compared to where they should be before an announcement like this one.

Government data showed infection levels fell by 25% in the past week. But the most recent ONS Infection Survey showed that more than 2.8 million people in England – equivalent to one in 19 – had Covid-19 in the week to 5 February.

Professor Paul Hunter, of the University of East Anglia’s Norwich School of Medicine, sounded a more optimistic note. Asked about the timing of the plans, he said that “in some ways we are getting to that point, as reported case numbers have been falling”.

Dr Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, described the move as “an experiment which will either be shown to be very brave or very stupid – but nobody knows for sure what the result will be”.

The Times’ science editor Tom Whipple said that “from a virological perspective, the coronavirus is not endemic” because “endemic viruses do not surge wildly and unpredictably”.

But in terms of its political definition, “endemic means ‘Boris doesn’t have to stand on a podium beside Chris Whitty any more, and can worry about other things’.

“From this perspective”, Whipple said, “coronavirus may – may – be endemic.”

Is this surrender?

Critics have said Johnson’s move is less about being ready and more about surrender. “We’re still seeing around 1,800 deaths a week,” said Dr Gurdasani, adding that “the message from the government here is that we accept this level of infection and death”.

“The assumption now is that we will all get infected,” said The Times’ Whipple.

But that does not give much comfort to the immunocompromised, he warned, who are once again asking for “official communication of a plan for the half a million people whose immune systems are less able to protect them”.

The perception among those who are more vulnerable, Richard Evans from Blood Cancer UK told Whipple, is that the plan is “good luck, and God bless”.

The World Health Organization has also insisted that it is “too soon” to declare victory or surrender, said CNBC. “It’s premature for any country either to surrender or to declare victory” over Covid-19, said director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.