It is two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. Society has reopened, life has resumed. Attention has turned, understandably, to the harrowing crisis in Ukraine. No one would blame you for hoping you’d heard the last of Covid. Yet on Thursday, the director general of the WHO tweeted that the pandemic is “far from over”.
Given the removal of mitigations by the Westminster government you would be forgiven for thinking differently. Speaking to friends and relatives, they seem surprised that Covid cases and hospitalisations are rising again, and have been for the past two weeks. In south-west England, hospital admissions are already higher than at the peak of the Omicron wave. The south-east will soon follow. In order to understand the implications of these recent upticks for the future of the pandemic, we need to put our finger on what caused them. Is this just a bump in the road towards high-level endemicity, or do these figures herald the start of yet another NHS-threatening wave?
