The expected surge in Covid-19 infections over the coming weeks could leave hundreds of thousands of younger people with long-term health problems, researchers have warned.
As England prepares to remove all pandemic restrictions on 19 July, including mask-wearing and social distancing, a group of academics from institutions including Queen Mary University of London, the University of Sussex, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, have described the decision as “dangerous and premature”.
In their correspondence published in The Lancet, they say not enough people will have been vaccinated to achieve “population immunity” by 19 July. Young people face a particular risk of catching Covid-19 and falling ill as many have not yet been able to have their second jab.
“The UK health secretary has stated that daily cases could reach 100,000 per day over the summer months of 2021. The link between infection and death might have been weakened, but it has not been broken, and infection can still cause substantial morbidity in both acute and long-term illness,” they say.
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“This strategy risks creating a generation left with chronic health problems and disability, the personal and economic impacts of which might be felt for decades to come.”
They identify five main concerns with the government’s plans to lift all restrictions at this stage of the pandemic:
- Unmitigated transmission will disproportionately affect unvaccinated children and young adults. “Even assuming that approximately 20% of unvaccinated people are protected by previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, this still leaves more than 17 million people with no protection against Covid-19,” they say.
- The creation of a “reservoir of infection” over the summer months, which will result in an accelerated spread of the virus in schools and universities in the autumn as children and students will no longer need to self-isolate, despite having not been vaccinated.
- The emergence of “vaccine-resistant” variants of Covid-19, which would place everybody at risk whether they have had a jab or not.
- Further pressure on exhausted health workers, especially at a time when people are waiting for medical procedures and routine care after a pause last year.
- A disproportionate effect on the most vulnerable and deprived communities, which would deepen inequality.
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They recommend that the government delays the removing of restrictions until everyone, including adolescents, has been offered a Covid-19 vaccine and uptake is high. Until then, measures recommended by the World Health Organisation, including mask-wearing, should remain in place, they say.
They say: “In light of these grave risks, and given that vaccination offers the prospect of quickly reaching the same goal of population immunity without incurring them, we consider any strategy that tolerates high levels of infection to be both unethical and illogical… We believe the government is embarking on a dangerous and unethical experiment, and we call on it to pause plans to abandon mitigations on July 19, 2021.”
