As Britain learns to live with Covid, MoS drops weekly figures

THE Mail on Sunday has decided to end the routine publication of the latest coronavirus statistics panel after Health Secretary Sajid Javid

urged Britain to start treating Covid-19 more like the flu.

For exactly a year, the MoS has printed a weekly panel with the latest figures for new cases, hospitalisations, deaths and the number of vaccinations given.

But with coronavirus in retreat, doubts over the usefulness of the figures and growing calls – including from Mr Javid – for Covid to be treated like any other disease,

this newspaper will no longer feature the panel.

David Dillon, Editor of The Mail on Sunday, said: ‘This is a significant moment in our coverage of the pandemic. As the Health Secretary

has said, it is now time for us to learn to live with Covid.

‘For this reason and because it has been shown that the figures are increasingly misleading, we no longer see the need to keep a running tally.’

The development came as:

M The Government stepped up its efforts to get civil servants back to their desks, even as some departments were drawing up plans to allow staff to work remotely and

the MoS discovered scores of ‘work from home’ job adverts;

M No 10 is set to announce as early as tomorrow that the requirement for people travelling abroad to have Covid passes will be dropped in February along with testing rules for fully jabbed travellers;

M Boris Johnson faced growing calls to extend the deadline for unvaccinated NHS staff to be jabbed or face losing their jobs.

M Thousands took part in marches across the country to protest against mandatory vaccinations, with the Royal College of GPs warning of staff shortages without a delay;

Since becoming Health Secretary in June, Mr Javid has repeatedly told MPs that as Covid becomes endemic, it should be treated no differently from other illnesses.

While explaining the decision to lift ‘Plan B’ restrictions last week, he compared Covid to flu. ‘In a bad

flu year you can [lose] about 20,000 lives, but we don’t shut down our entire country and put in place lots of restrictions,’ he told Sky News.

Experts say the Omicron variant’s milder nature makes Covid statistics less informative and potentially misleading.

Large numbers of new daily cases no longer translate into hospitalisations and hospitalisation figures risk overstating the true impact of the virus.

For example, there were 14,588 patients with Covid in English hospitals last Tuesday, but only 7,605

(52 per cent) were being treated primarily for the virus. In London

and the East of England, the figures were 41 and 45 per cent.

During much of the pandemic, around 85 per cent of deaths reported by the Government have been due to Covid, rather than other causes, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Since the arrival of Omicron, that proportion has fallen. It was 72 per

cent for the week ending January 7. Mr Javid picked up on this anomaly during a No 10 press conference last week, as did Huw Edwards, presenter of the BBC’s News at Ten, later that evening.

He said that while there had been another 359 deaths reported within 28 days of a positive test, ‘there will

be some among that number who won’t have died from Covid’.

Francois Balloux, professor of computational systems biology at University College London, said: ‘Part of the transition out of the pandemic is stopping people feeling so obsessed by case numbers and hospitalisations.

‘It’s not entirely healthy – we are all a bit addicted to it.’

In a further positive sign, Professor Rupert Pearse, an intensive care doctor working at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel,

tweeted a picture this weekend of an ICU whiteboard with the words: ‘6 days since last Covid admission.’

He urged caution but wrote: ‘We are definitely feeling a fall in NHS hospital and ICU admissions with

Covid in London. The rest of the UK should see a similar pattern.’

‘Time to treat it as we would other diseases’