'We are going to be living with Covid for many years to come' - health chief
Covid is set to stay for years to come according to a Staffordshire health boss – and some measures will need to remain in place to control its spread.
Those hoping that coronavirus would be a pandemic of the past by the start of 2022 may be disappointed to hear that the county’s health and wellbeing board has been considering how it will affect the area in the years leading up to 2030.
As residents and businesses look forward to the gradual easing of national lockdown restrictions. those responsible for health and care services have been preparing to deal with future cases of Covid – and looking at best and worst case scenarios.
Dr Richard Harling, director of health and care at Staffordshire County Council, told Thursday’s board meeting: “I think it’s safe to say we are going to be living with Covid for many years to come.
“The virus has become endemic. I do not believe we are going to be able to eradicate it and therefore it will be circulating in our communities, probably in perpetuity. That means we will need to maintain a series of Covid defences and hopefully we will have control over as many of those as possible at a local level.
“I think the future is quite uncertain; there a wide range of plausible scenarios and while we should all hope for the best we need to make sure we are planning and prepared for the full spectrum of what might befall us.”
The meeting heard that measures including testing, contact tracing, isolation and outbreak management would need to be continue as part of all possible scenarios.
Dr Harling said: “We will need to make sure we have facilities available for testing both people with symptoms and regular asymptomatic testing for as many people as possible, as frequently as possible.
“We are going to need to maintain contact tracing to follow up all cases, find out where they have contracted infection, identify others who may have been exposed and make sure we can isolate them. I hope we won’t be doing it at quite the scale we have been doing it for the last few months, but nevertheless that requirement will remain.
Vulnerable
“Isolation of cases and contacts is currently at 10 days each as a legal requirement and I expect that to continue. From the evidence we have, most people appear to be following that. We are at the moment referring suspected non-isolators to the police for follow up and are very grateful to police colleagues for their role in that.
“I also expect that there will continue to be outbreaks of Covid in various settings – hopefully rather fewer than we are seeing at the moment. But there are some settings that remain innately vulnerable; anywhere where large numbers of people share a small space gives an opportunity for the virus to spread.
“Whilst uptake of the vaccination at the moment is very good, we can expect that there will be pockets of our communities where uptake is sub-optimal and that will give an opportunity for resurgence of the virus. Hopefully these will be small and infrequent, but we need to maintain the ability to deal with them.”
A “minimum level” of Covid-security measures will also be considered, the meeting heard, which included personal and environmental hygiene and a degree of social distancing.
“Under best case scenarios I don’t think this will need to be as intrusive as it perhaps has been over the last year and might fall under what we would regard as sensible precautions – not dissimilar to other routine health and safety measures that we tend to observe at home and in our workplaces,” Dr Harling said.
“It seems likely the virus will evolve and that new variants will emerge, and that the vaccine will need to be updated and re-administered on a fairly regular basis. I think annually is a reasonably safe assumption and that will be a similar principle to the flu vaccination.
“We will need to make sure we are supporting the most vulnerable people. In Staffordshire we have 50,000 people who fall into the clinically extremely vulnerable group and to whom additional support is available with things like shopping and collecting medicines, to make sure they can stay at home if they need to do so.”
The situation is currently considered to be moving towards a more optimistic scenario, Dr Harling said, which was to be welcomed. But it remained “extremely volatile” and the risk that new variants of the virus could “take off” as lockdown was eased remained.
He added: “You will have seen the roadmap set out on 22nd February by the Government with some indicative timescales of when restrictions might be released. I think everyone is hoping we are able to progress with that sort of speed and that societal restrictions can be lifted without putting undue pressure on the NHS – and then once they’re lifted, they stay lifted.”
