COVID 2023 (part 1)

Woah we're halfway there

Six months into 2023, and it feels like COVID is pretty far in the rear-view mirror for most people. Some kind of normal English summer is going on: Glastonbury last weekend, the Lord’s Test match this weekend, Wimbledon starting next week, all with 2019-size crowds and (as far as I am aware) no restrictions in place. While some people are continuing to be cautious, either through fear of Long COVID or because of underlying health conditions, it’s got to the stage where it’s slightly surprising to see someone in a mask. Even the perennially cautious Independent SAGE have announced that they are on hiatus until September.

To be honest, that doesn’t feel unreasonable at the moment: broadly speaking COVID admissions and deaths are about as low as they’ve been at any point since March 2020. Admissions have been falling now for three-and-a-half months straight, which isn’t something that’s happened before outside times of lockdown or significant NPIs. England’s most recent total daily admissions number was 82, which given that under a third of beds occupied are “for COVID” at the moment may even correspond to something close to the all-time low value of 25.

And yet. After so many waves and dips, it’s natural to feel like more cycles of the rollercoaster ride will continue, and there’s bound to be more to come. Maybe there will be, of course. Since viral evolution is a random process, then it’s very hard to rule anything out for sure.

But it’s worth noticing that so far, 2023 has been a pretty quiet year, variant-wise. For all the hype about XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16, neither of them had enough of a growth advantage in the UK to convert into the size of wave that we saw from BA.5 last summer for example. And it’s not completely obvious what the next headline variant might be. There’s talk of the splendidly named FU family, for example, but that is only present in the UK in very small numbers at the moment, so even if it is going to cause a wave, then it’s not going to do so for quite a while.

This doesn’t seem completely surprising. As long as the variants continue to crop up in the same kind of corners of the omicron space, I suspect there’s a limit to how much of an advantage they can gain over each other, as a lot of the same mutations crop up in different variant strains.

But still, perhaps we should be cautious, because any time now we could see a big evolutionary jump: the creation of the long-awaited pi variant. It could happen tomorrow. Maybe it already happened.

But my feeling is that this is a bridge we should cross if and when we come to it. As I said six weeks ago now, variants always start with one infection, and the level of omicron prevailing at the time doesn’t affect that. Honestly, it doesn’t seem healthy or proportional to be worrying about something that may never happen, or may not happen for years.

Of course, pi could appear next week, but equally Russia could blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant next week (and indeed the latter seems considerably more likely right now). And honestly, the chances of anything you do affecting whether either of these things happen are exceedingly minimal.

So, while it’s still very possible that COVID numbers will pick up in the autumn (due to some combination of seasonality, waning, return to work and possible new variants), halfway through the year it’s hard to feel like things could be going much better, and it’s a good time to enjoy the summer.