Advancements against COVID-19 provide faith in a somewhat normal future

Advances against COVID-19 offer hope that we can return to something like normality, as faith prevails over fear of stepping back out into the open.

Customers dine outside in Chinatown, London, as lockdown measures are eased and people emerge from their homes – fuelling hope for an economic recovery. Picture: Getty

First, some good news. If there is another surge of COVID-19 we are much better placed to confront it than last time. Make no mistake: this is still a disease no one would want to catch. But if you do, your chances of surviving are far greater than they were back in the spring.

When Boris Johnson was admitted to intensive care in early April the proportion of ICU patients dying from the coronavirus in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the previous 30 days was more than 42 per cent. That rate has dropped dramatically since then: in the 30 days to mid-July it fell to just over 20 per cent. It’s worth dwelling on those numbers for a moment, if only because good news is in such short supply: the probability of ICU patients dying of COVID-19 has pretty much halved in the space of a few months.

There are some important provisos: that recent data is based on a smallish number of cases during a quiet period; some patients are still in critical care and some of them, sadly, will die. And those low rates are unlikely to persist if hospitals are overwhelmed by the disease. Even so, as things stand, the critical care survival rate for those with the disease is now approaching the same rate as typical pneumonia.

A still image from footage released of Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson announcing that he has tested positive for coronavirus in March, 2020. Since the PM was admitted to ICU the probability of ICU patients dying of COVID-19 has pretty much halved. Picture: AFP

That is a testament to the hard work, ingenuity and determination of Britain’s medical workers and researchers. We do not know how to cure COVID-19 but thanks to experience, improved techniques and new treatments such as dexamethasone, we are getting better at helping people to survive it.

We are better placed too because, for all the ridicule rightly piled on Britain’s testing system in recent months, it has improved enormously. Anyone with symptoms can get a free test, which was not the case back in April. True: there are still some big problems with the track and trace system designed to catch cases in their early stages. Too few of the contacts of those who get the disease are being contacted and asked to isolate, though again the numbers are not quite as disastrous as you might have guessed – about 75 per cent instead of the 80 per cent the government would like to see.

In short, if there is another wave of infections then we are actually pretty well placed to confront it. Why hasn’t this sunk in yet? One problem is that we humans tend to internalise bad news more readily than good news. “Negativity bias”, as psychologists call it, is probably a remnant of our hunter-gatherer past, when an encounter with a predator was worth remembering, but it plays havoc with decision-making at times like this.

Britain’s testing system has improved enormously in recent months. Picture: Getty

The early weeks of the pandemic were a tidal wave of bad news. The death rate was horribly high; the testing system was a disaster. Things have improved since but the good news simply hasn’t sunk in yet. The other day the government said it was planning a big advertising campaign to remind people that they are entitled to a test – a policy that has been in place for months.

Another issue is that this is as much a data story as a health story and sometimes the most telling data gets buried out of sight. In the case of the aforementioned numbers on ICU outcomes, they are deep in a spreadsheet produced by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre, which prefers to show them only as cumulative figures, including all outcomes since COVID-19 first hit hospitals. This makes sense with most conditions for which survival rates are relatively constant over the years but in the case of a fast-moving pandemic like this it underplays changes over time.

Economists sometimes call such things “biased estimators” and you don’t have to look far to find others. As Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, pointed out this week, part of the reason COVID-19 cases seem to have been rising recently is that we are testing more people. Adjust for that and the proportion of people testing positive is about the same as it was a month ago. Yet those scary case numbers are front and centre of the government’s COVID-19 dashboard, alongside another dodgy measure: Public Health England’s count of deaths, which includes anyone who once tested positive for the disease, even if they recovered and were then run over by a bus. In reality, the death numbers in England are running at about half the official number.

Patient Trudy Woodfall who is recovering from coronavirus at Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, is treated by a member of clinical staff. Picture: AFP

In the face of all this muddle and confusion who can blame anyone for erring on the side of caution, for staying in rather than going out? Yet this goes to the heart of the forthcoming crisis, the one we’ll be living with for the next year or so. For the more this lack of confidence prevents us from going about our lives with some degree of normality, the longer and deeper the recession.

Yesterday (Thursday) the Bank of England unveiled its first economic forecasts of the pandemic and they were actually a bit more optimistic than expected. Why? Well, one could single out this or that sector but ultimately it comes down to faith and fear. Faith that consumers will start shopping again slightly outweighing the fear of stepping back out into the open.

“Never confuse faith, or belief – of any kind – with something even remotely intellectual,” wrote John Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany. And economic models are only so much use in these kinds of moments when fear and faith rule the roost.

Fear of the virus; faith in the institutions protecting us from the virus. The good news is that the case for faith is strengthening.

(Ed Conway is economics editor of Sky News UK)

The Times