I cannot face another lockdown – but what if plan B isn’t enough?

I am not a religious woman and instead I have placed my faith in our vaccines – may they grant us smooth sailing until spring, writes Marie Le Conte

‘It is tough not to feel jittery’ (EPA)

There is a morning I have been thinking about a lot recently. It was winter and unusually mild; I had some errands to run near Piccadilly and, on the way back, decided to walk through St James’s Park to look at the pelicans.

It sounds like a happy memory but it isn’t; that oddly sunny day was 24 December 2020, and the first Christmas I’d ever spent away from my family. A week after that, the weather had got cold again, and I turned 29 without my friends, for the first time in my adult life.

I keep thinking about these memories because they now feel like warnings from history: first, the cases rose in October, then the government remained stubbornly relaxed, then we got locked down by the end of the year. We are now in October, the cases have been rising steadily, the government remains stubbornly relaxed, then…? Well, only time will tell.

Of course, we have vaccines now. Tens of millions of people have received not one but two doses, and others got a third very recently. We are, as a nation, considerably less likely to die or be hospitalised from Covid than we were a year ago. The upcoming winter and the one we lived through last year are not entirely comparable.

Still, it is tough not to feel jittery. England is, at time of writing, averaging around 40,000 new cases, 1,000 hospitalisations and 100 deaths a day. Every ambulance service in the country is now at code black, the highest level of alert, and some patients have had to wait for up to 11 hours to get into A&E. As Shaun Lintern reported last week for The Independent, the NHS is at “breaking point”.

Meanwhile, health secretary Sajid Javid appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said, quite breezily, that “from what we are seeing at the moment of course case numbers are high but in terms of our plans, in terms of moving from plan A to plan B, we do not think the data supports that yet”.

This is worrying both because the data feels worthy of concern and because plan B is, in itself, not very serious at all. As far as we know, the measures discussed would involve vaccine passports for large indoors events and higher risk venues, a return to compulsory masks in more indoor settings, and a nudge towards working from home for those who can.

These changes would hardly be life-altering, which begs the question: why not simply implement them now? What are we waiting for? But then, these are the easy ones. The one question I should ask but do not, because I do not want to think about the answer, is: what if these measures are not enough?

It is something I do not want to think about because, to be blunt, I do not believe we should ever introduce harsher measures again. Lockdowns worked, but they were blunt instruments with considerable drawbacks – they were only acceptable when there were no other options.

The vaccine has, I believe, changed that equation forever; inflicting this much misery on an entire country now would – and should – be unthinkable. If the health system is in peril, it is up to the government to rescue it; citizens should not be expected to do that job for them.

And yet, the question remains: what if plan B is not enough? I do not wish to see tens of thousands of people die, from either Covid or hospitals being too full to treat anyone else. It is not a political position that makes sense, I know; I couldn’t be more aware of it if I tried.

I am young and healthy and double jabbed and I had recovered from Covid before the first lockdown even started; I lost a year and a half of my life to protect other people, at great cost to my own sanity. I cannot – will not – do it again. Still, here I am, worrying endlessly about what will happen if we delay plan B for too long and what would happen if plan B ended up not being enough. There is no logic to my reasoning anymore and it is exhausting.

I wish I could offer a satisfying conclusion, both to you and to myself, but I do not have one; all I have is fingers crossed that things will be fine in the end. I am not a religious woman and instead I have placed my faith in our vaccines; may they grant us smooth sailing until spring, as heaven knows what I would do otherwise.