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COVID-19 Recovery Committee 20 January 2022

20 Jan 2022 · S6 · COVID-19 Recovery Committee

Item of business

Ministerial Statement, Coronavirus Acts Report and Subordinate Legislation

Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Requirements) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2022 (SSI 2022/6)

Professor Leitch Watch on SPTV

I will respond briefly to question 2, and then I will answer the question on endemic status. When omicron first emerged, we simply did not know whether the rumours—let us call them that—of slightly milder disease were true. Nobody knew. However, we knew pretty quickly that booster doses of vaccines were crucial, and we were able to vaccinate, at one point, faster than any other country in the world. The omicron wave has not been as damaging as we thought that it might be, because of the combination of protections, human behaviour and vaccination, with the contribution from the virus that, in the end, it is milder than the delta version. Unpicking how much of that has been down to the virus and how much has been down to vaccination will take months, but the combination of all those things is why we have not seen omicron reach the absolute worst that we thought that it might. That is a credit to the national health service vaccination teams and to the public, who reduced their contacts appropriately, partly because we told them to and partly voluntarily. The term “endemic” is a little misunderstood. The disease that everybody suggests is endemic is flu. Endemicity is about predictability. An endemic disease is defined as one that is in an area of the world and which is relatively predictable, so we know when it is coming and what it is going to do. Endemicity says nothing about severity. Malaria is an endemic disease and kills 600,000 people a year, not here, but among the billions of people who catch it in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. Endemicity is not about ease or making it better—it is about predictability. For now, Covid is unpredictable. We do not know when the next wave is coming or whether it will be better or worse than the previous waves. The WHO will decide when the disease becomes endemic. Just now, the WHO says that it is a pandemic, and the definition of that is that every single person on earth is at risk from it. The WHO will decide when it is more predictable, which I hope will happen in 2022, although nobody knows whether it will. How Scotland and other countries choose to deal with the next year of the pandemic is the core of Murdo Fraser’s question. What do we do, and how should we react, as the disease moves into another year of being a pandemic? That is the question that the committee has been asking, and to which the Government has tried to respond, throughout the whole period. I am not sure that it is about having an intellectual conversation on pandemic versus endemic; it is about how we manage a pandemic. As we have discussed, that has global implications around genetic sequencing, and for our strategic framework, which we are refreshing—the Government will announce the results of that in the next few weeks.

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COVID-19 Recovery Committee 20 January 2022

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