This Covid Christmas, let’s use our common sense — or risk a third wave

Christmas is coming,

Covid’s coming back.

Please keep your distance

To save us from attack.

If you’re hugging everybody,

Please don’t hug us too.

If you catch coronavirus,

Then God bless you.

This new version of the old nursery rhyme sums up the mood of foreboding that is now overshadowing the festive season. The Prime Minister, we are told, has overruled the advice of some scientists in effect to cancel Christmas. The promised relaxation of the rules, to allow up to three households to mingle for five days, is now awaited with dread by doctors. 

Cases of Covid have risen by about 50 per cent from a week ago. The numbers being treated in hospital are now around 15,000; by the end of the year they are likely to surpass their peak last spring, when they reached 18,974. In some regions NHS acute care is already approaching capacity and there is a danger that a new surge of Covid will have a knock-on effect on treatment for other conditions. As the editors of the BMJ and the Health Service Journal put it in a joint editorial, “a significant third wave could wipe out all the reductions in waiting times for elective procedures achieved in the past 20 years”. We are back to the spectre of the NHS being overwhelmed. 

How can we, the public, stave off this grim prospect? People have been confused by the constant changes in restrictions and terminology. They need simpler rules, better communicated. The Government is about to launch a new advertising campaign to warn the country about the pitfalls of socialising over Christmas. It will, we are told, aim to discourage people from seeing relatives unless necessary.

This campaign had better be an improvement on the recent Government TV ad to promote fresh air as a Covid prophylactic. It advocates keeping windows open “throughout the day” — which sounds like an invitation to burglars. Preventing a third wave of coronavirus should not entail a crime wave instead.

The ad also tells people to keep visits short. That advice is difficult to reconcile with the exemption for three households to meet over Christmas, which most families will interpret as permission to have at least one meal at which the generations can eat and drink together. The Government needs to get its messaging straight. Are we allowed to sit round the table for Christmas dinner with grandparents and other vulnerable people, or not? Apparently the new ads will try to dissuade us from travelling to see family members or friends during the holiday period. What, then, is the point of the Christmas easing of social distancing? Many extended families will not have seen one another during this year of lockdowns. Why give them their first chance to meet while frightening them away from taking advantage of it?

We are still in the throes of the second wave and already there is talk of a third, perhaps exacerbated by a new strain of this mutating coronavirus. Other countries, such as Germany, are managing the second wave less well than the first. The death toll in Italy has now overtaken that in the UK, but that is a cause for sympathy, not complacency. The United States is struggling with the dire consequences of Thanksgiving celebrations.

This is a time to stay calm, but not to carry on regardless. The British have always prided themselves on their common sense. Not much of that was in evidence in London on Tuesday evening, as raucous gatherings took place in pubs just before the capital returned to Tier 3. We do need to remain vigilant and maintain social distancing in busy places. One simple idea would be to bring back the two metre rule, at least outdoors, which seems to have fallen into disuse since the first wave. Though people did not always stay two metres or yards apart, in practice most kept their distance. That now seems a long time ago. Christmas does indeed bring tidings of comfort and joy — but for heaven’s sake, let’s keep our heads. Otherwise, for far too many of us, it may be our last.

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