Simon Jones: End game?

The United Kingdom could be just weeks away from being able to say the coronavirus pandemic is ‘over,’ I heard a scientist say earlier this week. Talking on the BBC’s Today programme, Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said forthcoming data was likely to show that Covid-19 vaccines were even more successful at keeping people out of hospital than they were at preventing mild infection.

‘If the current generation of vaccines are able to stop people going into hospital… then the pandemic is over, because we can live with the virus,’ he told the programme.

Living with the virus is where things become tricky. As we begin to learn more about Covid-19, how practitioners and patients adapt to changing states of ‘normal’ will be hard to second guess.