Sajid Javid warns about ‘shocking’ NHS backlog caused by Covid-19
Sajid Javid has said the extent of the NHS waiting list “shocked” him when he was sworn in as health secretary and that 7m people had not come forward with serious illness over the past 16 months.
Javid said that as “health secretary I can’t just be thinking about Covid alone, I have to be thinking about other health problems” while explaining the rationale behind the big bang shedding of restrictions for 19 July.
Speaking to the BBC, Javid said: “We do need to start learning to live with Covid like we live with flu for example and other diseases and mange it so we can get on with something that’s a bit more normal.
“We’re seeing around 25,000 cases a day, the last time we saw numbers like that we had deaths of around 500 day – we are now at 1/30th of that.
“That’s because of the impact the vaccine and the treatments we had are far better than when this pandemic began.”
Boris Johnson yesterday announced the vast majority of Covid restrictions are set to go on 19 July, including social distancing, mandatory face masks, the rule of six at hospitality venues and the ban on mass indoor events.
This is despite Covid cases surging to their highest point in months due to the more transmissible Delta variant.
There have been 178,128 cases in the past seven days – a 53 per cent weekly rise – however hospitalisations and deaths have only seen relatively small increases.
The Prime Minister said the UK’s vaccine numbers meant the link between Covid cases and deaths had been severely weakened.
He added: “If we can’t open our society in the next few weeks…we must ask ourselves when will be be able to return to normal?”
However, critics have said the plan runs the risk of the virus spreading so far and wide that a new vaccine-resistant variant emerges in the UK.
Javid said today that cases could reach as high as 100,000 a day next month, but that government modelling could not predict what this would mean for hospitalisations.
“What’s different now is the vaccine – the huge wall of defence we’ve built,” he said.
“These have severely weakened the link between case numbers and hospitalisations and deaths.”
When asked if there was any possibility of a return to restrictions later in the year when winter hits, the health secretary refused to rule it out.
“I hope not…that’s certainly not our plan,” he said.
“We’ve seen how there’s been variants already and very damaging variants in terms of how they infect people.
“There may be – and no one knows, this there isn’t yet – there may be a variant that comes out in the future that is vaccine resistant. Which means by definition this wall of defence we’ve built is no longer going to be there for us and so we have to of course remain vigilant.”