Opinion: Gavin St Pier
WE will all remember that at some point in our, our children’s or our grand-children’s lives, the stabilisers just have to be taken off the bike. It’s time. And when they do, the learner will wobble and probably fall off a few times, before their confidence builds and they are pedalling away furiously.
We’ve reached that time in the pandemic. Everyone is fed-up with Covid. After 18 months of this virus’ life on earth, understandably, we all just want ‘normal life’ to resume. We’re sick of Zoom meetings and quizzes. We want to finally be able to see and hug distant family and friends. We want to go to music festivals and watch live theatre. Businesses want to start travelling again to meet and woo clients and prospects.
And so ‘we-have-to-learn-to-live-with-Covid’ is this month’s mantra. Except that ‘learning to live’ with a pandemic virus is not quite the same thing as learning to ride a bike.
If the stabilisers come off too early, infections will grow exponentially, some may become quite unwell, a few will need hospitalisation and a handful could die.
The evidence, modelling and treatments have improved so much with experience, that our communities can be confident that we can now live with and manage those risks.
In the worst case, another lockdown could be triggered but the expert advice will be this is most unlikely, even with the greater transmissibility of the Delta variant, given the numbers of fully vaccinated adults in our populations.
But having vaccinated that part of the population that can and is willing to be vaccinated, the means of living with Covid – test and trace, isolation, and possibly NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) such as social distancing and face coverings – will receive a very subjective response. One individual’s willingness and ability to self-isolate will vary from another’s, depending on their personality, age and home circumstances. And one community’s willingness to live with Covid may differ from another’s. This is where the islands’ differing pandemic journeys to date may impact how they wish to live with Covid.
By comparison to Guernsey, Jersey has for most of the pandemic had a slightly easier border regime that has enabled moderately easier travel for its residents. The price it has paid for this, while protecting its health infrastructure, has been more cases, more people in self-isolation, greater reliance on NPIs and longer lockdowns.
Notwithstanding this, perhaps counter-intuitively, I suspect Guernsey is less willing to accept the reimposition of NPIs or large numbers in isolation, if that is the price to pay for ‘living with Covid.’ That’s because Guernsey’s pandemic experience, for most of the last 16 months has been life as normal on island, with the price being more restricted travel off island.
Developing a single Channel Islands’ pandemic response generally or border policy in particular has felt like a series of sliding door moments. Lip service has been paid on both main islands to a shared ambition, for example, to build an air bridge that would allow unrestricted travel for the benefit of both communities and their economies. In practice, nothing has been done to co-ordinate policy that might create the circumstances that could deliver that outcome.
As we approach 1 July, when free movement will finally be restored, it feels like we may be passing each other through another sliding door.
Contrary to some reports, Guernsey never has had a formal ‘elimination strategy’ but elimination has been the practical achievement for most of the pandemic of applying a strict regime based on an infection prevalence model. It is now moving from that strategy to one based on vaccination status and vaccination prevalence.
Consequently, on 1 July Guernsey will change to allow unrestricted travel from within the Common Travel Area (geographically, this is anywhere in the British Isles) for the double vaccinated and any accompanying unvaccinated children. But unlike Jersey, for this cohort, there will be no requirement to test or isolate, even temporarily.
This is not as a result of some cunning policy choice to steal a slice of Jersey’s visitor economy by making it just a smidgeon easier for visitors to get in, but rather a practical recognition that the island simply doesn’t have the testing capacity to test every single passenger as those numbers arriving climb with easier movement.
The testing capacity the island does have, will need to be preserved, for example, for those entering who are not double vaccinated, symptomatic individuals, outbreaks and contact tracing or routine testing of certain groups.
Given rising infection prevalence rates outside the island – particularly of the Delta variant in the UK which is of greater concern than the more prevalent variants currently circulating in the rest of Europe – it seems inevitable that cases will rise in Guernsey with consequential increases in numbers self-isolating.
The decision to distinguish between the double vaccinated (and their families) and, well, everyone else has not been without controversy. Not least because it is the younger cohort of adults, particularly students, who simply will not have had the opportunity to be double vaccinated by 1 July and are therefore disproportionately impacted by this policy choice. The distinction is a rational one to make if the focus is on whether it is ‘proportionate’ – a legal test within the civil contingencies legislation – for the individual.
In other words, the Civil Contingencies Authority has decided that it is no longer proportionate, given the evidence, to restrict an individual’s right to move freely if they’ve been double vaccinated. It would in my view have been an equally valid conclusion that it is proportionate for the community as a whole, within the spirit of #GuernseyTogether, to retain more restrictions for a few more weeks, at least until such time as all adults have had the opportunity to be vaccinated.
We will see in the next six-to-eight weeks whether it is Jersey or Guernsey that wobbles less without stabilisers as we learn to live with Covid.
Place your bets.
lGavin St Pier is a Guernsey politician. He previously served as the President of the island’s Policy and Resources Committee.
