With the early stages of 2021 set to be entirely dominated by the vaccine rollout, Wells on Wheels and Digimax Dental director Shaz Memon lays out his thoughts for the year ahead.
I think we are approaching the stage now where, after a wretched nine months, we can all start to feel optimistic as far as Covid is concerned. The incredible work of scientists in this country and across the world, smashing all of our conceptions about how quickly a vaccine could be created, has been a wonder to behold. We all now hope that the government is able to hit is target and get at least one dose of the vaccine to the most vulnerable by mid-February. But, even if it takes slightly longer, the end is now firmly in sight.
The trouble, I fear, is that once the huge boulder that is Covid-19 has been removed, we will find a multitude of new problems hiding underneath.
According to HMRC, 9.9 million people are currently furloughed, eight million of whom have been so since May.
By the time the scheme is removed at the end of April, these people will have gone a full year without working. Unfortunately, it is reasonable to expect that a significant proportion will not return to their old roles at this point. Therefore, with ONS figures revealing that unemployment is already up 23% from a year ago (increasing from 3.9% to 4.8%), the reopening of our economy will almost certainly be accompanied by an unemployment crisis.
Added to that, the employees who do return from furlough will be rusty and will have to adapt to a vastly different working environment. And, over the summer months, companies will sadly discover that, without the support of the furlough scheme, they are not able to survive for long.
Without over-egging the Covid comparisons, we are likely to see two significant waves of job losses and company closures. The first, immediately after the furlough scheme ends, and the second, a few months later when the changed economic climate begins to bite.
Even more alarming are the health crises that may be uncovered when Covid is finally out of the way. After the year they’ve had, we would all love for our health and care workers to be able to enjoy a bit of a break. Sadly, that seems unlikely.
To take just one area, cancer; a study from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and the healthcare management consultancy Carnall Farrar revealed that more than a quarter of a million urgent cancer GP referrals were missed between April and June. Around seven per cent of those people will have cancer.
The number of urgent GP referrals in April 2020 was down by 60% compared with the year before.
In August, when most of the country was relatively open and Covid rates were low, the referrals were still down 15% compared with the previous year, and down 28% for breast cancer.
We will sadly discover that many other areas of healthcare and everyday life will be in similar straights when Covid is behind us.
And so, while it is completely understandable that this novel coronavirus has taken up so much of our focus, we must be realistic about the challenges posed in the post-Covid world.
We should be enormously proud of the efforts of the health and care workers, the scientists, the other essential workers and everyone else who has kept the country going over the past year. Their victory over Covid will be a victory for us all. However, we must also accept that the celebrations will necessarily be short-lived.
It’s clear that when we have finally beaten Covid, we will all need to take a deep breath, pat ourselves down and get ready for the battles ahead.
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
