So should we be worried about the latest rise in infections? Well, this is the official summary from the UKHSA: “SARS-CoV-2 positivity increased slightly to 9.0% compared with 8.2% in the previous week […] Covid-19 hospitalisations remained stable at 3.13 per 100,000 compared with 3.21 per 100,000 in the previous week. Covid-19 ICU admissions remained low and stable at 0.08 per 100,000 in week 19.” Terrifying!

To put that 0.08 statistic into context, in early 2021 the ICU rate reached 2.59 per 100,000 (i.e. nearly 30 times the current rate).

The media seem to have something of a doom loop, in which they periodically recycle the same scary headlines about Covid every few months. On one level, this is understandable: all press outlets have pages to fill and a headline like “Covid cases go up a little bit but nothing to worry about” is probably not going to get a lot of clicks. However, a consequence is that too many people are still living in fear of a virus that, even at its peak, was of little serious risk to the vast majority of the population.

Even less excusable are the irresponsible public health messages that are typically included in these reports. Readers this weekend are told: “Public health guidelines, such as wearing masks […] continue to be important measures to reduce the risk of infection.” Surely it is not too much to expect doctors and reporters to be aware of the authoritative Cochrane review of the evidence which concluded that “wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu-like illness/Covid-like illness”?

What’s more, almost every article pushes the importance of Covid booster vaccines despite the evidence that vaccination has at best limited impact on infection and transmission, particularly for the more recent variants. Many of the articles about the current variant quote Dr Gregory P. Gasic as claiming that “updated vaccines and boosters are vital” in combatting these variants. But in the very same sentence, Dr Gasic admits that the efficacy of boosters against these variants “isn’t entirely clear”. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Of course, no one knows for sure what will happen to Covid infections over the next few months. But it seems we can be certain that news outlets will continue to publish scaremongering headlines about Covid with little basis in reality. Additionally, we can expect that the experts will continue to promote the same costly public health measures which have proved so ineffective over the past four years.

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David Paton is a Professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University Business School.

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