Editor

If I have correctly understood the letter of your correspondent, Nikky Govier, (Letters, 12 November) then she implies that governments around the world are unnecessarily restricting personal freedoms and destroying livelihoods because of a pandemic with a fatality rate of less than one per cent.

Global coronavirus statistics, as at 14 November, were 1.3 million deaths from 53.4 million cases. I calculate this as a case fatality rate of 2.4 per cent. However the pandemic is not yet over so the total number of cases and deaths are certain to rise. The case fatality rate is likely to fall with improved treatment, so long as hospitals are not swamped with cases.

If governments had taken no action to try to control the spread of infection then the case fatality rate to date would almost certainly have been higher than 2.4 per cent.

Mortality is not the only effect of coronavirus. Roughly 20 per cent of cases need to be hospitalised. There is also chronic or “long Covid”, not necessarily a sequel to severe acute disease, where lassitude may continue for over 12 weeks.

We have had a low infection rate in Ceredigion so far, though cases have started to rise recently. Not having large numbers of people commuting on crowded public transport probably helped, as did the absence of a local airport. Fears that tourists or students would introduce a high level of infection to the county appear to have been groundless.

I think it is unfortunate that considerable premature publicity has recently been given to the mRNA vaccine especially with claims of 90 per cent effectiveness. Though the vaccine has been given to half of a group of over 43,000 people across six countries, so far only 94 of them mostly the unvaccinated controls - have developed clinical disease as the result of natural exposure. The 90 per cent figure is thus based on very small numbers. The vaccine has to be shown to be safe and effective before it can be licensed. The vaccine developer has so far failed to release a lot of information from this trial. As far as I am aware, the age distribution of the volunteers has not been revealed or whether any antibody testing has been performed.

It has been said that the vaccine will allow life to return to normal. I hope that we will have learnt from this pandemic and not revert entirely to the old lifestyle, for the sake of the environment and ultimately humanity. We don’t need to burn so much fossil fuel in commuting. Many meetings have been held successfully using Zoom. Some jobs can be done from home. Perhaps some offices and shops can be converted for habitation. Do we need to fly around the world as frequently as we did?

We did not learn from SARS or MERS. Will we learn from Covid?

David Kirby Cae Melyn Aberystwyth

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