The strategy includes a reduction in access to the more accurate tests for most of the people with symptoms, an end to legal requirements, and a phasing-out of free access to rapid flow tests.
Boris Johnson said the time was over with the changes that will come into force on Thursday. He said that people will be asked to look after each other.
The wisdom of phasing out both testing and self-isolation measures at this stage of the Pandemic is being questioned by health and education leaders and scientists. What will the UK look like over the next year, and how will it affect our ability to deal with Covid-19?
Proponents of relaxing the measures have often appealed to individual responsibility, whether that is to voluntarily self-isolate if positive, or to assess our own appetite for risk and behave accordingly. There is a limit to what an individual can do with a disease.
If you know you are positive in the first place, and you can resist pressure from employers to go in to work, you can choose to be isolated. From now on, all three aspects will become more difficult, and will put others at risk.
Reducing social contact or wearing high-quality filters is one of the measures individuals can take to protect themselves. Some aspects of Covid surveillance will remain, but with less reliable local data on infections and not being able to ask others to test before meeting, personal choices are taken away from individuals.
If Covid develops, lack of testing will reduce timely access to antivirals to prevent severe illness and long-term care if it develops.
The peaks in July with Delta and this winter with Omicron were not higher because people voluntarily restricted their behavior over and above what was required by legislation, according to theSage group. The public needs to be able to see that there is a potential problem. It will be less likely that enough people will change their behavior at the same time as testing and reporting are scaled back.
I wrote about the danger of Covid becoming a disease of poverty almost a year ago. This danger is worsened by the new policies. Those in more deprived areas will be less able to afford to test; less able to afford to voluntarily self-isolate; more likely to live in poor, overcrowded housing and more likely to be crowded spaces outside the home thus more likely to spread the disease. The cycle perpetuates because Ill-health worsens families.
coronaviruses has worse health outcomes than the flu and is more infectious than the flu. Adding it to our population will return us to what feels like normal life, but it will be a shorter and sicker one.
Omicron is not the last variant. It is likely that many people will catch it once or twice a year as the vaccine efficacy fades and public health measures are abandoned. The steady gains seen over the last 70 years had already stopped in 2011.
The health service will be under pressure as we add a new disease to the already challenging winter season. A large percentage of the workforce getting sick at the same time will cause significant disruption to education, transportation, and other work places.
Communal remedies are the best for any problem. When it came to tackling pollution, car accidents, and drink-driving, societies around the world did just that.
For coronaviruses, this means research into better vaccines and treatments, understanding and preventing long Covid, infrastructure investment to support cleaner air, and a well-oiled national and global public health strategy that can spring into action when needed.
The last three will be effective against future airborne Pandemics. If we don't want a world with more illness and death, we need to do something to prevent it.
The Clinical Operational Research Unit at the University College London applies advanced analytical methods to problems in healthcare.
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