November 2, 2021

By David Leonhardt and Claire Moses

Good morning. Britain offers a warning of what happens when a country ignores Covid.

A crowd in London at a screening of Dune last month.Vickie Flores/EPA, via Shutterstock

Needless suffering

There are downsides to most Covid-19 precautions. Keeping children home from school can cause them to fall behind. Working from home can impede creativity. Staying away from friends and relatives can damage mental health. Wearing masks can muffle speech, hide smiles and fog eyeglasses.

For all of these reasons, the ideal Covid policy for any society balances the benefits and costs of precautions. It acknowledges that excessive caution can do more harm than good. By now, regular readers will recognize the search for Covid balance as a theme of this newsletter. Today, we want to focus on a place that seems to be erring on the side of too little caution: Britain.

Over the past year, Britain's Covid response has included some major victories. The country rushed to vaccinate people (as we've explained) and was also willing to reimpose behavior restrictions last winter. These measures helped cause a sharp drop in caseloads.

In response, Britain reopened over the summer, allowing people to live largely without restrictions. Schools and workplaces have returned to normal, without masks. Restaurants are booked. Finding a taxi on a Saturday night in Central London is again a challenge.

"There's a feeling that finally we can breathe," Devi Sridhar, the head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in August. "We can start trying to get back what we've lost."

The problem is that Britain now seems to have lost a sense of balance, as Sridhar has also suggested. Cases have surged this fall, more so than in the rest of Europe, the U.S. or many other countries. Yet Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government continues to oppose measures that could reduce cases.

We want to focus on Britain partly because it can offer lessons for the U.S. and other countries. The Delta variant arrived in Britain earlier than in many other places, making it something of a leading indicator. Cases in Britain rose for about two months starting in May and then started falling. But the decline didn't last:

Data as of Oct. 31. Chart shows a seven-day daily average. The New York Times

Over the past week in the U.S., cases have also stopped falling. The reasons are not clear, as is often the case with Covid, and the recent increase is minuscule. But it's a reminder that the pandemic will probably keep having ups and downs.

Experts say Britain seems to be making three main mistakes that are aggravating the pandemic.

1. Not enough vaccinations

Despite being ahead of most of Europe on vaccinating adults, Britain waited to approve vaccines for adolescents. It did not recommend vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds until September, weeks after many students had returned to school, as our colleague Josh Holder has noted. Today, only 21 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds in England are vaccinated, compared with 80 percent of adults.

The U.S. faces a related challenge. About 57 percent of Americans age 12 to 15 have been vaccinated, and children 5 to 11 are on the verge of becoming eligible. A significant number of parents remain wary, partly because Covid is rarely severe in children. But vaccinating children — in addition to the individual benefits — is likely to hold down cases for everyone else.

The biggest problem in the U.S. is a vaccination rate lower than in most other high-income countries.

2. Waning immunity

The pace at which vaccines lose their effectiveness remains a subject of intense debate. Most experts believe that the vaccines remain excellent at preventing severe illness, even months after shots are given. But the bulk of the evidence suggests that the vaccines do lose some of their ability to prevent at least mild infections. That's especially true of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has been widely used in England.

Britain's initial speed at vaccinating people brought down caseloads early this year. Yet it also meant that waning immunity became a problem sooner than in countries that were slower to give shots. Britain is now offering boosters to people 50 and above, as well as health care workers and the medically vulnerable.

Over the next few months, waning immunity could become a growing problem in the U.S., especially for more vulnerable people. All Americans 65 and above are eligible for boosters, along with anybody who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and some other people.

3. Live and let live

Behavior restrictions — like mask wearing — are not as effective as their proponents sometimes suggest. Britain offers a case study: Scotland, where masks are often mandated, has a similar level of Covid spread as England, where masks are less common, as John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times has written. If masks determined Covid spread, Scotland's rate would be lower than England's.

But there is a difference between a precaution having a modest effect and no effect. Masks do help, according to a wide variety of evidence, even if their impact is sometimes overwhelmed by other factors. Britain seems to be suffering from a lack of almost any restrictions, including mask mandates. Among the biggest problem, Burn-Murdoch notes, is the number of crowded indoor gatherings across Britain, including Scotland.

When cases are falling, it often makes sense to let people live more freely. When cases are surging, the reverse is true. Britain is ignoring that lesson — and pleas from many experts.

The bottom line

Britain's recent Covid policy has led to deaths and overwhelmed hospitals. "When a health care system fails, increasing numbers of people suffer and die needlessly," Dr. Kenneth Baillie wrote on Twitter. "This is happening, now, all over the U.K."

Still, it is worth putting Britain's troubles in perspective. The country's high vaccination rate means that only a tiny share of recent cases have led to severe illness, and the death rate this fall has been a fraction of what it was last winter. "This virus is going to be with us for years, if not the rest of our lives," Willem van Schaik, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in England, told us. "We've definitely left the worst behind us."

Despite the Covid surge in Britain, the U.S. — where the overall vaccination rate is lower — arguably remains in worse shape, with a considerably higher death rate per capita. Why? Vaccination rates still matter more than anything else.

Data as of Oct. 31. Chart shows a 7-day daily average.The New York Times

THE LATEST NEWS

Washington

Officials from Texas at the Supreme Court.Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Questions from Supreme Court justices suggested that they might be skeptical of Texas' restrictive abortion law. (Brett Kavanaugh could have the deciding vote.)
Senator Joe Manchin said he would not support President Biden's revised spending plan without "greater clarity" about its economic effects.

Climate

Biden at the climate summit in Glasgow.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

More than 100 countries, including Brazil, China and the U.S., pledged to end deforestation by 2030. Forests are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide.
The Biden administration is planning to heavily regulate methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Biden and other leaders spoke in grave terms about global warming, but offered few new commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Election Day

Voters today will elect governors in Virginia and New Jersey, and mayors in New York City, Boston and elsewhere. Here's what to watch for.
Minneapolis voters will decide whether to restructure their police department after the murder last year of George Floyd.
The mayor's race in Buffalo is between a socialist who won the Democratic primary and a centrist incumbent running a write-in campaign.
A year after the 2020 election, how well do you understand its demographic trends?

MORNING READS

Mushrooms, container ships and many, many Jokers.Ali Kate Cherkis for The New York Times

Back with a vengeance: What Halloween looked like on the subway.

Up in the air: How we travel now.

Spousal support: The paradox of alimony for men.

Memoir: Five questions for Kal Penn.

Advice from Wirecutter: Get a quieter leaf blower.

Lives Lived: Dr. Aaron Beck developed pragmatic, thought-monitoring psychotherapy that transformed the treatment of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. He died at 100.

ARTS AND IDEAS

The final scene of "Die Meistersinger" features 200 people.Todd Heisler/The New York Times

A six-hour opera epic

Cultural institutions have been trying to lure audiences back with shorter shows. Not the Metropolitan Opera.

The Met is staging the longest opera in its repertory, Wagner's nearly six-hour "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg," about love and music-making in medieval Germany. The show includes more than 400 artists and stagehands, breakneck set changes, fight scenes and two 40-minute intermissions. "There's always room for epics," Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, told The Times. "There is always an appeal for huge events."

For now, the audience has been slow to turn out. On opening night last week, a little more than half of the auditorium's 3,700 seats were filled. On Saturday, about two-thirds of the seats were full.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

Julia Gartland for The New York Times

These Korean barbecue-style meatballs are savory and sweet.

What to Read

In his memoir, "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows," the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei writes about family, exile and the inseparability of art and politics.

What to Watch

Stream these science-fiction movies, including a mega-budget, yet overlooked, time-travel spectacle.

Late Night

The hosts talked about Biden and the pope.

Now Time to Play

The pangrams from yesterday's Spelling Bee were addiction, condonation, diatonic, dictation and indication. Here is today's puzzle — or you can play online.

Here's today's Mini Crossword, and a clue: Broadway's "___ Boots" (five letters).

If you're in the mood to play more, find all our games here.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

Correction: A chart in yesterday's newsletter showing per capita emissions was mislabeled. It showed metric tons, not million metric tons.

P.S. Ronald Reagan signed a bill making Martin Luther King's Birthday a federal holiday 38 years ago today.

Here's today's print front page.

"The Daily" is about inflation. On "The Ezra Klein Show," a discussion about student debt.

Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.