Northern Ireland should follow England in fully re-opening this month

The replacement to Matt Hancock as UK health minister, Sajid Javid, is talking bluntly about the need to move on from lockdown.

Mr Javid said something that lockdown sceptics were sometimes mocked for saying only a few months ago: “We are going to have to learn to accept the existence of Covid and find ways to cope with it – just as we already do with flu.”

There is now a UK-wide rise in the number of people being infected with coronavirus, including more than 500 new cases in Northern Ireland in the most recent 24-hour reporting period, the largest since January. This is far from ideal, yet the numbers of people in hospital are low. One reason for this seems to be that vaccinations dampen the severity of infections, as well as stopping them altogether.

But the question of whether or not to have a lockdown cannot just be a matter of infection numbers. It has to be a wider calculation of cost and benefit. This has never entirely been the case, for two principle reasons.

First, there was naturally anxiety in March 2020 about the risks of an unknown new pandemic.

Second, we still cannot fully know the costs of lockdown.

Those wider costs will take years to assess, in terms of mental health damage, harm to education, ruined economic sectors, damage to untreated non Covid health conditions, and the impact on life expectancy of the economic collapse.

It is possible to be think these overall costs of lockdown are unacceptable without claiming Covid is harmless. It is clearly worse than typical flu (even if our response to it might have to be as pragmatic as our response to flu). But Covid deaths have been overwhelmingly among the already very ill.

Northern Ireland has been very slow in returning to normality, in part because there are political forces pulling us to have a closer reopening to the Republic.

But it has a much less advanced jab regime.

It is time to open up fully this month, as England is doing.

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