An illusion that simply won’t work
To believe that you can isolate and protect 30 per cent of the population and that we can send out the other 70 per cent of the population without there being massive damage is an illusion.
It is unethical, quite apart from ineffective, to think you can send out that many people in the middle of a pandemic without terrible consequences. We are talking about, probably in the United States, hundreds of thousands, if not more, of people actually dying.
Certain groups — the young, the poor, ethnic minorities — have had a raw deal out of this pandemic and we need to do something about it. Secondly, the way we’re doing things, this cycle of restrictions and relaxations of second and possibly third and fourth lockdowns is not the right way to do things.
My concern is that the strategy, the Great Barrington Declaration strategy, will actually make things worse. First, if we were to say that people over 65 should be locked away and sequestered, well, something like 20-25 per cent of the population is in that bracket. In the United States, it’s 54 million people; in Canada, seven million; in the United Kingdom, it’s 13 million. If you add people with comorbidities, you’re going even higher, to about 30 per cent. We cannot tear society apart and sequester those people away. It’s simply not possible.
Look at the people who care for them. In Canada, there are more carers, unpaid carers, than there are people aged over 65, 7.8 million in fact. So it’s an impossibility to sequester these people. Secondly, when we talk about letting people live their ordinary lives, the privileged will be able to stay relatively safe in their bigger houses, in their private cars, being able to work at home, while the people who will go out and catch the infection will be the underprivileged.
When we talk about the damage, it’s not a binary, it’s not death or life. We know that “long- COVID” causes huge amounts of damage: 38 per cent of people who have had COVID have abnormal chest radiographs two months later. Seventy per cent of them have fatigue. There are studies that show that a quarter of all people who get COVID have got symptoms that are akin to post- traumatic stress disorder. So it causes vast damage, which is why the head of the World Health Organization said allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical.
The notion that there will be soon a point when we can let the elderly out because there will be immunity among the majority of the population doesn’t stand up. We don’t know if that immunity will build up. We’ve seen in big studies recently that the amount of antibodies has fallen. We saw it in Manaus in the Amazon rainforest, where there was a huge amount of infection the first time around and it’s now having a huge second spike.
The notion that it’s either focused protection or lockdown is the biggest mistake of all. Lockdown is a shortterm emergency measure. It brings the infections down so that people are not dying in the streets, so you’re not having to decide who you’re going to treat, to get things to a point where you can manage them through more proportionate measures. The reason why things spiked again is that when we lifted those restrictions in the summer, we didn’t put those proportionate measures
in place. We didn’t — in the U. K., in the U. S. — have decent test- and- trace systems. They failed us.
Secondly, we didn’t have good regulations to make sure that workplaces and public spaces were actually safe for people. Thirdly, we didn’t support people. In the U. K., in the first lockdown, poor people and ethnic minorities were three to six times more likely to break lockdown, not because they weren’t motivated to do so, but because they didn’t have the resources to do so. And so, bringing in a financial scheme to support people was absolutely critical.
The response to that is not to expose those aged under 65 more. The response to that is to address the inequalities in our society, including within the pandemic. If you bring in measures that restrict people, you have to do something that makes it possible to abide by those restrictions.
The answer lies in actually providing those resources and a number of places in the world have done that. One of the most remarkable places has been Kerala in southern India, a relatively poor state, but it made sure that when people had to self- isolate, they were given money, they were given accommodation, they were given food, they were given support. You don’t play off the economic safety against their physical safety.
The notion that you should simply avoid restrictions has simply postponed restrictions. It has meant that when they actually have to be put in place, they take longer and are more severe than before. In practice and in reality, the Great Barrington Declaration might sound good as an abstraction, but in the end, it increases the likelihood of lockdown and does more damage.