Turn off your tunnel vision, Mr Swann: there’s more to public health than Covid
Our health minister has a tough job to do, but he also has a duty to see the bigger picture, argues Fionola Meredith
Ifeel sorry for Robin Swann. Really, I do. Two months after he became health minister, we were hit by the chaos of Covid. How could a provincial politician, new to ministerial office, know best how to handle such an unexpected global crisis? And to be fair, Mr Swann was far from alone in using highly alarmist language and predicting mass death tolls. That was basically UK government policy: terrify the populace into quivering compliance.
It’s not surprising, then, that a recent Ipsos poll found that 68% of British people were “very concerned” about the threat of coronavirus to their own health. They were quite deliberately terrorised, and a great many remain so.
Now, however, we know much more about this new disease than we did back at the start, and the news is mostly reassuring.
The median infection fatality rate if you catch Covid is likely to be under 0.3%, far less than originally predicted. If you are under 65, the risk of dying of Covid is much the same as you face during the drive to work, and most of us seem to manage that without existential meltdown.
Children under 15, the least affected of all, are more likely to be hit by lightning than to die of Covid, which should give comfort to those parents still fretting about sending their kids back to school.
What’s more, we now know that the most common symptom of the disease is quite simply nothing: the majority of people are asymptomatic. Sadly, it is the most clinically vulnerable people — particularly the frail and elderly — who are the likeliest to lose the fight with coronavirus, should they become infected.
So surely these are the people at whom every possible protective resource must now be directed, rather than imposing arbitrary, scientifically unproven measures on the young, fit and healthy?
Yet Mr Swann continues to regale us with words of doom — and warnings of ever harder enforcement.
Following the recent increase in diagnosed cases in Northern Ireland, he has warned that we are in danger of “sliding down a very slippery and treacherous slope”. He has now announced new restrictions on indoor and outdoor gatherings, aimed at curbing the spread of the disease.
Mr Swann has also refused to rule out a return to full lockdown over the coming months.
To my mind, this is far more terrifying than the threat presented by Covid. Although cases have indeed been rising in Northern Ireland, they remain overall at a low level, and there is currently no marked increase in ICU admissions, hospitalisations or deaths.
Yes, we need to be careful, to keep washing our hands and social distancing, but in the absence of a measurable, demonstrable and growing correlation between cases and deaths, there is no reasonable justification for hitting the brakes.
Mr Swann, you and your ministerial colleagues need to remove your tunnel vision glasses and see the reality.
Lockdowns are a crude, bludgeoning measure of last resort, only justified when health services risk becoming overwhelmed. They are also of highly doubtful efficacy.
Look at Peru, which has had one of the longest, hardest lockdowns in the world, with military-enforced curfews, and yet Covid deaths are still climbing there, and are now poised to overtake Belgium — also a strict lockdown country — as the worst in the world.
What we do know, for sure, is that lockdowns cause immeasurable harm to lives and livelihoods, wrecking mental health, destroying businesses, wiping out jobs, increasing inequality. As ever, it is the poorest people who are hardest hit.
The relentless obsession with Covid, as if there was only one disease beginning with C, means that countless cancer diagnoses are missed, and urgent treatments delayed, potentially with fatal results.
If you are determined to find a “surge” somewhere, check out the domestic violence figures. Two-thirds of women in abusive relationships have suffered more violence from their partners during lockdown. In the first seven weeks, there was one call to police every 30 seconds.
We already have atrocious levels of domestic abuse in Northern Ireland. Lockdown has only compounded this horror. More than ever, we need clear, honest and evidence-based political leadership. We all have a duty — journalists most especially — to demand this from the government, rather than simply accept every edict as gospel truth.
Ticking us off like naughty children who haven’t washed our hands properly, or trying to frighten us into submission with ominous pronouncements, is no way to run a public health campaign — or a country.
Besides, in the long run, it doesn’t work.
Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? After a while, nobody believed him. Take note, Mr Swann.