‘RULES MAY KILL MORE’

Closing schools lets pandemic bounce back, warn doctors

STRICT lockdowns that involve shutting schools may increase the coronavirus death toll, a major study has found.

Researchers from Edinburgh University said draconian measures could prolong the epidemic and increase long-term deaths.

Their analysis concluded that closing schools ‘leads to more overall deaths from Covid-19’ than allowing them to remain open.

This is because it prevents herd immunity building up among the healthy and young, who face only a tiny risk of dying from the disease.

The virus bounces back as soon as measures are lifted, infecting more vulnerable populations and resulting in ‘more deaths, but later’.

The study was published in the British Medical Journal, co-ordinated by the Royal Society and funded by UK Research and Innovation, an arm of the Government. Its authors said their findings support calls for older age groups to be protected while the rest of society returns to normal to build up immunity.

The researchers said 97 per cent of Covid-19 deaths occur in over-65s, compared with just 5 per cent during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.

They concluded that mitigating the pandemic therefore ‘ requires a different strategy from an influenza epidemic, with more focus on shielding elderly and vulnerable people’.

The study found that social distancing was more effective at reducing deaths when employed only by the over-70s, than when practised by the entire population. It said it was inevitable that a large fraction of the population would be infected, but that ‘the final death toll depends primarily on the age distribution of those infected and not the total number’.

Government policy is focused on reducing Covid-19 cases across all age groups using measures such as pub curfews and the ‘rule of six’.

However, the authors suggested an alternative strategy aimed at minimising deaths could be more effective.

The study said this would involve ‘focusing stricter social distancing measures on care homes, where people are likely to die, rather than schools, where they are not’.

Lead author Professor Graeme Ackland, from Edinburgh University, said: ‘Unless a vaccine magically appears and is rolled out across the entire population in the next six months, then shutting down society is unlikely to reduce overall deaths.

‘Lockdowns essentially just postpone these deaths and prevent immunity building up which can reduce the spread in the long term and prevent infections among vulnerable people.

‘The way out of any epidemic is herd immunity, which is when enough people in the population are infected that the virus can’t spread.

‘We need to focus on the people who are going to be affected by coronavirus, not the people who aren’t.

‘Locking students in their university halls and preventing people in care homes mixing will have the same effect on reducing cases, but a different effect on deaths.’

The study re-evaluated a model by Professor Neil Ferguson and his colleagues from Imperial College London, which predicted that hundreds of thousands of deaths would occur if no action was taken to stop the spread of Covid-19.

It supported the key findings of the report by Professor Ferguson.

The new analysis suggests that the strict lockdown imposed by Boris Johnson in March successfully reduced peak demand for intensive care beds, but also prolonged the Covid-19 epidemic.

Professor Ackland said this would result in more long-term coronavirus deaths unless an effective vaccination programme is implemented within the next six months, which experts believe is unlikely. He said: ‘ In the short term, closing schools contributed to reducing the severity of the first wave, to the extent that Nightingale hospitals were not needed, but the decision has left us more vulnerable to subsequent waves of infection.’

The researchers used a model called ‘CovidSim’, which replicates the actions of individuals going home, to school, work, university and hospital.

Paul McKeigue, professor of genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics at Edinburgh, said the conclusion of the paper was consistent with the general theme of ‘focused protection’ advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration reported in the Daily Mail yesterday. He added: ‘Unless a vaccine became available, the only deaths that would be prevented by lockdowns would be the extra deaths resulting from the predicted overload of the health service.’

Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, added: ‘The headline result – that school closures in March could lead to a larger death toll over time – is intriguing and may cause some concern. In fact, this result applies to a specific, and probably unrealistic, scenario and should not be interpreted as a prediction.

‘Nonetheless, this counterintuitive result does shed some light on the current debate about whether to allow herd immunity to build up.’

‘Stricter social distancing’