Lord Hague:
Instead, ministers should listen to Tony Blair and prepare for Covid testing on a truly massive scale
Three months after we entered lockdown, as we tiptoe out to non-essential stores and meet a lonely relative, we can begin to benefit from something previously unavailable – experience. Instead of having to rely entirely on widely varying mathematical models and fight an unknown virus in a fog of uncertainty, governments can start to see what has actually worked in different places around the world.
This new situation can have immediate benefits. For instance, we can now see that it is not necessary to have a two-metre separation between people to keep the virus in retreat where it is already at a low level. We know this from the experience of countries such as Denmark, France and Germany where the recommended distance is shorter, and we should not have to spend weeks agonising over it. Great swathes of our hospitality industry could thus be saved.
We also know that these and other European countries are continuing to make progress without quarantining people entering from low-risk countries nearby, and can therefore concentrate on testing arrivals and stopping people coming from highrisk places. So the rather belated decision to require everyone arriving in the UK to quarantine themselves for two weeks ought soon to be ditched.
We can also begin to discern the true cost of a national lockdown, not just in economic but in human terms. The unemployment figures about to be released represent a personal catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of people. Large rounds of corporate redundancies mean worse is to come. For many individuals, lockdown is going to mean depression, family breakdown and despair.
On top of this, we can now be sure that there will be tens of thousands of undetected cancers. Evidence is mounting that domestic abuse is rising, and mental health deteriorating. Dental standards will have dropped sharply, with lasting consequences. Above all, the education and development of millions of young people have been severely damaged, and they will carry the scars of that for the rest of their long lives.
We now know therefore that a lockdown is not a temporary blip or a paid holiday, but a disaster for our society. It is increasing inequality, social tension, and unaffordable debt. Globally, the World Bank has estimated that up to 60 million people will be pushed into extreme poverty. Such a disaster cannot under any circumstances be repeated. There can be no second lockdown.
To use yet another wartime analogy, a lockdown is like Dunkirk – a heroic operation in itself but the result of a massive failure. I am not singling out the Government for that, for this has been a failure at multiple levels: a failure by the whole world to prevent the trading of wild animals for consumption; by China to report the initial outbreak openly; by our and many other countries to prepare for this type of pandemic.
Out of such failure, we have also learnt crucial lessons. One of these is that some countries have escaped a good deal of the brutal costs of having to pursue a tight lockdown, even though they are large, complex and open nations. Germany and South Korea are examples that stand out.
Furthermore, we can see that these countries have something in common – from the outset they were much more ambitious about testing. South Koreans used a fully prepared track-and-trace system at once, and Germans were tested for the virus on a vastly greater scale than the people of Italy, Spain, Britain or America. This is why the Government, correctly, is rolling out a track-and-trace system here.
Yet there is a danger of thinking that this is all we have to do. We should observe that even the South Koreans have sometimes struggled to keep a lid on the virus. And this week’s renewed outbreak in Beijing shows it can easily return just when you think you’ve got rid of it. If it is true that a lockdown represents a massive failure of policy and the costs of it cannot be repeated, and also true that testing has always provided the key to avoiding such failure, then it is time for the British Government to be much more ambitious in its goals.
In particular, ministers should listen carefully to Tony Blair. That is not an easy sentence for me to write, given that I spent four years of my life as his official arch-enemy. But the report published earlier this month by his Institute for Global Change argues persuasively for the Government to prepare now for testing on a truly massive scale – involving millions of tests every week as people enter the country, arrive at work, attend conferences or just decide to go out.
His argument is that a wide range of rapid tests are now under development and that they can be rolled out faster with government funding, commitment and accelerated permissions. Many are being developed by British firms. While the cost would run into billions of pounds, it would be very little compared with the costs of one day of lockdown. It could even be financed through special bonds.
These almost instant point-of-use tests would provide warning of any outbreak and could be used to produce the data necessary to act quickly and avoid further lockdowns. They would be used in conjunction with lab-based tests to pinpoint new cases. This is not an alternative to a track-and-trace system, but could make that far more likely to be successful.
Such a programme would require the harnessing of the resources of many small labs, expanding large ones, and making financial commitments to firms who could manufacture the simpler, mass tests. Taking them would become part of our way of life. But that is better than mass unemployment and widespread other illnesses becoming our way of life instead. Currently, the Government appears to be encouraging employers to adopt such testing but has not made the leap to saying this is an overriding national strategy.
It ought to do so, with a Cabinet minister responsible for seeing it through. We have seen enough to know that a lockdown is so destructive that it can only ever be allowed once. That is why we should get out of it as soon as that can safely be done. But it is also why we should prepare, invest and organise to avoid it ever being contemplated again.