Ross Clark:

To avoid the health service becoming overwhelmed, cancers went undetected and heart attacks untreated

The British public protected the NHS all right. Any fears that the institution might be overwhelmed were put aside when, a couple of weeks into lockdown, the hurriedly-constructed Nightingale hospitals were still empty, along with many other hospital wards, clinics and surgeries. By mid April, routine clinical activity by GPS was down 25 per cent and A&E visits down 52 per cent. Some of that was thanks to fewer drunks falling over and fewer children coming to grief in playgrounds, yet there is plenty to suggest that some very unwell people were scared into taking the instruction not to trouble the NHS too much to heart.

Whether, by avoiding the NHS, the public helped achieve the other objective of the Government’s original Covid slogan – “save lives” – is still difficult to discern. But a month ago, the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) quietly published an analysis which came to the stark conclusion that lockdown could end up costing more lives than the virus.

The study, which estimated loss of life in terms of Quality-adjusted Life-years (QALYS), calculated that Covid-19 will cost 530,000 QALYS in the year to March 2021. On the other side of the ledger, however, reduced access to A&E in that time could cost 41,000 QALYS and the early discharge of some patients from hospital in order to make way for the expected wave of Covid patients a further 73,000 QALYS. In the longer term, the cancelling and postponement of surgery and other treatments will cost 45,000 QALYS, the recession 157,000 QALYS and the long-term effects of poverty due to a smaller economy 294,000 QALYS.

The department still said that it thought lockdown had been worth it, on the grounds that it helped save many more lives from Covid-19. Nevertheless, the report concluded, “when morbidity is taken into account, the estimates for the health impacts from a lockdown and lockdown-induced recession are greater in terms of QALYS than the direct Covid-19 deaths”.

We should be wary of any such modelling, but there is little doubt that cancers have gone undetected and heart attacks untreated. Even by June, when the number of Covid patients had dropped sharply and the country was opening up again, the NHS was still running at half-cock. In that month, GPS made 153,134 urgent cancer referrals, 21 per cent down on June 2019. Routine hospital treatments were down 67 per cent. The legacy of lockdown, according to a study by healthcare technology company Medefer, is that there are 15.3million people waiting for an NHS appointment. There are 50,536 who have been waiting for more than a year – up from 1,643 in January.

We all know the modelling that led to the country being locked-down: Prof Neil Ferguson’s paper claiming that 500,000 people could die in Britain of Covid-19 unless the Government took drastic action. But how much consideration was put into the negative effects of lockdown on our health? Ministers seem to have been terrified by a big scary number spewed out by a mathematical model, without it ever occurring to them that there was another scary number crying out to be estimated: the number of people who would lose their lives as a direct or indirect result of trying to “protect the NHS”.

The Government had no idea of the costs of lockdown on the nation’s health because it never countenanced that course of action. Its pre-covid pandemic plans sought to prepare for an infectious disease that would be caught by half of the UK population and kill up to 2.5 per cent of those it infected, with a possible death toll of 750,000 – worse even than Prof Ferguson’s worst-case scenario. Yet lockdown was never part of the plan: people were to be encouraged to go about their daily business in as normal a way as possible.

But come Covid and all that went out of the window. We were ordered indoors and told not to bother the NHS unless we were seriously ill – all without any consideration of what that would mean for heart patients, cancer patients and anyone else who fell ill of anything other than Covid-19. The NHS was reconfigured as a National Covid Service which needed “protecting” from anyone suffering from anything else. I had always thought that the NHS was supposed to be there to protect us.