We now know that lockdown is a social disaster. Please, Boris, don’t do it again
Not again. Not after all the vaccines, all the precautions, all the privations. Not after all the models that turned out to be so absurdly alarmist. Our freedoms are elemental. They are what make us who we are as a nation. We can’t surrender them on the off-chance that some putative ill might materialise.
The original lockdown was sold on the grounds that it was the only way to prevent a meltdown in our healthcare system. In the event, our Nightingale hospitals stood empty, and real-world data (as opposed to modelling) showed that the peak in new infections had passed before the restrictions were imposed.
The second lockdown had a sounder rationale. It was supposed to buy time while the vaccination programme was rolled out. Since, by definition, lockdowns push infections into the future, rather than prevent them altogether, this at least made sense.
But we have more than done our bit. We are among the most inoculated people on earth, with some of us now on our fourth jabs. Vaccines were supposed to be the way out of this nightmare. If they are not, then we are facing chronic lockdowns forever.
I’m confident that, had that been the proposition in March 2020 – had we been told that we faced a lifetime of stoppages – we’d have refused point-blank. But we have been boiled slowly, like so many frogs in the pan. A three-week lockdown became six weeks, then 12 weeks, then a wait until we could vaccinate the clinically vulnerable, then the over-50s, then all adults, then kids, too. After all that, the idea of annual lockdowns can feel almost like a logical next step.
At each stage, we have been lulled, habituated, anaesthetised. Human beings tend to anchor to the status quo, becoming irrationally changeaverse. When the status quo involves being paid to stay at home, along with a satisfying sense of solidarity and community, it is hardly surprising that some people take to it readily.
Government advisers originally feared that a lockdown of more than three weeks would be unenforceable: a free people would shake it off, as a horse shakes off flies. In the event, they need not have worried. Our liberties turned out to be much easier to remove than to restore.
Still, it is worth pointing out that, at every stage, the models used by public health agencies exaggerated the numbers of infections and of deaths. Indeed, it may well be that, once again, the lockdown will come
into effect only after the peak in new infections has passed. Why do our leaders keep falling for it?
Because, I’m afraid, all the incentives are stacked one way. No politician ever gets into trouble for erring on the side of caution. Nor does any public health adviser. No one has ever been hounded from office for spending too much on test and trace, or for imposing restrictions that had little effect, or for making predictions that were excessively alarmist. Make the slightest slip the other way, though, and you’re finished.
Will that logic once again push Boris Johnson into a course of action that, in his heart of hearts, he doubts? Not necessarily. A number of things have changed since we last faced such a decision.
First, there is now organised political opposition to more bans. Last week, 100 Conservative MPs voted against the relatively mild restrictions set out in Plan B. They were not concerned, in most cases, about masks in cinemas. The vast majority of them recognised that, even with Plan B, Britain would remain more open than Europe. No, what they were really doing was drawing a line, seeking assurances that ministers would go no further. In some cases, they withdrew their opposition after reportedly getting such assurances.
Second, we have now had ample opportunity to measure Sage’s forecasts against the reality. We saw their predictions for the first wave, their predictions for the second wave, their predictions for what would happen after the July opening, their predictions for what would happen this autumn. Every time, what actually happened was less severe than their central predictions and, in almost every case, less severe than best-case scenarios.
Third, this wave began in South Africa, giving us a few extra weeks of data to study. Everyone accepts that the omicron mutation has been less lethal in South Africa than the delta, but there were worries that this reflected a difference in demographics: the average age is 27 in South Africa, 40 here.
Last week, though, studies started to come in that broke down South Africa’s hospitalisations by age group. They confirmed the view of both the European Medicines Agency and America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, namely that this is a milder variant than its predecessors.
Fourth, we have had a control in the experiment all along. It has become almost indelicate to mention Sweden, these days, but there she stands, stolid, sensible and social-democratic, a living refutation of the claim that house arrest was the only way to avoid mass fatalities.
It takes a real effort of will to recall how affronted foreign media were by Sweden’s refusal to shut down. “Heading for disaster,” went one headline. “Leading us to catastrophe,” agreed another. Time magazine reported that “Sweden’s relaxed approach to the coronavirus could already be backfiring” and quoted a doctor saying that it would “probably end in a historical massacre”. “We fear that Sweden has picked the worst possible time to experiment with national chauvinism,” chided the Washington Post. It was “the world’s cautionary tale”, pronounced the New York Times.
So, do Sweden’s fatality rates stick out in every chart? Hardly. They are roughly in line with those of, say, Austria or Greece, and better than in Italy or Britain. At first, commentators tried to claim that this was because of some unique characteristic, such as low population density. In fact, Sweden is an urbanised society, with 85 per cent of its population occupying two per cent of its territory. Then they compared it only to its neighbours, pointing to better outcomes in Norway and Finland. But the original claim was not that a lockdown would fractionally lower the death rate; it was that nothing else would prevent a calamity. So now, commentators simply ignore the place altogether.
Fifth, public opinion has finally begun to turn. For 18 months, YouGov polls have shown unwavering support for every kind of prohibition: closed shops, closed schools, closed pubs, closed borders. But on Friday, there was a significant shift, with 60 per cent opposing shop or pub closures and 62 per cent opposing a ban on mixing with other households. Perhaps, after long slumber, we are remembering who we are as a people.
Sixth, and most significant, the PM ignored the official advice once before – and was utterly vindicated. When “freedom day” was decreed in July, public health agencies predicted disaster. Modellers at Warwick University forecast at least 1,000 deaths a day (in the event, the highest daily toll was 188). Sage told us that daily hospital admissions would be between 2,000 and 7,000 (the highest daily total was 1,086). Neil Ferguson predicted 100,000 infections a day (they peaked at 56,688).
I have criticised the lockdowns often in these pages. But the PM deserves vastly more credit than he has had for trusting his judgment in July. Britain is, as I write, still a freer society than almost any of its neighbours. Our businesses are open, our retail sector is prospering and we have more people in work.
Why throw it all away? Why give in to the same combination of flesh-creeping forecasts, hair-raising headlines and lockdown-nostalgic devolved administrations? The same off-therecord briefings? The same reports of “major incidents”? Why allow models, necessarily academic, to trump our real-world experience of having reopened and avoided the worst?
Had the lockdowns been a clinical trial, they would have been called off on grounds of the damage they were doing to public health. We all now know the effects. The disorientated teenagers, the rise in undiagnosed cancers, the bankruptcies, the mental health problems, the tax rises, the sheer human misery. Are we seriously proposing to go through it all again, at a time when the coronavirus has become endemic, and when, according to the ONS, 95 per cent of us have antibodies? Why inflict such ruin on ourselves and our posterity?
At such times, only Shakespeare will do:
Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!
Why give in to the same combination of flesh-creeping forecasts and hair-raising headlines?