Tragic cost of putting UK under house arrest

CAST your mind back to March 23, 2020, the day an ashen-faced Boris Johnson announced the first and most comprehensive Covid lockdown.

Pandemic modelling scientists – notably Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College, London – were warning him that without draconian measures the death toll could reach 500,000.

This led to near hysterical calls for action from opposition politicians and much of the broadcast media. Any suggestion of less severe restrictions was howled down.

Initially reluctant to put the country into suspended animation, the Prime Minister acceded. We are still living with the consequences of that decision, and probably will be for years, if not decades.

Vast hospital waiting lists from postponed treatments as the NHS sought to protect itself and its staff. Children’s education set back incalculably by school closures.

The traumatic memory of how care homes effectively became houses of death as residents were shunted back from hospital.

And then there was the massive financial hit: £97billion in employment support alone, stunted economic growth and ultimately the collapse of many firms.

So was it all worth it? The lockdowns were called for the best of motives. No government wants to be held responsible for allowing its citizens to die.

But a new study from leading universities in Sweden (which didn’t lock down but had better outcomes than the UK) and the US seriously questions the efficacy of lockdowns and whether they achieved their primary objective of saving lives.

It estimates that the first lockdown may have saved as few as 1,700 lives in England and Wales. Any avoidable death diminishes us all, of course, and is the cause of deep sorrow for loved ones.

However, when set in context, this number appears relatively small. The influenza virus causes or contributes to around 20,000 deaths a year, but we have never locked the country down against it.

The Mail doesn’t criticise Mr Johnson for locking down. He was under immense pressure from all sides (not least Sir Keir Starmer) to ‘follow the science’.

The problem was that the science was often confused, sometimes contradictory and, where the early modelling was concerned, downright wrong.

The Covid Inquiry will tackle these weighty matters. But if lessons are to be learned it must look closely at the dreadful negative effects of lockdown as well as death rates.

The whole of life is a balance of risk, from crossing the road to waging war. The question is, did we get that balance right on Covid? Increasingly it looks as though we may not have.