Up to 40,000 lives ‘saved by lockdown’
UP TO 40,000 Scots could have died from coronavirus if the country had not gone into lockdown, a study has found.
Scientists have estimated what might have happened if Scotland had done the same as Sweden, where a lockdown was not imposed.
So far there have been 4,119 deaths linked to the virus in Scotland and more than 5,200 in Sweden, the highest per capita number in the Nordic region.
There was no compulsory lockdown in Sweden, unlike elsewhere in Europe.
But in line with government advice, most people adopted voluntary social distancing and working from home. Restaurants, bars, schools and businesses remained open. But gatherings of more than 50 people were banned.
Rowland Kao, a Professor of epidemiology and data science at Edinburgh University, who led the study, said: ‘We took the relative amount of transmission going on in Sweden, translated that over to Scotland and looked at what the resultant number of deaths would have been had we taken that approach.’
When Denmark and Norway agreed to reopen their borders to each other, from June 15, Sweden was left out because of its high rate of infection.
Professor Kao estimates between 7,000 and 40,000 people could have died from Covid-19 if Scotland had followed the same measures, far higher than the current death toll.
That is because Sweden failed to bring its infection rate down as effectively as Scotland.
Scotland’s R number – the number of people infected by each case – may have been up to six at the start of the pandemic but is now as low as 0.6.
Sweden’s R number went from an estimated 2.8 to 0.76 – a much smaller reduction.
Professor Kao said: ‘With no lockdown and some restrictions, Scotland could have experienced a slightly larger outbreak, possibly with 7,280 deaths, or a far larger outbreak which could have killed nearly 39,613.’
Scotland would have avoided the collateral damage to the economy and schools caused by lockdown, ‘but many more people would have died’.
‘It’s fair to say that the chance of there being substantially more deaths is very high. There’s a 50:50 chance we would have had a much worse epidemic.
‘The great advantage is we should be better prepared if there is a second wave. It should become possible to have a much more regional approach.
‘We know a lot more about the disease and we have more testing capacity.’
In May, Professor Kao and his colleagues said more than 2,000 coronavirus deaths could have been prevented if Scotland had locked down two weeks earlier.
At her daily briefing yesterday, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: ‘I try not to spend too much time looking back because I have to focus on moving forward, but you can take it as read that all of the decisions I’ve taken weigh heavily on me and always will.
‘But there’s not a lot of point in me wishing we had done certain things differently.
‘I made decisions based on the best evidence and judgment we had at the time.’