Locking down harder and faster is not the right conclusion

A door has been opened and we have walked into a place in which our health and well-being is worse, we are poorer, and we are less free, in exchange for dubious claims of safety.

A report produced by the Health and Social Care & Science and Technology committees of MPs, published this week, has determined that the government approach at the beginning of the first epidemic wave of the coronavirus in March 2020 was an enormous public health failure and cost thousands of lives. They believe that we should have locked down earlier. It has been obvious for a while that the faster and harder narrative would be resorted to by any organisation tasked with identifying lessons we can learn from the pandemic.

We do not have to accept these conclusions, which have been congealing into a cliché since they were first uttered last spring. Here is an alternative summary of what we can take away from this episode.

The virus and the disease it can sometimes cause have led to a tragic death toll. The elevated risk to the frail elderly and the immunocompromised means that many lives have been lost and no town in the country is free of grief and bereavement. We have faced a major problem requiring an exhausting national effort.

However, there is now much real-world research which tells us that the mortality reducing benefits of widespread closures of “non-essential” businesses and stay-at-home orders have been overstated. Infections seem to have peaked and begun to curl over prior to the implementation of national lockdowns in both March 2020 and January 2021. Comparable countries, such as Sweden, with more moderate approaches, have fared no worse in terms of the disease and a lot better economically. Britain’s third wave peaked around the same time we lifted all restrictions, counter to the pro-lockdown narrative.

Our panicked crisis response has done a colossal amount of damage to people with all kinds of other ailments. The charity Breast Cancer Now have warned that nearly 11,000 people in the UK could be living with undiagnosed breast cancers. The Centre for Mental Health predict up to ten million people will need mental health support because of the events of the past eighteen months.

The economy has been given a more savage shock than it has experienced in over three centuries. Inflation and lower living standards are waiting patiently for us. The ratio of debt to GDP has exceeded 100%, far greater than that left by the last Labour government in 2010.

The repealing of our ancient civil liberties is the “most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country” according to the former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption. Their restoration has been fragile, and they are now forever subject to review; something we did not expect from a Conservative government.

Police officiousness towards the law-abiding will not recede lightly. Who can forget the two women fined £200 for not behaving “in the spirit” of lockdown when they went on a perfectly safe and legal walk with takeaway cups of coffee? We can expect digital control and biometric surveillance to intensify as well. Laws and guidelines often long outlive the challenge that they were originally introduced to combat.

There does not seem to be anything authoritarian enough that the virus cannot excuse it. A door has been opened and we have walked into a place in which our health and well-being is worse, we are poorer, and we are less free, in exchange for dubious claims of safety. The more people who realise that the damage done by many of the interventions should be regarded as unpalatable and the benefits illusory, the more likely we are to salvage something from this crisis and do better for the vulnerable next time.