Covid made the world go mad – Here’s what we know now about the year of lockdown
Two years on from home schooling and panic buying, an epidemiologist looks explains what we should have done
ByHarry de Quetteville20 February 2022 • 5:00am

Tomorrow, the Prime Minister is set to announce the end of Covid restrictions. No more free tests, or income support. Most dramatic of all, no more isolation for those infected. If this isn’t the end of pandemic crisis measures, it’s hard to know what is.
All of which means that the inevitable reflection upon two traumatic years, and the crisis measures inflicted by government upon the governed, begins now. The official public enquiry, originally set for this spring, is likely to be delayed. But the unofficial accounting – up and down the nation, of each and every citizen totting up their losses and sacrifices, and wondering if it was all worth it – has already started.
For some, the ledger will reveal a simple, terrible grief – a consequence of the 160,000 Covid deaths Britain has accumulated since the novel coronavirus arrived on these shores. But for many others, the price paid will be harder to establish. For it is difficult to number opportunities missed in schooling and higher education; or count the cost of careers stalled and businesses failing; or take the toll of lives still to be lost through mental and physical conditions undetected while services pivoted so completely to Covid.
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Whatever happens, one thing is certain: we will be told that lessons will be learnt. But which lessons? In politics, wise old hands talk about the importance of learning from mistakes, of knowing history and acting accordingly. But the wrong lessons, as epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse shows in a devastating new assessment of Covid lockdowns, can also lead us terribly astray.
British scientists and politicians were primed to respond disastrously to Covid-19 long before the virus was even heard of, he argues in his book The Year the World Went Mad – and precisely because of their experience with previously known diseases.

March 2020: The Government's daily Covid briefings are in full swing, regularly featuring Boris Johnson flanked by Sir Patrick Vallance and Pro Chris Whitty CREDIT: Pippa Fowles / No 10 Downing Street.
First of these was influenza, on which our pandemic preparation was based. That was why Covid models included schools, which are key drivers of flu transmission, but not care homes – with catastrophic consequences.
The second diversion was a specific outbreak of flu – the swine flu epidemic of 2009-10, largely forgotten because it killed fewer than 500 people. Those who do remember it are sure to include the parents of around 70 British children who died. “Many more [children],” as Woolhouse, 63, a father of one daughter, points out, “than died from novel coronavirus infection in 2020.”
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Yet schools stayed open then. “It seems that our collective assessment of the balance of harms changed dramatically over the intervening 10 years.”
Swine flu’s damaging legacy was timidity. Exactly a decade before Covid really did erupt to change the world, public health officials were warning that swine flu would do the same. “Basically, there was a false alarm,” says Woolhouse, who advised on swine flu and became a member of the Sage modelling group SPI-M for the current pandemic.

April 2020: With social distancing and reduced capacity at supermarkets, long queues become a regular sight CREDIT: OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images
Come 2019-20, scientists were loath “to make complete fools of ourselves” by crying wolf again. Drastic early interventions which could have made a difference, like closing borders, became unthinkable, propelling policy ever further towards the most draconian and, in Woolhouse’s view, wrongheaded, interventions of all: lockdowns.
Lockdowns, Woolhouse says, emerged from the idea that Covid could be eradicated. And the idea that Covid could be eradicated emerged from a third misleading encounter with disease – that other coronavirus, Sars, which in 2002 was confined and ultimately crushed in one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The problem is that there was a critical difference with Sars. It was almost exclusively transmitted by patients who were obviously sick. “Isolating symptomatic cases stopped most of the spread,” says Woolhouse. But Covid spreads asymptomatically, too, making eradication effectively impossible. Yet convincing those in power to give up on the dream of killing off Covid proved impossible.
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“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”

April 2020: The then-Health Secretary Matt Hancock opens London's Nightingale hospital to help the NHS deal with the surging number of patients CREDIT: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Thought it might not let me read it again once I'd closed the page.
. That sucks.