I’m sceptical about the lockdown approach. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I do believe that covid is a potentially serious illness which would have killed many more people if allowed to run through the population. I don’t think there’s an easy answer and I’m not certain that my view will turn out to be correct. We won’t know how we should have acted until we have the benefit of hindsight in many years time and maybe not even then.
Basically I don’t think lockdowns are a viable long term solution and I think the harm they cause probably outweighs the deaths they postpone.
My main issue with the lockdown approach is that we still don’t have a way out of it other than everyone being vaccinated. We are apparently at the limit of how much we can open up now without cases rising but keeping the current level of restrictions in place until most people are vaccinated will do catastrophic damage to society.
Recessions shorten lives. We know this - it has been well studied. I think the years of life lost due to the economic damage caused by lockdowns will be higher than years which would have been lost due to covid if we hadn’t locked down. This is partly because most of those who die of covid are older whereas recession will affect the health of those of working age. Lockdowns also dramatically decrease quality of life for almost the whole population probably over a period of many years and I don’t believe we should save lives at any cost to the quality of life of others. I would never personally expect strangers to give up their jobs or education to protect me from illness.
I think people understand the harm done by the virus itself quite well and the press has focused on this. Many on mumsnet are knowledgable about covid. I think very few people understand much about the economic aspects and particularly how mass job losses in circumstances where replacement jobs will not be available can affect the health and well-being of the newly unemployed and the ability of the government to fund public services. I accept that there would have been an economic impact whatever happened but we have destroyed huge parts of our economy. I don’t see how any other approach could have caused more damage.
Added to this lockdown is risky because it would be so easy to end up where we started with exponential growth as soon as restrictions are lifted. We would then have gained nothing but still be left with the tremendous cost of lockdown. Even if we wanted to we may not be able to maintain current restrictions - if enough people stop following the rules it won’t practically be possible to enforce them unless we want to turn the army on people hugging their parents or not wearing a mask, which is a really sinister idea.
My favoured approach would have been throwing huge resources at protecting the vulnerable and otherwise letting the virus run its course alongside some measures to slow it e.g no mass gatherings inside , promoting hand washing, working from home if possible etc (I’m not arguing for the chaotic approach adopted in Brazil etc. We could have spent almost anything on protecting the shielded and it would have been cheaper than furlough. E.g we could have paid care workers extra to isolate themselves for certain periods. A short lockdown to build up nhs capacity may also have been justified.
We would then have had some level of immunity in the population. I accept that we’re not sure how long this would last but we’re not sure about lots of things related to lockdown such as when we’ll get a vaccine either so every approach is a risk.
I think the government ultimately didn’t take this approach because they would be blamed for lives lost to covid but not so much for lives lost due to recession, which are harder to measure. It would also have been difficult to go against the international consensus because people would have panicked. There is now an element of sunk cost because we don’t want to have locked down for nothing. Epidemiologists were always going to concentrate on the issue of deaths from the virus because that’s their field so it’s hardly surprising that they recommend lockdowns - they’re not qualified to assess the damage done by lockdown itself.
Anyway I think it’s unhelpful to call people like me stupid. I just have a different view of the relative risk of different approaches. I don’t think anyone should be claiming lockdowns are a success just yet. If we manage to ease restrictions further while keeping the virus under control and then manage to vaccinate everyone fairly soon I’ll concede I was wrong.