One year on, we still haven’t learnt the lessons of lockdown failure
The apparatus that was so eager to apply restrictions last Christmas is still there, ready to pounce again
It was a year ago today that Britain was set to be locked down again for the fourth time. The Omicron variant was at large and experts at Sage had predicted there would be between 600 to 6,000 deaths a day unless “interventions” were made. Plans were drawn up and an emergency press conference pencilled in – but this time, the script changed. When Rishi Sunak heard what was happening, he threatened to resign. He
flew back early from his trip to California and demanded this was discussed at a Cabinet meeting, which, as he knew it would, killed the idea.
There’s a long list of people who “saved” last Christmas, but Sunak deserves a place near the top. Had he not intervened, the economy and society would have been closed yet again. If the blood-curdling Sage “scenarios” did not come to pass, lockdown would be credited. Sunak had gone along with previous shutdowns, thinking himself a lone voice of dissent. But this time, he had enough support at a time when Boris Johnson had
already lost a by-election and
lost David Frost, his Brexit minister. He could not afford to lose a Chancellor.
This tells us three things. First, that Sunak was single-minded enough to take on the whole government machine, risking his career. Next, he’s smart enough to work out when the civil service has been captured by groupthink and find his own information. But perhaps the biggest lesson was that there was – and remains – a massive flaw in the government system, where decisions are taken on unreliable science, with minimal scrutiny. It’s a scandal that ought to have been quickly remedied, but what we see instead is a pattern of denial.
Lockdown remains at the root of the biggest problems that confront the country, but few are willing to say so. Euphemisms are used, like saying that “the pandemic” destroyed 10 years of progress in education equality. Yet Sweden had a pandemic, but no lockdown, no national school closures below sixth-form and no educational hit.
The NHS waiting lists, the 565,000 “missing” workers, the rise in at-home deaths, and nearly 9,000 more cancer deaths – all linked to lockdown’s legacy.
No one disputes the damage – the question is whether it was a price worth paying for a smaller pandemic death toll. But advocates of lockdown seem strikingly uninterested in finding out. A report was published earlier this month by (among others) Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, the two gentlemen of Corona, to summarise what they learned from handling the pandemic. What about lockdowns? Hard to tell these things, it says, because so many things happen at once. In this way, the £400 billion question – do lockdowns work? – is breezily cast aside.
The events of last December alone could themselves be enough for an official inquiry, as Sunak knows better than anyone. A former financier, he still reads research notes from banks and received a December 13 paper from JP Morgan. It used real-world South African data to model the UK hospitalisation rate peaking at about 34 per cent of the previous (Delta) wave. Crucial information which, if true, could save the country from another lockdown.
But such information was not being shown to the Cabinet members. Instead they were being given terrifying Sage “scenarios” with good news filtered out. On December 15 last year, Whitty was saying: “All the things that we do know [about Omicron] are bad.” This was quite untrue: the milder illness and shorter hospital stays had, by then, been reported by South African authorities. This didn’t stop Dr Jenny Harries, Whitty’s former deputy, proclaiming Omicron to be “probably the most significant threat” since the discovery of Covid.
By the time the Cabinet met on December 20, JP Morgan was able to predict, correctly, that Omicron hospital admissions would peak at 1,500. Sage was a mess. Its daily death range of 600 to 6,000 was bunkum: the actual peak was 269. This is what Whitty et al should be asking now: why did they get it so wrong? Why were ministers fed such misleading figures? A nation was about to be shut down: shops hit, schools closed, Christmases cancelled, on the strength of scenarios which (as Sage later admitted) were “at variance with reality”. Why was this allowed?
There is, of course, an even more awkward question. The third lockdown in January 2021 was extended for months on the strength of these Sage “scenarios”. Might these figures have been as off as the Omicron scenarios turned out to be? If so, how much of these UK lockdowns may now prove to have been unnecessary? This isn’t an investigation that Whitty will be conducting in a hurry.
The formal Covid inquiry looks designed to avoid the hardest questions about lockdowns. It’s not about guilt: we can assume everyone acted honourably, on the best information they had. The question is why dud information was not exposed, or policies properly tested. The basic (in some countries, compulsory) way of judging public health questions is a “quality of life years lost” study: factoring in age and health impacts of the problem and the solution. Sunak was astonished to find that no such study had been conducted for lockdown. It is, of course, not too late to do one now. But not many in Parliament would thank him for it.
This isn’t about litigating the past, but getting ready for the future. When the next pathogen is discovered, what to do? If old mistakes aren’t recognised, they’re certain to be repeated. There has been no apology or contrition from the main Sage figures for mistakes. Graham Medley, chair of its modellers, even collected a medal from the Royal Society for his work. The apparatus that almost misled Britain into a needless lockdown last Christmas is still there, waiting to snap back into use.
More than perhaps anyone else in the Cabinet, Sunak knows how rotten the old system was; how dissenting voices were crushed and how many questions seem to have been deliberately ignored. He has many battles to fight before he reforms the pandemic preparedness that failed us so badly last time. He’ll just have to hope – as we all will – that he’ll get it done before the next panic starts.
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