Why more and more experts say lockdown didn't prevent people dying of Covid - and call it a 'monumental mistake on a global scale' | Mail on Sunday - Jo MacFarlance:
March 26, 2022 - "It was 'a simple instruction' to the British people, said the Prime Minister: 'You must stay at home.' With that sombre televised address, shown on March 23, 2020 – two years ago last week – the country was plunged into its first national lockdown. After weeks of surging Covid infections, and horrified by the staggering scale of hospitalisations and deaths in Spain and Italy, the Government had concluded there was no option but to issue an unprecedented order ... a legal mandate that permitted people to leave their homes only for specific purposes: to shop for basic supplies, for medical purposes, for exercise or for work. This lasted seven weeks, and led to some of the most heartbreaking and damaging moments of the pandemic.
"And it wasn't the last. In November 2020 there was a second national lockdown, lasting four weeks. And then, in January 2021 came the big one: a lockdown that lasted almost three months. The true toll won't be known for some time. However the general scientific consensus, rarely challenged, is that these measures were a necessary evil that saved lives. But just how true is that? While there is no doubt that robust measures were necessary against a new and devastating virus, was lockdown truly the only route through those dark days of the pandemic, or the right one?...
"Professor Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, ... has recently published a book, The Year The World Went Mad, about the UK's pandemic policy failures. Speaking this week on The Mail on Sunday's Medical Minefield podcast, Prof Woolhouse said: 'I think that lockdown will be viewed by history as a monumental mistake on a global scale, for a number of reasons. The obvious one is the immense harm the lockdown, more than any other measure, did in terms of the economy, mental health and on the wellbeing of society. Clearly things needed to be done to bring waves of infection under control. But many analyses suggest that lockdown itself didn't have a huge impact on reducing the health burden. That was achieved in other ways.'
"Analysing the effect of any single Covid measure is difficult, and researchers have managed it with varying degrees of success. In the UK, 'lockdown' refers specifically to the stay-at-home order. But some studies also include school and border closures, business closures and curfews in their definition of lockdown....
"One paper that did attempt to tease out the benefits of individual measures, published last month, found stay-at-home orders reduced global Covid deaths by just 2.9 per cent. By comparison, business closures cut deaths by ten per cent and school closures by nearly five per cent. The authors, economists linked to Johns Hopkins University in the US, have been accused of bias – one has repeatedly equated lockdown measures with fascism – and 'cherry-picking' papers to suit their hypothesis.
"'If you start with a premise and select studies which are likely to back that premise, you don't come to an objective answer,' says epidemiologist and Government adviser Dr Raghib Ali, at the University of Cambridge. But intriguingly, Dr Ali and others also admit the researchers have a point....
"Another study ... published in Science in February last year, found 'stay at home' measures reduced Covid transmission by an average of 13 per cent on top of other measures such as closing schools and non-essential shops, and banning small gatherings. The study, which looked at evidence from 41 countries around the world, concluded this was a 'small effect' and meant 'some countries could control the epidemic while avoiding stay-at-home orders'. It also found something intriguing: lockdowns could, in a worst-case scenario, actually increase transmission of the virus by up to five per cent. This may be an effect of allowing it to spread within households, experts say.
"Prof Woolhouse has argued that, if the aim was partially to protect society's most vulnerable, lockdowns failed. 'We focused on this idea that if we stopped the virus transmitting among everybody, that this would somehow be sufficient to protect those who were at risk,' he says. 'And it wasn't.' Prof Woolhouse also argues that for lockdown to have had an effect it would need to have been imposed earlier. This is what worked in Australia and New Zealand, which pursued a 'zero Covid' strategy.... 'Lockdown as an intervention only makes sense in the context of zero Covid, and by the time it was imposed it was no longer the appropriate tool.
"'There are ways we could have responded to the pandemic that would have avoided most of the lockdown, and saved more lives. But lockdown happened anyway because by that stage no one – including me – was prepared to risk waiting to find out if [restrictions introduced prior to our full lockdown on March 23] had worked.' But that stay-at-home order was, for most, the hardest part of the pandemic. 'It made everything so much harder than it might have been,' he adds.
"Countries that had earlier lockdowns, better testing capacity and were able to identify and isolate cases fared better during the initial wave of the pandemic.In the UK, lockdown was seen – at a point of desperation – as the only option left remaining. But Prof Woolhouse argues people had already become more cautious. Studies using anonymised mobile phone location tracking data show contacts between people plummeted in early March (although the biggest drop was March 24, the day after lockdown).
"Dr Ali says: 'The purpose of lockdown is to reduce contacts, but if people are doing that anyway, the additional benefit [of making it a legal requirement to stay at home] is obviously somewhat reduced.'
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