The first lockdown failed miserably. Why are we not learning?

The first lockdown – originally announced in late March as a 3-week measure to “flatten the curve” – has inflicted a terrible toll on all of society. I am not talking about money (does anyone even care what the budget deficit is these days?) – the restrictions have left long-lasting damage on every aspect of our lives.

We have sacrificed children’s education. A generation of 18-year-olds have been royally screwed over by the inexcusable failure to organise A-levels. Cancer screenings have been cancelled and mental health ignored. Arts, sports, leisure, travel – activities that make life worth living – have been decimated.

Public opinion has largely supported the first lockdown. Some (including myself) may have questioned whether there really was a viable plan, but society has listened to experts and made every effort to go along with the government’s plan.

It is now clear that the first lockdown was a miserable failure. Despite all of our efforts, we are no better off than we were at the start of pandemic, back in March. Society has never made greater sacrifices in peacetime, yet the results are precisely zero. It is nonsensical to talk about lives saved, when all we got was a deferment for a few months. The lockdown saved lives only in the sense that a delayed mortgage repayment saves you money.

When pharmaceutical companies develop a new drug, society requires a rigorous approval process to ensure that the drug is effective and that any side effects are substantially outweighed by its benefits. With the lockdown, no one ever calculated how the benefits of this never-tried-before non-pharmaceutical intervention stack up against its terrifying costs.

Incredibly, the government’s plan for November is exactly the same plan that got us nowhere just a few months ago. It is laughable to think that a 4-week lockdown will make any long-term, strategic impact on the epidemiological situation. As schools will remain open, there is no chance that the second lockdown will make the virus any less endemic. The measures are a pathetic non-solution that achieve nothing of lasting value, and are largely intended only to counteract the political damage for the government from the inevitable death toll.

So what can be done?

The most valuable insight from Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, was his comments about sustainability. 

“At the outset, we talked very much about sustainability, and I think that’s something we managed to keep to. And also be a bit resistant to quick fixes, to realise that this is not going to be easy, it is not going to be a short-term kind of thing, it’s not going to be fixed by one kind of measure. We see a disease that we’re going to have to handle for a long time into the future and we need to build up systems for doing that,”

We need to work on the assumption that Covid is here to stay. It is far, far too widespread across all of Europe to eradicate with lockdowns. Every single country in Europe is experiencing a second wave, no matter how strict and long the first lockdown was. Test & trace systems made no difference (Baroness Harding wasted an incredible amount of money on a useless system, but in all fairness, she was given an impossible task). Cases are surging even in Germany, the land of supposedly good Covid governance. 

The vaccine, which some think is almost ready, remains the Holy Grail for lockdown proponents. I sincerely hope they are right, but I worry that getting to a solution that is safe 99.99% of the time (which is the standard we would require to inject billions of people) will take more than a few months of testing. We still cannot even rule out the possibility that a safe and effective vaccine will never be found.

Sustainability needs to be the key word in our Covid response. We need a realistic plan that draws the conclusions from the failure of the first lockdown, and does not rely on wishful thinking about vaccines or “moonshot” schemes. The government needs to have an adult conversation with society about co-existing with Covid in the long term. Hiding away from the problem until 2 December will not help at all.