Quick Take…The Covid Inquiry’s (Incredibly Predictable) Findings

Lockdowns Could Have Been Avoided Entirely If “Stringent Restrictions” Were Imposed Earlier, Covid Inquiry Finds

Lockdowns could have been “avoided entirely” during Covid had ministers more quickly imposed “stringent restrictions” such as social distancing and face masks, the COVID-19 Inquiry has concluded. The Telegraph has more.

Baroness Hallett, the inquiry Chairman, said that if “stringent restrictions” had been put in place before March 16th 2020 there might have been no need for lockdown.

However, a “toxic and chaotic culture” at the centre of the government meant the pandemic response was often “too little, too late”, meaning a lockdown became inevitable.

Once that point had been reached, she said, up to 23,000 lives could have been saved if the first lockdown had been imposed a week earlier.

In the second report of her multi-stage inquiry, covering core decision-making in Government during the pandemic, Baroness Hallett repeatedly criticised Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, and Sir Chris Wormald, the current Cabinet Secretary, who at the time was Mr Hancock’s permanent secretary at the Department of Health.

Speculation that Sir Chris could be ousted was set to mount after Baroness Hallett said that his failure to rein in Mr Hancock had led to concerns at the centre of government about the “effectiveness of [his] leadership”.

There was also criticism of the failure by Boris Johnson’s government to assess the economic impact of lockdowns, the effect of school closures on children’s education and well-being and the increase in domestic abuse that occurred when women were unable to escape their abusers.

The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) risked “groupthink” because of its narrow membership and failure to represent dissenting opinions, the report added.

Baroness Hallett made 19 recommendations in the 1,531-page document, including improving the way economic and other impacts of emergency responses are assessed, broadening participation in Sage and enabling greater Parliamentary scrutiny of the use of emergency powers.

During his evidence to the inquiry, Mr Johnson, who was prime minister during the pandemic, said he thought it was “highly unlikely” that imposing restrictions earlier might have avoided lockdowns.

Baroness Hallett disagreed. Her report said: “Had stringent restrictions short of a mandatory lockdown been introduced earlier than March 16th 2020 – when the number of COVID-19 cases was lower – the mandatory lockdown might have been shorter or, conceivably, avoided entirely.

“At the very least, there would have been time to establish what the effect of those restrictions on levels of incidence were and whether there was a sustained reduction in social contact.

“This would have enabled the governments to assess whether stringent restrictions short of a lockdown would suffice to prevent health services across the UK being overwhelmed and whether they were therefore a feasible policy option.”

She quoted Mark Woolhouse, a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, who told the inquiry that “more proportionate and sustainable interventions” such as contact tracing, self-isolation, face coverings and respiratory hygiene, should have been introduced “as early as March 4th 2020”.

He said that, if at least some of the “substantial interventions” brought in during the week of March 16th 2020 had been introduced earlier, the need for a full lockdown could have been avoided because “if you go early, you don’t have to go so hard”.

Worth reading in full.

The criticism of the lack of impact assessment of lockdowns is welcome, as is the call for a greater diversity of voices on SAGE. If these are taken on board there may be a chance of a better response next time, particularly as the political class will surely not want to pay the monumental bill of further lockdowns again.

However, the primary implication that lockdowns were necessary when all else had failed and that to avoid them in the future “stringent restrictions” should be imposed much earlier is obviously disastrous. It’s not clear precisely which restrictions are in mind. But any requirement for social distancing would be tantamount to lockdown as most of modern life involves getting closer than two metres, while facemasks have consistently been shown to be ineffective at preventing viral spread and also to be detrimental to health, social interaction and child development. Contact tracing, meanwhile, was assessed by Parliament to have been entirely ineffective and an extraordinary waste of public money. The idea that “23,000 lives” would have been saved by doing something “stringent” earlier is pure counterfactual supposition of the kind that deservedly earned such a poor reputation during Covid. It’s also falsified by the experience of Sweden, which refused to lock down and had a fraction of the deaths predicted by the same modellers for the first wave, and ended up having one of the lowest overall pandemic death tolls in the world.

What we really needed from the inquiry – though were unlikely to get – was an affirmation of the pre-Covid pandemic plans, which were clear that trying to prevent the spread of a highly contagious airborne virus is neither feasible nor advisable and could only be economically and socially disastrous. By reinforcing the new post-Covid orthodoxy – that preventing the spread of low-fatality respiratory viruses is achievable and overall beneficial to human life and health – the Covid Inquiry has set us up to repeat the horrific errors of the Covid era all over again. Somehow, better sense needs to prevail.

Stop Press: The Telegraph has an article summarising the new inquiry report’s main findings:

• “‘Toxic culture’ and indecisiveness in Downing Street” – Dominic Cummings was a “destabilising influence” who created a “toxic culture” and “sexist workplace culture at the heart of the UK government”.
• “Government acted ‘too little, too late’” – Introducing the first national lockdown a week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives in England alone, supposedly.
• “Hancock overpromised and underdelivered” – Then-health secretary Matt Hancock “gained a reputation among senior officials and advisers at 10 Downing Street for overpromising and underdelivering”.
• “Ministerial rule-breaking” – Several high-profile incidents, such as Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle and Matt Hancock’s affair, undermined trust in the government.
• “Groupthink silenced dissenting voices in Sage” – The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies suffered from “groupthink”, with dissenting voices often failing to be heard.
• “School closures ‘brought ordinary childhood to a halt’” – Closing schools during lockdowns “brought ordinary childhood to a halt” and “gave rise to a serious risk that these measures would compound existing inequalities”.
• “Treasury failed to assess economic impact of lockdown” – “There was little evidence in each of the four nations of substantive economic modelling and analysis being provided to decision-makers. This inevitably hampered the ability of decision-makers to assess and balance relative harms.”
• “Other lockdown harms” – There was a “considerable body of evidence demonstrating that rates of domestic abuse, sexual abuse and child abuse rise in civil emergencies” and that it was “therefore foreseeable that, during a period of lockdown, abuse within the home would, in all likelihood, increase”.
• “Confusing rules and disproportionate fines” – “Frequent and complex changes to the rules” undermined public trust, and Downing Street and the devolved administrations should have done more to ensure guidance accurately reflected the law.