COVID LOCKDOWN UNNECESSARY AS VIRUS WAS UNDER CONTROL, SAYS SENIOR ADVISER
Britain did not need to enter lockdown because Covid was “already under control”, according to a senior government adviser on the fifth anniversary of the first national shutdown.
Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University, said that measures such as mask-wearing and staying in family groups had been “enough”.
He claimed that statisticians had examined the data “and it’s now quite clear that the virus was already under control before lockdown came into place” on March 23, 2020, thanks to changes in public behaviour.
Prof Woolhouse called lockdown “an overreaction” caused by panic, and suggested it would not have been necessary if Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon’s governments had made the right preparations.
The strategy of locking down to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed had failed, he argued, as “we basically closed our health system” for treating all non-Covid conditions.
He lambasted the decision to close schools, arguing that it was “necessary at no stage during the epidemic”, and the impact on children, especially from poorer families, had been “just extraordinary”.
Prof Woolhouse was an adviser to the Scottish Government during the pandemic and sat on the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, a sub-group of the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
He previously accused Ms Sturgeon’s government of failing to understand the “underlying epidemiology” of the disease, citing their “naive” belief that easing lockdown restrictions more slowly than Mr Johnson would prevent another wave.
The academic, who has written a book called The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir, said that a lockdown “wasn’t inevitable” to control the virus.
“What caused it was the lack of preparation in the weeks and months leading up to lockdown,” Prof Woolhouse told BBC Radio Scotland. “We didn’t anticipate in time the enormity of the event or of the response needed and that’s something we have to fix in the future.”
He said he had been “raising the alarm” from mid-January 2020 “but somehow that concern didn’t get translated through the government advisory system ... into a strong call for action in February”.
As a result, when the virus “really took off” in March, the necessary groundwork had not been done to prevent a lockdown, he said.
Describing the early months as a time of dithering and panic, he said: “In the end, lockdown was clearly an overreaction to the event. We had to do something, but that something didn’t have to be as severe.”
He argued that earlier, less drastic action had been needed: “It turns out that the measures we took in the first half of March were enough (to avoid lockdown), but no one knew that at the time.
“We didn’t have the surveillance, the testing, the genomics and all those bits of information gathering that we need to assess the state of the virus.”
When asked if people wearing masks and staying in family groups had been enough without lockdown being required, he said: “It was enough in hindsight.
“The analysis of data from that crucial period throughout March shows quite clearly that the virus was already under control before lockdown came into place. It was under control because people had taken their own precautions, that we’d all changed our behaviour.”
Prof Woolhouse emphasised that the elderly and frail were at “vastly increased risk” from the virus but not children. “We had some data from China, but we didn’t have enough for everyone to feel confident that we could get through this without closing schools.
“With hindsight, we could have got through it without closing schools, and in my view, we should have opened them much earlier than we did in 2020, in May, for example, when Denmark opened its schools. We didn’t fully open them until August, and the damage that has been done to that generation is just extraordinary, and it’s still accumulating now.”
He said the poorest children suffered most, adding: “This is the crucial thing, this wasn’t necessary... It was necessary at no stage during the epidemic, and yet we did it.”
Asked whether lockdown had succeeded in its aim of protecting the NHS, he said he had recently asked senior physicians at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital.
“Their answer was interesting. It was no. And the reason it was no is because, although we coped in Scotland with Covid patients, we didn’t cope with all the other needs,” Prof Woolhouse said. “We basically closed our health system to all those other non-Covid harms, and we weren’t able to keep those operations running.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “The Scottish Government is committed to responding to both the UK and Scottish Covid-19 inquiries, as learning lessons from the pandemic is vital to prepare for the future.
“We work closely with Public Health Scotland to maintain and improve our pandemic preparedness.”
The UK government was approached for comment.
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