As I’ve been saying for over a year now. The data show no correlation between the stringency of lockdown (as measured worldwide by an Oxford university tracker) and Covid outcomes, whether total cases or deaths per million. Similarly in the United States where the 50:states are run almost half half by Republican and Democratic governors, where the former tended to less stringent and the latter to more stringent measures (aka NPIs or Non Pharmaceutical Interventions), there are no correlations. In the UK, as Nelson points our, three studies have shown that cases had peaked before lockdown measures (NPIs) were introduced.
This most certainly needs an enquiry. And soon
The article is here, but as it’s of public interest, I copy it below the fold with thanks to the Telegraph:
British public inquiries take years, but are normally worth the wait. Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo affair still reads like a thriller. The Chilcot inquiry on Iraq dived deep enough to uncover new horrors: that Britain tried to police Basra with just 200 troops, for example, abandoning the city to jihadi death squads. The coronavirus pandemic, the biggest calamity in our peacetime history, deserves at least the same calibre of scrutiny – even if a big inquiry is unlikely to report back before the next election.It’s wrong to imagine that delay suits Boris Johnson. The inquiry is likely to vindicate his suspicion that the virus could be forced back without lockdown (plenty of studies now show this was happening anyway). But the more pressing problem is that the virus (or another lurgy) might be back with us this winter – and a failure to identify the mistakes made last time now guarantees repeating them. This makes the case for a shorter inquiry, identifying the main problems.
The case for the prosecution of Johnson is likely to be heard in a parliamentary inquiry (with Dominic Cummings as the star witness) which should bring scrutiny of the Imperial College cliff-edge hypothesis. This suggests that Covid cases surged every day until lockdown, so Prime Ministerial dither cost thousands of lives. Only when he eventually agreed to lock down on March 23, says Imperial, did cases collapse. This theory is one of the most influential ever deployed in government – and now looks as if it could be bunkum.
We don’t have to guess anymore, given how much Covid data exists. The ONS, Zoe/King’s College, the React-2 study run by a different team at Imperial: none support Neil Ferguson’s cliff-edge theory. All show Covid cases falling before lockdowns. So what forced the virus into retreat, if not stay-at-home orders? We can look at another form of contagion: news, spread digitally. People saw how things were getting dangerous and stayed home of their own accord. This is more than theory. Mobile phone data offers rich detail of this worldwide trend.
We can already look at America, where the states took wildly different approaches, and see the lack of correlation between lockdown stringency and virus control. Importantly, the few countries who did not lock down suffered far less death than Imperial’s models predicted. Sweden ended up with less than half the modelled death toll. Poor old Taiwan was down for 93,000 Covid deaths unless it locked down: it held its nerve and saw only a dozen fatalities.
Which brings us to the main problem: why the Sage group of advisers ever ended up with so much power. Such models will always have monstrous error margins: how could they not? But ministers wanted to say they were being guided by “the science” and saw, in Sage, a convenient political shield. It was a political decision to stand behind a group of advisers – who had been asked to focus on only one part of a mixed crisis. It was a major failing, with huge consequences.
The Cabinet Office, which ought to have supplied the rigour, instead served to amplify spin. Some of its internal documents, certain to come out in an inquiry, read like they’re trying to terrify the Prime Minister into locking down. He ended up making decisions on data which was often flat-out wrong – some of which fell apart under public scrutiny. What happened to quality control? A dozen Treasury civil servants, picked at random, could have solved this. Basic Whitehall scrutiny was not applied.
Perhaps inevitably, Sage ended up succumbing to groupthink and started acting like lobbyists for lockdown. Some of its members would take to the airwaves, making the case for even more stringent action. Those who demurred were threatened with being fired (something that will also come out in due course). This points to a massive flaw: the attempted stifling of debate. Dissenting experts ought to be welcomed. Instead, they were hounded – sometimes by Tory MPs.
What matters is that this flawed system is still in place now. We still have the Sage committee, operating in half-secrecy, calling the shots and pushing out models with a bias towards delaying the easing of lockdown. A see-no-evil approach persists on collateral damage: we still have virtually no analysis on the economic and social costs of prolonging so many aspects of lockdown. We have seen pitifully little assessments on cancer care, nor is there talk about the 20,000 pupils who have vanished from school rolls.
It would not take long to conduct an assessment on the impact of the “protect the NHS” message and the extent to which it deterred people from seeking lifesaving care. Might this be linked to the surge in at-home deaths? The NHS itself advised against this messaging, mindful of the damage At the peak of the first wave, half of hospital beds lay empty. Had all of this been reviewed last summer, then the “protect the NHS” message might not have been repeated this time.
Gus O’Donnell, a former civil service chief, recently put his finger on it. You can’t blame Sage: its members were only intended to be on hand to answer questions. Neil Ferguson never asked to have this influence. The Sage advice was always supposed to be fed into a higher committee that considered social and economic factors, weighed it all up and advised on options. How are ministers to make sensible decisions, without being told the costs and benefits? It was a recipe to compound a pandemic with far deeper collateral damage than was necessary.
The Government’s own “lessons learned” exercise is unlikely to highlight all this – especially if it’s being led by the Cabinet Office, which ought to be the subject of an inquiry. It failed to put together the complete picture, didn’t ask enough questions and took a one-dimensional approach to a multi-dimensional crisis. The lessons learned from the vaccine taskforce is that it is one of the greatest successes of modern British government, and one that may yet eclipse the previous failures.
These were the most difficult times in living memory: in the fog of viral war, huge decisions need to be made instantly. Mistakes – pretty big ones – were inevitable. At least the first time. But with the right system in place, they needn’t be next time.
