Professors Paul Dolan and Sunetra Gupta: "Lockdown was based on faith, not evidence"
Before 2020, lockdowns had never been considered as a viable response to a pandemic.
Building on existing evidence that lockdowns were a massive policy mistake, Paul Dolan (Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics) and Sunetra Gupta (Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University) lay out their views in a piece published today in the Telegraph.
As Professor Dolan notes on Twitter, until 2020, lockdowns had never been considered as a viable response to a pandemic.
Some highlights below:
Herd immunity means that the level of immunity in the population is such that the virus hovers around R=1. We would, because of seasonality and the loss of immunity over time, continue to experience some waves of infection, as we do with many other pathogens, but with a smaller and acceptable death rate.
The excellent vaccines we now have make our journey to this state of herd immunity much smoother as they offer focused protection to those who are most vulnerable, but to maintain this state we will need to rely on repeated natural infection of those not at risk of dying – as we do with several other pathogens.
As it currently stands, it looks like lockdowns had a small effect but, to some large extent, the path of the virus can be explained by “natural” factors such as the accumulation of herd immunity and seasonal differences in the transmissibility of the virus.
Furthermore, while lockdowns may have protected some vulnerable people from exposure to the virus, they may also have placed them at increased risk of future exposure by preventing high levels of herd immunity from establishing broadly across the population.
The profound costs of lockdown have been borne disproportionately by younger people, those with limited social support, those with mental health problems, and those in low-income groups with job insecurity.
Some older people have benefitted from lockdown, but perhaps by not as much as would have been hoped for, and without ever inquiring into whether they preferred to be isolated from close family for so long.
The most obvious beneficiaries of lockdown, at least insofar as the economic impacts are concerned, are those who can work from home on full pay – such as members of the government and advisory committees like Sage.
The critical question, of course, is whether it would have been possible to reduce the mortality and morbidity risks to the vulnerable population at lower cost than lockdowns? Other options were available, such as focused protection, whereby those most at risk from the virus would have been afforded protection whilst those at low risk would be largely allowed to go about life as normal. But this was dismissed as callous without any evidence to support this claim.