MAGGIE PAGANO: Covid lockdown trade-offs and a lack of rigorous debate

Baroness Hallett’s Covid inquiry turns into comedy, if not farce.

Until now, the investigation has been dominated by the Punch and Judy-esque politics of Downing Street, rather than a forensic investigation into how and why the decision to go for a hard lockdown was made.

These are the questions we want answers to.

Yet the research did not address whether the lockdown was necessary, let alone whether we locked down too hard. Indeed, why was Britain’s original pandemic plan – which did not envisage a lockdown – not followed?

Professor Sunetra Gupta, the Oxford epidemiologist who questioned the reasoning behind placing an iron curtain around every home in the country from the start of the pandemic, has some answers. You’ll find them in her 12-page testimony about the investigation, published last week via Collateral Global.

Gupta’s statement is not sugar-coated: “The blind adoption of lockdown and the lack of debate on how to respond to the uncertainties is a tragedy for which the entire society is now paying a high price.” That is why she recommended a strategy of ‘targeted protection’ for the most vulnerable.

And the price was high. In addition to the direct economic impact on public finances, estimated by the House of Commons at £400 billion, are the less visible costs. The long NHS waiting lists, the lost immunity of young people to other diseases and the devastating trauma for so many. What if we hadn’t locked down so hard and adopted a more voluntary, Swedish-style approach?

Doug McWilliams, from the Center for Economics and Business Research, estimates that around half of the £400 billion in government spending could have been avoided. In a report today, McWilliams estimates that a ‘softer’ approach would still have cost Britain at least £118 billion in lost GDP – around 7.6 percent of GDP at 2019 values, but roughly half of actual shortfall in growth of 14.7 percent.

If Britain had not gone into a formal lockdown, he argues, we would still have lost £118 billion in GDP, plus another £200 billion in government spending: enough to fund the NHS alone for a few years.

There would always have been costs associated with the fight against Covid because, as we saw in early 2020, many people were already going into voluntary self-quarantine, and this would have had a knock-on effect on trade in general and of course on travel. . He arrived at the figures by revising the data to take into account the likely underestimates of UK public sector GDP during Covid.

Adjusting for the more complex UK economy, Cebr uses Sweden as a benchmark for how we could have behaved without pulling down the hatches. Sweden’s GDP fell by about 2.2 percent in 2020, grew by 5.6 percent in 2021 and by 2.1 percent last year. Swedish companies saw sales fall 6.1 percent in 2020, and British companies are likely to have experienced similarly modest declines.

Locking up was always a gamble. We will never know whether it was the right choice. But what emerges from the research is that there was a frightening lack of rigorous debate about alternative strategies and the trade-offs between them.

Even worse was the dangerous way in which so much debate was censored. Scientists like Gupta were branded heretics for challenging the assumption that lockdown was the only game in town. It wasn’t.

What or who prevented the alternatives from being more openly razed to the ground? Hallett must be careful not to make such a mistake again.