Lessons to learn from the failure of lockdown
from Christian Concern:
Head of Public Policy Tim Dieppe comments on a new analysis of Covid lockdowns and the lessons Christians should learn from what happened.
The evidence is now in.
A newly published meta-analysis which examined almost 20,000 studies shows that the impact of lockdowns on Covid mortality was ‘negligible’. Lockdown is the strict ‘stay at home’ orders that applied throughout the UK with forced closures of schools and businesses. The use of other measures such as social distancing and face masks is not criticised in the report.
We were told by the now notorious Professor Neil Fergusson, who disobeyed his own lockdown advice, that a “reasonable worst case scenario” would be 500,000 deaths, and even with other mitigations there could be at least 250,000 deaths. Therefore, we were told, lockdowns were required to avoid anything like this from happening.
Now the evidence shows that as few as 1,700 lives were saved by lockdown.
In an average week there are 11,000 deaths in England and Wales. A typical flu season accounts for around 20,000 deaths in England and Wales. Fortunately, we do not lockdown for flu every year. If the negligible benefit had been known at the time, compared with the astronomical costs, no politician would have supported lockdowns.
In August 2020, I argued that “it is not clear whether lockdown has worked”. Even then, government figures were suggesting that lockdown had killed two people for every three who died of coronavirus at the peak of the outbreak.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now say categorically that lockdown was a mistake.
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