Instead, the country needs, very quickly, not to be surprised by new variants and not to respond each one in an ad hoc fashion. They signify a failure of public health policy,” he states. “Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. We effectively chose just one.”Īnd Woolhouse is emphatic that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. We should and could have invested in both suppression and protection. “By contrast, we spent almost nothing on protecting the vulnerable in the community. “These people stood between the vulnerable and the virus but, for most of 2020, they got minimal recognition and received no help.”īritain spent a fortune on suppressing the virus and will still be servicing the debt incurred for generations to come, he adds. Indeed, Woolhouse is particularly disdainful of the neglect of “shielders”, such as care home workers and informal carers. The nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on provision of routine testing and in helping to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others and that would still have amounted to a small fraction of the £300bn we eventually spent on our pandemic response, he argues. “Much more should have been spent on providing protection for care homes,” says Woolhouse, who also castigates the government for offering nothing more than a letter telling those shielding elderly parents and other vulnerable individuals in their own homes to take precautions. On average, each home got an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus, he calculates. Well over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain’s care homes. Instead, the country should have put far more effort into protecting the vulnerable. They signify a failure of public health policy Professor Mark Woolhouse, Edinburgh University “It also lacked a convincing plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.” Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. “This would have led to an epidemic far larger than the one we eventually experienced in 2020,” says Woolhouse. However, Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who backed the Barrington Declaration which proposed the Covid-19 virus be allowed to circulate until enough people had been infected to achieve herd immunity. “But it was a lazy solution to a novel coronavirus epidemic, as well as a hugely damaging one,” he adds. Enough business is now done online to allow large parts of society to function fairly well – through video conferences and online shopping. Instead, we plumped for an enforced national lockdown, in part because, for the first time in history, we could. Largely voluntary behaviour change worked in Sweden and it should have been allowed to progress in the UK, argues Woolhouse. That, coupled with Covid-safe measures, such as masks and testing, would have been sufficient to control spread.” “You can see from the UK data that people were reducing their contacts with each other as cases rose and before lockdown was imposed. Rather than imposing blanket lockdowns across the nation, the government should have adopted measures designed to make contacts safe, Woolhouse maintains. Michael Gove told the country that the virus didn’t discriminate but he was wrong, according to leading epidemiologist. This was an epidemic crying out for a precision public health approach and it got the opposite.” ![]() “We were mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the emergency and succeeded only in making a crisis even worse. “All this to protect the NHS from a disease that is a far, far greater threat to the elderly, frail and infirm than to the young and healthy. “We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt,” he argues. This is a strategy that Woolhouse – one of the country’s leading epidemiologists – describes as morally wrong and highly damaging in his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir. And it was this failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19 that led to Britain’s flawed responses to the disease’s appearance, he argues – errors that included the imposition of a long-lasting, national lockdown.
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