UK lockdowns were a policy ‘failure’, health expert tells Covid inquiry

Nationwide lockdowns in the UK during the pandemic were a “failure” of public health policy as they were not considered a last resort, an epidemiology expert has said.

Giving evidence at the Covid-19 public inquiry on Monday, Prof Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh – a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O) – said the group failed to adequately assess the negative consequences of a nationwide lockdown.

“The harms of the social distancing measures – particularly lockdown, the economic harms, the educational harms, the harms to access to healthcare, the harms to societal wellbeing … just the way we all function … mental health – were not included in any of the work that SPI-M-O did and, as far as I could tell, no one else was doing it either,” Woolhouse told the inquiry.

“I take the view that it would have been very helpful if the government said explicitly: ‘We don’t want to go into lockdown. What’s your advice? How can we both minimise the health burden and stay out of lockdown?’ And we could have given a lot of advice and all the other things you could do other than lockdown.

“The question of how to avoid lockdown was never asked of us and I find that extraordinary.”

Woolhouse, who specialises in infectious diseases and epidemiology, also criticised the phrase “going early, going hard”, used by the UK’s then chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in regard to the rapid implementation of a strict lockdown, claiming that in the circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic it would not have been effective, as completely eradicating the virus was not an option at that time.

He added: “I remember Patrick [Vallance] and others repeated it several times: ‘Go hard, go early and go wider than you would have.’ Now that, for me, is a good maxim in a particular situation where your strategic objective is to eradicate the virus – you’re going to try and clear it out completely. That’s what was done with Sars in 2003.

“I did not think from very early on that eradicating the virus was even the remotest possibility. In which case this ‘go hard, go early, go wide’ is going to mean severe restrictions,” Woolhouse said. “I was always interested from early on in trying to find a sustainable intervention and so my maxim is, ‘If you go early, you don’t have to go so hard.’”

Although Woolhouse told the inquiry that he supported lockdown at the time, with hindsight he questioned whether the measures were entirely necessary, before adding that lockdown was “a failure of public health policy”.

He added: “I think it’s fair to describe lockdown not as a public health policy, but as a failure of public health policy. [Lockdown] is what you do when all those other things you know you can do haven’t worked, it’s a last resort and it should always be that in my view.”

The inquiry continues.