Mark Woolhouse says there was a distinctive moment at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic that encapsulated the mistakes and confusion of Britain's early efforts to tackle the disease. Michael Gove, the cabinet minister, told No 10 that the virus did not discriminate. He said everyone is at risk.
Professor Woolhouse is an expert on infectious diseases at Edinburgh University. He says that Gove's statement was not true. This is a very discriminating virus. Some people are more at risk than others. People over 75 are ten times more at risk than those under 15.
He argues that Britain's flawed responses to the disease's appearance were caused by the failure to understand the wide variations in individual responses to Covid-19. In his forthcoming book, The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir, Woolhouse describes this strategy as morally wrong and damaging.
He argues that 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. The elderly, frail and infirm are more at risk of contracting a disease than the young and healthy.
We succeeded in making a crisis even worse because we were so fascinated by the scale of the emergency. We panicked. This was an epidemic that was crying out for a public health approach.
The leading epidemiologist said that Gove was wrong to say that the virus didn't discriminate. The PRU is pictured with the AFP.
Woolhouse maintains that the government should have put in place measures to make contacts safe rather than impose blanket lockdowns. The data from the UK shows that people were reducing their contact with each other as the cases rose. It would have been enough to control the spread with Covid-safe measures.
Woolhouse argues that voluntary behavior change should have been allowed to progress in the UK. For the first time in history, we could, so we plumped for an enforced national lock down. Large parts of society are now able to function fairly well through online shopping and video conferences. He says it was a lazy solution to a novel coronaviruses epidemic.
Woolhouse is at pains to reject the ideas of those who advocated the complete opening up of society, including academics who supported the idea of the Covid-19 virus being allowed to circulate until enough people had been exposed to it.
Woolhouse says that this would have led to an epidemic that was far larger than the one we experienced in 2020. It didn't have a plan for adequately protecting the more vulnerable members of society, the elderly and those who are immuno-compromised.
Lockdowns are not a public health policy. They show a failure of public health policy.
Mark Woolhouse is a professor at Edinburgh University.
The country should have done more to protect the vulnerable. Over 30,000 people died of Covid-19 in Britain. He calculates that each home gets an extra £250,000 from the government to protect against the virus. Woolhouse says that the government should have spent more on protecting care homes, and that it should have sent a letter to those who protect elderly parents.
He argues that the nation could have spent several thousand pounds per household on routine testing and help to implement Covid-safe measures for those shielding others, but that would have cost a small fraction of the $300 billion spent on the response to the Pandemic. Woolhouse dislikes the neglect of care home workers and informal caregivers. The people stood between the vulnerable and the virus, but for most of 2020 they received no help.
Britain spent a lot of money on suppressing the virus and will be servicing the debt for a long time. We did not spend a dime on protecting the vulnerable in the community. We should have invested in suppression and protection. We chose one.
Woolhouse says that further lockdowns are not the way to deal with future waves of Covid-19. Lock downs are not a public health policy. He states that they signify a failure of public health policy.
Not to be surprised by new variations and not to respond in an ad hoc fashion is what the country needs. We should agree on a scale of interventions andtrigger points. It all feels chaotic with omicron. When the next variant arrives, we need better planning and preparation.
