After being told continuously that we only had to grin and bear it for a short while longer, we are now living under our third national lockdown in the space of eleven months. This most recent delay and lack of clarity is at best, a naïve disillusionment after the promise of a vaccine and, at worst, a complete disregard for any persons who aren’t also Tory donors. In an effort to understand how we are still here, almost a year on from the first confirmed UK case, here is an in-depth analysis of the factors which led up to the first national lockdown.
The First Case
Having sat watching the rest of the Western world start to confirm cases of COVID-19, the UK was left waiting until the 29 January 2020 when it identified its first cases; ‘two Chinese nationals from the same family staying at a hotel in York’. The following day the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a ‘global health emergency’ due to the growing spread of the virus in other countries. Although the UK Government, along with other nations, took action and evacuated their nationals from Wuhan and quarantined them at Arrowe Park Hospital in Wirral, very little changed on the ground in terms of preparing for a pandemic. For a government who had been brought in after a dreary two years on the back of their own calls to ‘Get Brexit Done’, perhaps it felt important not to antagonise the British public any further than necessary; indeed situations of high public morale where always where Boris Johnson was most comfortable.
Herd immunity
Whilst Italy was suddenly overladen with a sudden surge of up to 150 cases and immediately placed 50,000 citizens in lockdown, the British Government seemed keen to downplay calls for its own restrictive measures, citing their own plans for ‘Herd Immunity’. Such a strategy would allow for the majority of the population to be infected and develop an immune response, therefore limiting further transmission of the virus to those with compromised immunity. Whilst accredited to Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, chief advisor to the PM at the time, this idea was actually born out of a 2011 document on ‘Influenza Preparedness Strategy’, which suggests that ‘a novel influenza viral strain could arise at any point’ and there was ‘no scientific rationale to support the notion that such a pandemic in the UK could be successfully “contained”’.
Instead, it points to scientific evidence to suggest that its impact ‘might be somewhat suppressed, or mitigated, by the judicious use of a combination of behavioural and pharmaceutical interventions’. This suggests that the government was planning for mitigation rather than suppression. In other words, before the virus had even landed on our shores, the government had decided it couldn’t halt it, only potentially weaken its strength.
Is less really more?
But to this end, the government ignored calls to shut down public gatherings and enforce widespread mask-wearing. Of the first eleven measures laid out in the Executive summary, the government only partially introduced the second to begin with, which calls for ‘improved access to respiratory and hand hygiene facilities, such as tissues and soap’, but assured that the more drastic actions such as facemasks, school closures, and restrictions on mass gatherings, would have little to no effect.
There was an attempt to start-up minor testing and contact tracing of confirmed cases but this was scrapped on 12 March. As images from Italy painted a dire situation with hospitals overwhelmed and cases jumping in the UK, the government cited ‘behavioural fatigue’ as the reason why they weren’t implementing more measures. A fairly scientific-sounding term to a layman, it actually has no scientific grounding. Instead, as stated by Susan Michie, a British psychologist and director at UCL’s Centre for Behaviour Change and Health Psychology Research Group, ‘It appears that someone made [behavouiral fatigue] up as a shorthand and then used it to justify a policy, but it also seems that no one appears willing to say where it came from.’
An imprudent policy
The policy in question was the one that to introduce a lockdown too early would be to limit its efficacy as people would become apathetic to restrictions. Eleven months later and still under restrictive measures, surely even the most determined Tory would be hard-pressed to defend that action. Indeed, perhaps this policy was actually the cause of increased harm due to its signaling to the public. Surely it’s only common sense that if you suggest that you expect apathy to a decision from the outset, you encourage it to occur more quickly and allow people to feel more justified when they do go against the rules.
With a government confused by its own priorities, it’s no wonder the UK started its response to the pandemic on the backfoot. Its direction took a complete 180 turn from 12 March when closing schools was ‘not thought to be an obvious next step’ to 23 March when schools were shut. Whilst every scientific guidance available was indeed only theoretical, the government seemed to run with the theory that best suited its members and insist they were following the science (when opposing theories were also being circulated). The delay in imposing lockdown measures is estimated to have cost 21,000 lives last spring according to an end-of-year report from Imperial College.
What now?
It is fair to accept that no one knew the right answers last March, but for at least a month and a half, we could see all the potential questions that may have been asked of us and, as the saying goes, fail to prepare; prepare to fail. But we are now almost a year on from that early unprecedented situation and those leading the government still seem to be acting like stubborn schoolchildren. Delays in announcements for schools, problems with the vaccine rollout, and an insistence that a complete shut down similar to last March isn’t necessary, suggests that the government never really stopped believing their original ‘mitigation over suppression’ policy.
It seems that at every hurdle, the government has approached blind and ill-prepared for what lay in front of them, and whilst they’ve (finally) cancelled A-Level and GCSE exams for this summer, it seems they have a fair amount of last-minute revising to do if they ever hope to see the back of this pandemic.
Aarthee Parimelalaghan
Featured image courtesy of Ross Sneddon on Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.