The impact of the virus first came to public attention in February with images of hospitals in Lombardy being suddenly overrun with a huge influx of covid-19 patients with doctors being overwhelmed. The hospitals soon ran out of beds and ventilators, and doctors were placed in the impossible position of having to decide which patients should receive treatment and which of them should be left to die. These images were looked at in horror here, both by the public and government ministers.
The government came under enormous pressure to ensure that such scenes were not repeated in British hospitals. The Italian government had responded by imposing a strict lockdown in Lombardy which was soon extended to the whole of Italy. In quick succession national lockdowns were also imposed in France, Germany and Spain, and before long the whole of Western Europe, with the exception of Sweden had been placed in lockdown. At this stage the first British cases had been registered but numbers were still low compared with the Continent. The government appeared unwilling to countenance a lockdown in Britain, rightly fearing that such a measure would have an enormous adverse impact on the economy. Initially it confined itself to recommending us all to wash our hands thoroughly and to maintain social distancing.
However by March the number of cases started to quickly increase and the first British deaths were announced. Before long the number of new cases was doubling every few days, and ministers feared that British hospitals would soon be overwhelmed unless drastic measures were introduced. Epidemiologists were predicting that over half a million could die if no action was taken.
On March 23 the Prime Minister addressed the nation to announce that a national lockdown would be imposed with immediate effect. The declared objective was to flatten the curve of the virus thus preventing the NHS from becoming overwhelmed. In this situation the Government really had no choice but to impose a lockdown, in the words of their slogan, to ‘Save the NHS’. By this time the pressure from the media, the fears of the public, the precedent of an almost complete lockdown in mainland Europe, and the still unknown threat from the virus meant that no government could have resisted the clamour to lockdown the country.
The government acted with considerable speed at the start of the crisis by expanding the number of bed spaces through the construction of the Nightingale hospitals in a very short period of time. With the help of several companies that switched their production lines, the government was also able to ensure that ventilators were built in the required numbers. More controversially, many elderly patients were transferred from hospitals into care homes. As a result of all these measures the NHS was always able to cope with covid cases even at the time of peak infection which occurred in mid April.
The government should be congratulated for the way it handled the crisis at this most critical moment. There has been some ignorant carping that as the Nightingale hospitals were hardly used, and the number of ventilators far exceeded the actual need, the government should instead have focussed attention on acquiring more PPE equipment which was in short supply. But this criticism comes with the benefit of hindsight and there can be no doubt that government ministers got their priorities right at this critical stage.
With regard to the large number of deaths in care homes it should be remembered that hospitals were also hotspots for coronavirus infections, and there was an urgent necessity to remove from hospital patients who had no clinical need to be there. Other countries showed a similar proportion of care home deaths including Scotland under the sainted Nicola Sturgeon. Indeed in retrospect it is a mystery how more than half British care homes avoided having any infections at a time when the virus was rampant in the community.
Many people were hoping that once the epidemic had peaked and the number of cases was on a clear downward trajectory, the lockdown could be ended since the NHS was no longer in danger of being overwhelmed. It is now almost forgotten that the original period of lockdown was intended to be for only three weeks. But instead of ending the lockdown when the threat to the NHS was over, considerable mission creep occurred, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Boris Johnson contracted the virus and needed to be placed in intensive care. With his removal from the scene the government was left rudderless with no one willing to take important decisions until the Prime Minister had recovered. When he did return to work Boris Johnson, perhaps understandably, appeared rather spooked by his brush with death, and became a lot more cautious about relaxing the lockdown.
At the same time the British public had become far more frightened by the virus, influenced not just by the government’s alarmist messaging but also by fears whipped up by the mainstream media. The BBC was in the vanguard of raising public concern. From the beginning it had been agitating for the strictest of lockdowns, and was continually criticising the government over the lack of PPE and the failure to introduce an effective testing regime. As a result of this campaign the original objective of saving the NHS disappeared, to be replaced by a collective hysteria over the rising number of deaths resulting from the virus.
From the beginning of the crisis the government has repeatedly claimed that it has been following the science. What it has refused to acknowledge is that there has been very little reliable science to follow. This was a new virus with several known unknowns. Nobody knew how infectious it was, or how it was transmitted, or how it would impact on the population, or the level of immunity or how long any immunity would last. So the projections and advice on which the government made its decisions were often little more than guesswork, but dangerously dressed up as immutable scientific fact.
The original strategy of the government appears to have been to achieve what is known as herd immunity. This occurs when sufficient numbers of people have antibodies to the virus so that it is no longer able to spread and it eventually dies out in the community. But as the number of deaths increased the BBC and other media outlets started to denounce this as a callous strategy, calling instead for measures that would help prevent the spread of the disease and save lives. This became the government’s new approach.
Meanwhile the number of deaths per day started to fall and this has continued steadily until the present time. The government and virtually all of the media attributed this decline to the strong lockdown measures that had been taken. In time the government decided that it would be safe to gradually relax elements of the lockdown and the biggest steps were the re-opening of non essential shops followed a few weeks later by the opening of pubs and restaurants. But things have by no means returned to normal as strict social distancing measures are still being insisted upon.
So this was the science under which the government took its decisions, and virtually no one in the media questioned whether the scientific advice had been correct. There appears to have been a collective failure to notice, or to ignore, what had been happening in the real world. The first failure was to acknowledge how quickly the virus had spread in the community in the early months of February and March. Given how soon the number of cases increased during this period the only conclusion that can be reached is that the virus is very highly infectious. Moreover it continued to be infectious after lockdown was introduced albeit at a lower level. This suggests that the virus was unaffected by the two metres social distancing rule. Instead it appears that the virus was caught by people breathing it in from the air in enclosed spaces, most probably supermarkets which most people continued to visit, but in reduced frequency and numbers. This theory has now gained some traction with scientists, but with unfortunate consequences for relaxing restrictions.
Another factor to which relatively little attention has been given is the infection pattern in Western European countries. These show remarkable similarities regardless of whether there was a hard lockdown such as in Spain or only relatively relaxed measures as taken by Sweden. The pattern in Britain has been the same with a very quick growth followed by a gradual decline in the number of new cases. In all these countries new infections are now at a very low level, although in Britain the number of deaths recorded in the official statistics is still higher, primarily due to a backlog in registering them. The best conclusion that can reasonably be reached is that the epidemic is now virtually over in these countries, including Britain.
However, the pronouncements of government and the reporting of the media especially the BBC, instead give the impression that the pandemic is still rampant and widespread, resulting in a significant proportion of the population being petrified that they might catch the virus. In reality the virus has had very little impact on people of working age. The average age of those who have died is over 80 and over 90% of those who have died have been over 65. Nearly all those who have died had one or more serious underlying conditions, the virus sadly hastening their inevitable demise. So the deadly nature of the virus for the majority of the population has been grossly exaggerated. Since the height of the pandemic the number of deaths, hospital admissions and new cases have all fallen by over 95%, and they continue to fall.
Another distraction has been the obsession with testing promoted by the BBC but embraced by the government. They have treated testing as if it was a substitute vaccine. In reality a test is out of date as soon as it has taken place. Testing in itself (outside a hospital or care home) has no effect on the spread of the virus. The more tests you carry out the more cases you are likely to find. This is what prompted the unnecessary local Leicester lockdown.
The current fear is that a deadly second wave of the virus will appear in the autumn. A recent report has suggested that up to 120,000 people could die from covid during the winter. It is this alarmism (plus the increasing acceptance that the virus can be spread in the air we breath) which has been the driver for introducing the mandatory wearing of face masks on public transport and now in shops. These fears have also acted as a brake on relaxing the other restrictions which are still in place such as those affecting theatres.
The reality is that by default herd immunity has largely been achieved over most of the United Kingdom, and that there is absolutely no justification for retaining any of the present restrictions including the wearing of face masks. The insistence on wearing face masks at a time when the virus has almost disappeared is sheer madness. In any case these face masks are regarded by many scientists as virtually useless when compared with the surgical masks used in hospitals, which have to be discarded immediately after use. The Guardian comparison between face masks and seat belts is patently fatuous. They are dehumanising, a threat to health and wellbeing through the restriction of oxygen to the lungs. Moreover, there is likely to be a huge spike in shoplifting from convenience stores that rely on CCTV for their security.
The only reason that we cannot return to normalcy is the exaggerated and unfounded fears of a deadly second wave promoted by the BBC and some epidemiologists. However, it can safely be predicted that as herd immunity has now almost arrived this second wave will never happen in Britain. So the government, in failing to return society back to normal, is behaving recklessly by continuing to encourage fears of the virus, which will inevitably result in economic armageddon with sky high levels of unemployment. The ending of the hysteria over the virus should now be the government’s top priority, if an economic catastrophe is to be avoided.
