James Forsyth
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One secretary of state professes to have been shocked to learn this week that the government’s two epidemiological models both assume six months where some forms of restrictions are in place. If it is six months before the lockdown is lifted, then the economic damage caused by this virus will be immense. By the time it is ended, thousands of business will have closed for good and millions will have lost their jobs. To many ministers, six months of restrictions is unthinkable and unaffordable.
One problem for the government is that it doesn’t have all the information it needs to make decisions. For instance, it still doesn’t know what fraction of the population is likely to have had the disease. One of those intimately involved in the policy-making process laments that ‘We don’t have enough clarity to know where we are, to know what we should be doing’.
Medical answers seem a way off. A vaccine will not be available this year, the antibody tests that have been trialled so far have not worked, and even with the accelerated clinical trials for drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, it will take six to ten weeks to know whether they are effective or not. Add to this the fact that even the target of 100,000 tests a day — a figure which some in No. 10 are sceptical of the government’s ability to meet — wouldn’t be enough for a South Korean-style ‘test, track and trace’ approach, and it is clear that finding a medical way out of the crisis is going to take some time.
The debate about when to relax the lockdown is sometimes caricatured as lives vs the economy. It is, of course, a much more delicate trade-off than that. As Professor Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has pointed out, a continued lockdown means more people could end up in poverty, which is a health risk. It is likely to result in an increase in domestic violence and mental health problems, and in a growing number of young children missing being vaccinated. And if this country ends up permanently poorer, it won’t be able to afford the same levels of health care that it currently can.
However long it does go on, the lockdown cannot be lifted in one go, because that would mean people flocking to pubs, which would boost the transmission rate of the virus. But some restrictions could be eased sooner rather than later. For example, the government was worried that its list of key workers would lead to 30 per cent of children being in school, when the aim was 20 per cent. But I understand that less than 2 per cent of children are now in school.
The rapid increase in the number of NHS beds also changes the situation. A Downing Street insider points out that ‘one of the biggest priorities was that we don’t want an Italian-style situation. We can’t have people choking to death in corridors. It is not what we want to be as a country, anything is worth it to avoid that. But once we have built up capacity to deal with it, the argument become much more nuanced’.
Another factor is how successfully other European countries end their lockdowns. In the same way that the decision by so many countries to impose restrictions led to public pressure on the UK government to do the same, if various countries manage to lift them without unleashing a second wave of the virus, that could shift public opinion. As senior government figures admit, it would be impossible to enforce a lockdown on a British public that didn’t want one.
But right now the public are anxious, and the Prime Minister is in intensive care. The debates about when to lift the lockdown will have to wait for Johnson’s recovery.
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