The Covid lockdowns were an inexcusable act of self-harm, and we’ll be counting the costs for decades. School closures damaged the life chances of a whole generation; hundreds of billions of pounds were added to the national debt; millions were condemned to months of loneliness and isolation, leaving a legacy of spiralling mental-health problems. Yet so much of that could and should have been avoided.
The UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) first met to discuss the possibility of a Covid pandemic in January 2020. I was not involved, though I was to become a member of a SAGE sub-group and Scottish advisory group informally known as SAGE for Scotland. Although I and many other scientists were deeply concerned about a potential pandemic, SAGE did a poor job of raising the alarm over the following weeks and Boris Johnson’s government dithered.
On 23 March 2020, I did not demur from advice calling for an immediate lockdown. We had been caught unawares – not by the long-anticipated rise in cases, but by the pace of events. The lack of testing capacity meant we were blind to the thousand-or-so infections that had been brought into the country in February, giving the pandemic a massive headstart and bringing the crisis forward by weeks.
The strategy should have been to act earlier and therefore less drastically. That’s not difficult to understand – you don’t need harsh restrictions to drive down the number of infections if you don’t let them rise up in the first place. Even so, not everyone has got the message. Matt Hancock, the health secretary at the time, is still arguing for earlier, longer and harsher lockdowns. But he’s wrong. Lockdown is not so much a public-health policy, it’s a failure of public-health policy. Lockdown is what you do when you think you have no other choice.
What none of us knew in March 2020 was that the measures already taken were working and the public had already acted. When anonymised mobile-phone data were released two months later, they showed far less activity and much more staying at home than usual in the week before lockdown. Little changed on 23 March. Covid was already under control before the lockdown began, though that wouldn’t be apparent for another fortnight while infections already acquired extracted their toll of sickness and death.
I expected and argued for a rapid release from the least effective restrictions, including stay-at-home orders, bans on outdoor activities and – most importantly – school closures. We could have dropped all those at any time without the pandemic taking off again. But SAGE was having none of it, and the confinement continued for months. In July 2020, I wrote in frustration that ‘I fear that history will judge lockdown as a monumental mistake on a truly global scale’. Maybe it will, but we were not done with lockdowns yet.
SAGE resisted the reopening of schools until Scotland did it in August. But when Covid cases rose in October, SAGE clamoured for another full lockdown. Those involved in SAGE had been chastened by their underreaction during the first wave and a ‘let’s not make the same mistake again’ mindset had taken hold. SAGE was presented with alternatives for keeping Covid at bay, but dismissed them all – only lockdown would do. England eventually capitulated but the November lockdown wasn’t necessary – Scotland didn’t have one and still fared better. At least this time the Westminster government went against SAGE advice and resisted the call to close schools.
Ministers’ resolve faltered when the Alpha variant arrived and the entire UK, schools and all, went into another full lockdown in January 2021. This was an extremely challenging period and action was needed, but the lifting of restrictions was even slower and schools did not fully reopen until May, long after the wave had been brought under control.
Over the summer of 2021, the government wanted to lift many of the remaining restrictions. SAGE advised against this, warning of the worst wave yet if it did so. But once Matt Hancock was forced to resign for flouting his own social-distancing rules the government’s mood changed. It ignored SAGE and ‘Freedom Day’ went ahead. There was no wave of infections at all.
When the highly transmissible Omicron variant appeared in late 2021, SAGE called for yet another lockdown, warning of by far the deadliest wave of all. The government kept faith with its own plan. There was a modest wave, but nowhere near the scale that SAGE’s models had predicted.
The reasons for this are worth exploring. The hugely successful vaccination programme played a role, as did the immunity built up through natural infection. The other factor was the rollout of free self-testing kits. Self-testing empowered people to gauge and manage their own risk to others – something they did with great enthusiasm and even greater effect. The test kits had been successfully trialled over a year before and could have helped us avoid the January 2021 lockdown, but that approach was never supported by SAGE.
At this point, I must insert a disclaimer. The UK has many outstanding scientists who did invaluable work during the Covid pandemic. The advisers on SAGE had great expertise, worked non-stop, were genuinely concerned and meant well. The fault wasn’t with the individuals. Rather, it lay with the way their advice was solicited and then communicated to government. I call it a ‘systems failure’.
The failure was so profound that when the government went against SAGE’s advice – keeping schools open in November 2020, removing restrictions in July 2021, not locking down during the Omicron wave – its decision to do so was vindicated. If SAGE had got its way, the UK would have been the most locked-down country in the world, and the damage done to our children, to the economy and to society would have been even worse than it was.
The problem runs too deep to be fixed by cosmetic adjustments. The best way forward is to abolish SAGE and introduce a better system. There should be teams dedicated to collating and summarising the evidence (a huge task). There should be teams charged with coming up with multiple options, complete with their pros and cons. SAGE preferred to send a single message, but there are always options – the government should be told what they are, not frog-marched in a direction it doesn’t want to go.
SAGE had the depth of expertise. But there needs to be a much greater breadth of expertise so as to reflect the impact of a crisis like Covid on every aspect of society. That means changing the committee format, which is too susceptible to hubris and groupthink. There should be a bigger group of senior figures channelling advice to ministers, rather than just one or two – even if they are Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance.
All that, and more, can be done. If reforms haven’t been made before the next pandemic arrives then we risk repeating the same mistakes. The lockdown genie is out of the bottle and waiting for its next chance. Before March 2020, I never imagined the world would come up with a public-health intervention that ultimately made matters worse. Yet that’s what happened – it must never happen again.
Mark Woolhouse is a professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Year the World Went Mad (Sandstone Press, 2022).
