Pandemic 2020: Look back in anger

It is a few days before Christmas and the year is 2022. I am an economist and I was concerned about the impact on the UK economy of the pandemic itself and more importantly the official response and policies chosen to fight it.

We are now suffering from stagflation (high inflation and high unemployment), the travel sector has been almost decimated, the hospitality sector has not recovered, 80% of shops are boarded up in the High Street, there is a surge of excess deaths as the result of delayed operations and diagnoses during 2020, real incomes have fallen and we are all working harder to recover living standards, the flu season is with us again along with different strains of Covid such that new vaccines are continually playing catch-up.

It is therefore in hindsight that I wonder whether we got it right or did we make a complete mess?

As a somewhat sceptical economist I never see government intervention, with all its good intentions, ever working without a lot of waste and inefficiency as it creates new committees and organisations that are meant to be temporary but seem to become a permanent part of our political landscape.

At the time of the pandemic we were crying out for statistics that explained exactly what was going on rather than those that were chosen to frighten us into submitting to what most people have now realised was the wrong approach with a lot of mixed messaging which said one thing, but implied something completely different. We now know that the average age of those who died after a positive Covid test was 82.4 and that although Covid was on the death certificate it was unlikely to be the cause of death and almost all those who died had underlying conditions. It was even claimed that there were no deaths among healthy young people and very few deaths among healthy old people.

Knowing this what could we have done better?

Could we have gone without lockdowns and minimised damage to our economy. I am not a medical expert, but I noticed at the time that there were considerable differences among the experts. The Barrington Declaration made a very strong case for no lockdowns as the SAGE committee did for promoting lockdowns. Unfortunately this debate never reached the mainstream media who supported lockdowns throughout.

One of the good things that came out early in the pandemic was Shielding Letters to those who were vulnerable. In retrospect I see that they could have been used very differently and more productively. They could have included concern about age, obesity, underlying medical conditions and particularly the medication a person was taking. As they were personalised they could then have given each person an analysis of their risks. For example:

 “Because of your age and specified underlying conditions there is a 78% (or whatever risk level was identified by the experts) that you will die if you catch Covid. We suggest therefore that you minimise all contacts where Covid could be passed on to you. It is advisable that you continue to follow these guidelines until you have been vaccinated or been given the all clear”.

All people of working age who received a shielding letter could have been given the option to accept furlough payments which covered a significant proportion of their average wage. The cost of this would have been miniscule compared with the enormous expense of the chosen wasteful furlough scheme. Equally all these people would have the right to ignore this offer and continue their normal life as they could not do harm to anyone other than themselves or to those who had not also freely made the same decision to ignore the advice.

We now know that for 95% of the population Covid was no more than a very mild case of the flu and whoever was healthy and caught it may need at most a few days off work or may not even know that they had it. In 1968 I was in my second year at university and a pandemic named Hong Kong flu caused similar deaths and other short term problems in the UK. I and many of my friends never even noticed it. Under Harold Wilson`s labour government there were no restrictions, no track and trace, no masks, no lockdowns and in nine months it was gone and very few people outside the NHS noticed any waves as it went. It is a good example of achieving herd immunity as no vaccinations were required although there would have been developments in vaccination technology for future similar events.

What went wrong in 2020?

The media must take some of the blame for frightening the population by giving daily updates on deaths FOR ANY REASON among people who had received a positive Covid test in the previous 28 days. They also focused on the growth of infections that were registered through increased testing where there may not have been an increased number of infections. They used terminology like, an awful killer disease that can bring down healthy people of any age or require years to recover from what was called Long Covid. Once such an issue is highlighted a democratic government must always act as it is impossible for them to say that it is better we do nothing. They set up the SAGE committee that had a single issue to deal with, namely killing the killer virus at whatever cost. There were no experts included who could inform them of the economic damage their policies were creating and politicians used the get out clause “we are following the science” when they were unsure of outcomes or needed someone else to blame. Lockdowns were chosen to suppress the virus until a vaccination could be found. Time and time again they failed and the only solution was to say that we did not do it early enough, long enough or people just did not follow our instructions to the letter. To see the predicted results of this approach please return to the first paragraph.

John Hearn 20/12/2020