The case for lockdown falls apart more each day, but our leaders are in too deep to dig us out

Despite tragic mortality figures, Spain and Italy have not resisted the most gradual and tentative of easing in their national lockdowns. Yet the UK government continues to insist that the subject cannot even be discussed yet, apparently awaiting the passing of some kind of Coronavirus peak that will come and go at some point unknown.

By the way, where is Dr Jenny Harries these days? Has anyone seen her lately? Whilst everyone else has spoken in timelines of weeks, Dr Harries made the astonishingly contradictory assertion that we would need to wait between 3 and 6 months, then promptly disappeared.

I had hoped that Harries had spoken from her own point of view, and sensible heads had pointed out that when balancing health, economics and other considerations, months of lockdown wasn’t an option. Yet I increasingly fear that this was wishful thinking and that Harries had in fact let a most unwelcome cat out of the bag.

It follows that, a government that went into lockdown not as part of a planned response but the most major of overnight panics, now has no clue whatsoever how the hell we get out of it. That’s the scariest thing about the restrictions under which we are living.

There can be no crumb of comfort whilst the government refuses to have the adult discussion about the moral dilemmas in trying to ‘save lives’ that the rest of us are now being forced to confront.

The bleak economic consequences of lockdown will be deadly!

No minister could have sensed anything other than dismay at the projections of the Office for Budget Responsibility, which assumes that the impact of a 3-month lockdown will be a 35% shrinking of the economy, leading to 2 million unemployed and an annual GDP reduction of 12%, oh and the biggest single year’s net borrowing deficit since the Second World War – £273bn, if you please!

What’s even more disturbing is that economists regard these assumptions as being on the optimistic side, assuming a relatively swift return to normality.

However, the signs are everywhere that the campaign to terrorise the populace has been highly effective. A service-driven economy cannot recover if people’s behaviours are dramatically changed, and there is little doubt that they will be for some time. Hysteria is not easily unlearned. It is far more easily ramped up than taken down a few notches.

But even if the OBR proves correct, it’s worth revisiting the work of Professor Phillip Thomas of Bristol University. His modelling suggests that the virus running unchecked would, in terms of years of life lost, equate to the deaths of 400,000 average-aged adults. With that in mind, it’s possible to calculate the tipping point when the harm of an economic downturn would outweigh the benefits of efforts to beat the virus, and that tipping point is a fall of just 6.4% of GDP.

Many will needlessly die of causes other than Coronavirus

All this is before we even start to talk about the cost in lives of neglecting other serious medical conditions.

A&E attendance is down a third, with fears that patients are delaying seeking medical help even where they have suffered events as serious as suspected minor strokes or heart attacks.

Cancer trials are stopping, screening is ceasing, and GPs are closing their doors. This has a devastating impact on treatment, but more importantly the crucial early detection that stops a cancer diagnosis from being a death sentence.

And what about the vast backlog of routine appointments and surgery?

The cabinet has been informed that the potential impact of all this could be a cost of 150,000 avoidable deaths – a far greater cost than Coronavirus is likely to have even with a more moderate set of restrictions.

I have heard Matt Hancock, the health secretary, shrug this cohort of unfortunate people off as the indirect victims of the virus, but they are not. They will be victims of the lockdown and what I believe will be judged by history to be the most dramatic overreaction in generations.

Whatever happened to NHS Nightingale?

I saw tweets over the weekend asking what’s happening in NHS Nightingale, the London-based temporary hospital built in a couple of weeks, whose opening appeared to signal beyond any doubt that we are facing something truly apocalyptic.

Well, now we know, and it’s little wonder there has been silence about it. Over the Easter weekend, the facility, built to treat over 3,500 people, treated just 19 patients, whilst across London’s existing hospitals, 80% of intensive care beds were occupied.

Bottom line: in the epicentre of the UK Coronavirus outbreak, the NHS is coping. Remember that we are routinely told at the press conferences that we need to wait at least a few weeks to see if the lockdown measures are working. If we take the experts at their word, therefore, far from justifying the lockdown this in fact brings its value even further into question.

We need to hear the exit strategy

Business confidence is at an all-time low. The economy is about to face a slump without precedent. That alone will come with an appalling cost in lives, on top of which the many deaths that the vast disruption to the provision of health services will also cause.

Those health and care services, the workers behind which we applaud each Thursday evening, will end up even more drastically underfunded for many years to come as we pay down this extraordinary splurge of government spending.

Vaccines are too far away and, despite the constant chatter about testing, we’ve missed the boat to enjoy any meaningful benefits from widespread testing.

We are not saving lives but sleepwalking towards an even greater tragedy.

We are told we are protecting the NHS, but even at the point where we are told that it is too early to see any impact of locking down, the NHS is coping.

We had no justification for lockdown, but we face one almighty challenge coming out of it. Under a half-credible leader, Labour is pushing hard for details of the government’s exit strategy, but it’s pretty obvious that, if there is one, it’s not in any fit shape to provide the transparency we desperately need.

The case for lockdown falls apart more each day, but our leaders are in too deep to dig us out.