A University of Oxford professor suggested that refraining from imposing lockdowns to combat the coronavirus might have been more effective than the various lockdowns seen across the world.
“I think the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country, so I think it would definitely be less than 1 in 1,000 (0.1%) and probably closer to 1 in 10,000 (0.01%),” Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, said about the virus in the United Kingdom during an interview this week.
“I think there’s a chance we might have done better by doing nothing at all,” Gupta continued. “Or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable, to have thought about protecting the vulnerable 30 or 40 years ago when we started cutting hospital beds. The roots of this go a long, long way back.”
“In almost every context, we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around, and die away — almost like clockwork,” Gupta added. “Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet, what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behavior, which is highly consistent with the SIR model.”
SIR is an epidemiological model that computes the number of people theoretically infected with a disease in a closed population over time.
“To me, that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.”
Gupta’s comments come as people in the United States are openly protesting government lockdowns, most notably in Michigan and California, with restaurant owners and businesses opening their doors, arguing the infection curve has been adequately flattened and negative ramifications of the lockdowns are too dire.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has been a strong advocate of stay-at-home orders but acknowledged Friday that extended lockdowns could cause “irreparable damage” to the country.
A study published earlier this month concluded that stress from lockdowns will destroy 7 times the years of life than the lockdown will save, while another study warned the pandemic could lead to at least 75,000 deaths from “despair” related to suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.
