A member of the United Kingdom’s scientific advisory group for the coronavirus has expressed regret about his country’s lockdown response, especially as it has affected schools, which were set to open by Sept. 1. The comments demonstrate that the virus conversation in that country is tracking closely with that of the United States.
“I never want to see national lockdown again,” Professor Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh said, according to the Daily Express. “It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally, however low we drove down the number of cases, and now we know more about the virus and how to track it, we should not be in this position again.”
That lockdowns were never going to change anything fundamentally is a sensible argument and has been proven true. After immediate lockdowns were enacted, the going assumption of their extension and one that Woolhouse corroborated, was that governments could somehow snuff out the virus. But the virus will not go away, as New Zealand, which suffered exceptionally stringent lockdowns, has found out with new outbreaks. Italy endured extensive lockdowns, and so did France. Both are now seeing new surges in cases.
Woolhouse focused on schools, saying, “We absolutely should never return to a position where children cannot play or go to school.” He continued, “Closing schools was not an epidemiologically sensible thing to do,” saying, “We were not really thinking about where the risk lies, just on suppressing the virus.”
After Woolhouse’s comments were published, the BBC’s medical editor, Fergus Walsh, expressed similar thoughts in a column, asking whether it was time to move on and get back to normal life. In outlining risk levels among age groups and comparing COVID-19 deaths to those caused by prostate and breast cancers, he answers mostly in the affirmative.
Woolhouse’s and Walsh’s commentaries mirror elements of America’s current coronavirus conversation, and there are notable similarities even between Woolhouse and key U.S. health officials. Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested as recently as Aug. 3 that states with surges reconsider reimplementing lockdowns, though he changed course shortly thereafter, saying “You don’t have to lock down again, but everybody has got to be on board for doing these five or six fundamental public health measures,” referring to virus mitigation actions such as masking and distancing. “I think we can get through this without having to revert back to a shutdown,” he said.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield has stressed the health consequences of lockdowns, especially insofar as they would close schools, speaking repeatedly on the importance of them being reopened. “We don’t need to do an educational pause, as a nation, for a couple of years,” he said in a recent interview. On reopening, Redfield also made an effort to manage expectations, saying, “It’s got to be done with an understanding that COVID cases are going to occur in K-12s and they are going to occur in universities.”
It’s clear that, at least among some in public health, there has been some shift on the utility of lockdowns. If not a shift, there has at least been continuing recognition that lockdowns are deleterious and that the virus can be better managed using other strategies.
