For decades to come, public health officials, academics, and the broader population will debate whether the drastic lockdown measures taken in response to the coronavirus were a necessary action to save lives or a colossal mistake. But the answer to this question will depend heavily on how long it takes to develop an effective vaccine.
The argument in favor of lockdowns has been that COVID-19 is a new, sometimes fatal disease that has no available treatments and a relatively high hospitalization rate. Given that it has a long incubation period and that many people with mild or no symptoms could be carriers, it has been able to spread rapidly.
Originally, the argument was that in the absence of testing, it was necessary to order widespread shutdowns of social and economic activity in order to ensure that at its peak, hospitalizations would remain within the capacity of the medical system. Otherwise, there could be a widespread collapse and a significantly higher death toll as a consequence.
Now that no medical system is in danger of collapse and cases have been steadily declining even as testing ramps up to detect them, we seem to have migrated to a situation in which reopening is being tied to some vague notion of safety. And so the lockdowns have become more debatable.
Lockdown opponents have argued that the dramatic consequences of lockdowns have made continuing them not worth it. Tens of millions have lost their jobs, once-thriving businesses have buckled, and schools have remained shut down — with reopening seeming uncertain even in the fall. Meanwhile, depression and missed medical checkups could end up meaning a significant number of deaths tied to the lockdown.
Looked at one way, the fact that the United States passed the milestone of 100,000 deaths with widespread lockdowns for two months shows how dangerous the disease is — and how much worse it could have been had we gone on with life as usual. The fact that the number of new cases began to flatline within a few weeks of the lockdown orders were put in place is evidence in favor of the idea that draconian measures prevented something far worse.
Looked at another way, the lockdowns were useless: After all the devastation they caused, more than 100,000 people died anyway.
There have already been studies providing fodder for both sides of this argument, and in the years to come, there will be significantly more data to analyze. In the long run, research will address questions such as: How did states and countries fare based on the aggressiveness of the lockdowns? Was there really a large spike in suicides relative to normal years? Will we, in coming years, see a spike in deaths in cancer or in other diseases that could have benefited from earlier detection and treatment?
But the biggest unknown is the timing of the vaccine.
Right now, there are dozens of vaccine candidates being tried throughout the world. The process is moving along at unprecedented speed. The hope is that by fall, the first stage of testing will show that at least one vaccine candidate is safe and that it is effective in a small sample of people. That could allow it to be used in a targeted way in some populations or regions as a tool to fight a potential second wave.
The hope is that as soon as early next year, there will be a successful vaccine that has proven to be effective after larger-scale trials and can be produced and administered on a mass scale, allowing life to go back to normal.
If this were to play out, the case for at least the initial lockdown orders will be made much stronger. It would mean that there was a relatively narrow window in which there weren’t any tools available to slow the spread of the coronavirus and that the mass social distancing bought us time and prevented much worse carnage.
If the skeptics are right, however, and it takes years for a vaccine to be developed, if at all, and if the virus proves resistant to other treatments, the lockdowns will be viewed a lot more negatively.
Nobody really views the lockdowns as a sustainable measure for a matter of years. Unless the country is going to enter a period of extended hibernation, at some point, people will be forced to get on with their lives and incur more risk. Given that widespread infections and fatalities would be inevitable under a scenario in which a vaccine takes a long time or never arrives, it will become much harder to defend the economic and social disruption caused by the lockdowns in the meantime.
