Take it from a locking of the wise advisor was a disaster

Covated locking was an inexcusable act autumutilationWell count the costs for decades. School closings damaged the chances of life of an entire generation; Hundreds of billions of pounds were added to the national debt; Millions have been sentenced to months of loneliness and isolation, leaving an inheritance of spiral mental health problems. However, a large part of this could have and should have been avoided.

The Uks Scientific Advisory Group for Emergency (SAGE) first meeting To discuss the possibility of a cocovated pandemic in January 2020. I was not involved, although I had to become a member of a wise subgroup and a Scottish advisory group known informally under the name of Sage For Scotland. Although I and many other scientists were deeply concerned with a potential pandemic, Sage did a bad job of lifting the alarm in the following weeks and the government of Boris Johnsons truncated.

On March 23, 2020, I did not destroy advice calling Immediate locking. We had been caught off guard not by the increase expected for a long time in cases, but by the pace of events. The absence of test capacity meant that we were blind to thousand infections This had been brought to the country in February, giving the pandemic a massive lead and advancing the crisis per week.

The strategy should have been to act earlier and therefore less radically. It is not difficult to understand that you do not need severe restrictions to reduce the number of infections if you do not let them go up first. Even so everyone did not have the message. Matt HancockThe secretary of health at the time, still pleads for locking earlier, longer and harder. But he is wrong. Locking is not so much a public health policy, it is a failure of public health policy. Lock is what you do when you think you have no other choice.

What none of us knew in March 2020 is that the Measures already taken worked and the public had already acted. When anonymized mobile phone data were released two months later, they showed much less activity and much more at home than usual in the week before locking. Few things changed on March 23. Covid was already under control before the start of locking, although it would not be easy for a fortnight of fifteen days while infections have already acquired their toll of illness and death.

I expected and pleaded for rapid release of the least effective restrictions, including home orders, prohibitions of outdoor activities and especially school closures. We could have dropped all those who at any time without the pandemic taking off again. But Sage had nothing, and the junction continued for months. In July 2020, I wrote Frustration, I fear that history judges locking as a monumental error on a really global scale. Maybe this will be the case, but we haven't finished with locks yet.

Sage resisted the reopening of schools until Scotland did it in August. But when the cowled cases increased in October, wise claimed For another complete locking. The people involved in Sage had been chased by their sub-relief during the first wave and a state of mind “let's not make the same mistake”. Sage was presented with alternatives to keep Covid at a distance, but all rejected them, only the locking would do the trick. England finally capitulated, but the locking of November was not necessary that Scotland did not and was doing even better. At least this time, the Westminster government opposed the sage's advice and resisted the call to close the schools.

The resulting ministers failed when the alpha variant arrived and the whole United Kingdom, the schools and everything, entered into Another complete locking in January 2021. It was an extremely difficult period and an action was necessary, but the lifting of the restrictions was even slower and the schools were not fully reversed before May, long after the wave control.

During the summer of 2021, the government wanted to raise many of the remaining restrictions. Sage has advised this, warning of the worst wave to date. But once Matt Hancock was forced to resign to Bafouez his own rules of social provision The mood of governments has changed. He ignored the sage and 'Liberty Day“I went ahead. There was no wave of infections at all.

When the very transmitted omicron variant appeared at the end of 2021, Sage called to another locking, warning from afar the deadliest wave of all. The government has kept the faith with its own plan. There was a modest wave, but far from the ladder that the wise models had predicted.

The reasons are worth exploring. The extremely successful vaccination program played a role, as was immunity accumulated by a natural infection. The other factor was the deployment of free auto-test kits. Auto-test people allowed people to assess and manage their own risk for others something they have done with great enthusiasm and an even greater effect. The test kits had been successfully tested more than a year earlier and could have helped us avoid the locking of January 2021, but this approach was never supported by Sage.

At this point, I have to insert a warning. The United Kingdom has many exceptional scientists who have done priceless work during the cocovio pandemic. THE advisers On Sage, Sage had great expertise, worked constantly, was really worried and meant well. The fault was not with individuals. On the contrary, it was with the way their advice was asked and then communicated to the government. I call it a “systems failure”.

The failure was so deep that when the government followed the advice of the wise men Keep open schools In November 2020, delete restrictions In July 2021, not locking yourself during the Omicron wave, his decision to do so was confirmed. If wise had succeeded, the United Kingdom would have been the most locked country of the world, and the damage caused to our children to the economy and to society would have been even worse than it was.

The problem is too deep to be corrected by cosmetic adjustments. The best way is to abolish sage and introduce a better system. There should be teams dedicated to the snack and the summary of evidence (a huge task). There should be teams responsible for finding several options, with their advantages and disadvantages. Sage preferred to send a single message, but there are always options that the government should be informed of what they are, not marked by the frog in a direction he does not want to go.

Sage had the depth of expertise. But there must be a wide range of expertise in order to reflect the impact of a crisis like Cavid on all aspects of society. This means changing the format of the committee, which is too sensitive to pride and group thought. There should be a larger group of higher figures channeling advice to ministers, rather than only one or two even if they are Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance.

All this, and more, can be done. If reforms have not been made before the next pandemic arrives, we risk repeating the same mistakes. The locking genius came out of the bottle and awaits its next luck. Before March 2020, I never imagined that the world would offer public intervention in health that ends up worsen things. However, this is what happened, it should never happen again.

Mark Woolhouse is a professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The year when the world has gone mad (Sandstone Press, 2022).