I've been under different lockdowns in Spain, Austria and the UK – and still, there are no clear winners
www.telegraph.co.uk
Since the beginning of this pandemic, I have travelled through several European countries in which I have suffered their various, differing countermeasures.
I witnessed marines patrolling the streets in Spain, which was under one of Europe's hardest lockdowns in Europe. There I ran a half-marathon inside a small apartment in an attempt to stay sane and fit, while the Spanish government locked away both their physically vulnerable elderly and psychologically at-risk children from all sunlight and exercise, despite their measurable protection against the virus.
I returned to England when permitted, and was thus invited to bear witness to the catastrophic collapse of the hospitality industry, with hotels and restaurants practically begging for customers as they desperately attempted to outweigh the off-putting countermeasures of bleach, enforced hand-sanitisation, masks and social distancing.
Seeing the UK's second lockdown rolling in, like a sailor watching the wind moving across the water, and in search of an escape, I spoke to friends in Paris where I used to live, but they had it even harder than Spain. And, while the Swedish experiment to the north looked to me like an extraordinarily brave idea, one which may yet work in the long run, I have neither friends nor family there with whom to enjoy the liberty.
So I opted for Austria, where I do have loved ones; a country which after a short, sharp lockdown had stilled infections over the summer and were one of the most open countries in Europe. What’s more, where the authorities did impose measures,
it was done in a calm, unjudgmental manner, with healthy debate free to run on both sides.
Comparing the severity of various lockdown measures across Europe is complicated, with many factors at play. However, it is safe to say they have varied greatly. In France, citizens had to print out certificates before stepping foot outside, whereas in Sweden, everyday life appears to have carried on relatively unchanged.
Despite these vastly different approaches, however, when we look at the number of Covid deaths per capita in these countries – a metric not without its problems, mind – France and Sweden are almost neck-and-neck. And Spain's draconian measures didn't save it from recording far more fatalities than Austria, where the lockdown was comparatively relaxed.
Which brings us, naturally, to question the effectiveness of these countermeasures, and the ethics, politics and legality of imposing them.
The trouble with even raising these points, however, is that by now most readers will have made up their minds as to whether they are in my tribe or against it, having already decided (incorrectly) which 'tribe' I belong to: a staunch Tory-voting, pro-Brexit, Sar-COV-2 denier. If I happened to be American, you can add pro-gun, anti-abortion and systemic racist to that list.
On the other hand, when I say that I agree with certain measures, including, for instance, Austria’s introduction of the FFP2 mask last Monday to replace the functionally useless surgical masks we wore before, I will be labelled the reverse.
As I have said here before, informative nuance and healthy scepticism have been the
greatest victims of this plague in the time of social media. In truth, nothing is black and white, and it can't be easy being a scientist in the spotlight at present.
Suppose for a moment you are an epidemiologist, with a broad enough understanding of the interrelations between psychology, economics and health, to realise that any lockdown is a temporary measure, briefly lightening infection rates which will inevitably return; and, that once you start locking down it will inevitably happen again and again and have less effect on contagion each time.
What is more, you realise from your extensive academic study that the health effects of these lockdowns will most likely exceed the death rate of a virus with a mortality of between 0.4 per cent and 0.25 per cent (a figure we have from the perfect
epidemiological closed experiment of the Diamond Princess cruise shipas early as March last year.)
Then the Government asks you to join an advisory committee and puts your name to anything you recommend. Do you really want to be listed as an author on a paper saying that in effect, we should prematurely end the lives of anywhere between 150,000 and a quarter of a million citizens?
Even if the majority are elderly – the median age of death from Covid-19 in the UK is 82.4 years old – and even if your most conservative colleague, Neill Ferguson of Imperial College, says that “two thirds” of them may already have been in such ill health they would have died within a year anyway, are you going to sign that document of death?
No, not when the alternative is that you push to delay those particular deaths. Even if criticism comes further down the line for collapsing the economy, ruining the education and thus employment chances of a generation of children, and killing even more people. By then, the news cycle will have moved on, obfuscation made easy, “important lessons learned” and your time in the spotlight blissfully forgotten.
Yesterday I spoke to two doctor friends in the UK; an anaesthetist who is now deputy head of the intensive care unit at one of West London’s most important hospitals, the other his wife, a GP on the front line. Both explicitly said they would advocate a harsher lockdown, but also freely admitted that every part of their training revolved around saving the life in front of them; leaving the wider societal dilemmas to the politicians whose job it actually is. Conversely, the head of a pulmonary unit I met in Vienna, whose age, ethnicity and weight put him firmly in the high-risk bracket practically laughed the disease off and gave me some Valium for my own dose of Covid-19.
All the medics I speak with agree on one thing, though: no one will really know the effects of any of these legislative interventions – which have often circumvented parliamentary democracy – until we get to look at the five-year excess mortality studies and compare them between countries. We know, for example, that in Spain the economic consequences of the 2008 banking crisis contributed to the 40,000 deaths in excess of the five years prior, and that Covid-19 has already led that country into an economic state worse than that of their collapse in the mid-17th century.
I'll end with one clear, current example, which suggests that these lockdowns might not have been the most sensible manoeuvre, and begins with health but ends in economics. Pretty much 50 per cent of all Covid deaths across Europe have been within care homes. The budget for those in the UK is £16 billion, where care homes account for some 410,000 residents. Meanwhile, the hospitality industry, which has been effectively shut down, is the fourth biggest employer in the UK, accounting for 3.2million jobs through direct employment in 2016, and a further 2.8m indirectly; as well as generating over £73bn of Gross Value Added directly to the UK economy, and a further £87bn indirectly. So perhaps, say, tripling the budget for care homes to make them Covid-secure would have been a better way of spending some of the eye-watering £400 billion the Chancellor has had to borrow since last April to facilitate lockdowns, given both the lives and the livelihoods it would have saved in not doing so.
www.dagbladet.no
www.vg.no
Jeg har vanskelig for å forstå at det ville være mer inngripende enn å låse alle inne i hjemmene sine
www.nrk.no
