Several politicians, including Keir Starmer, the opposition Labour Party leader, have been demanding to know the exit strategy for the lockdown. "We should know what that exit strategy is, when the restrictions might be lifted and what the plan is for economic recovery to protect those who have been hardest hit," he said this week.
This is an entirely valid question, but the government cannot have an exit strategy unless they have an overall strategy. One follows directly from the other.
And there are only four possible strategies:
To eradicate the virus from the entire population by enforcing lockdown. Or to enforce lockdown until there is an effective treatment. Or to enforce lockdown until there is a vaccine. Or to enforce lockdown to slow the spread of the virus, so as to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Eradication is virtually impossible with such a highly infectious disease. Even if the UK was successful, if other countries were not, keeping Covid-19 out would require border closures for years, maybe decades. Endless checks on planes, boats, lorries, cars. Constant testing and restrictions. It is almost certain that the virus would still slip through. This does not seem a viable option.
What about finding an effective treatment? The chances are vanishingly small. Influenza, a very similar virus, has been around for decades, and no game changing medications have yet been found.
As for a vaccine, this solution is so distant that it does not really exist. It will be a minimum of 18 months before an effective vaccine can be developed, then tested, then produced in sufficient quantities to be of any use. Waiting for 18 months before ending the lockdown would be socially and economically impossible. We would be committing national suicide.
So there is only one overall strategy that can be followed. Control the spread to avoid overwhelming the NHS. This has never been made explicit, but the government has, albeit indirectly, told us that this is exactly what they are doing.
In the last few days, a letter was sent to all households, signed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, before he himself was confirmed to have contracted the disease. It was entitled 'Coronavirus - stay at home; protect the NHS, save lives'. It contained this key passage: "If too many people become seriously unwell at one time, the NHS will be unable to cope. This will cost lives. We must slow the spread of the disease, and reduce the number of people needing hospital treatment in order to save as many lives as possible."
The key sentence is the first: "If too many people become seriously unwell at one time."
This fits with the initial UK strategy. Contain, delay, research, mitigate. The UK has passed through 'contain' and is now in 'delay and mitigate'. Research sits in the background and may, or may not, provide a solution.
However, 'delay and mitigate' doesn't mean that people will not become infected and die. It just means that the NHS will not be overwhelmed by a wave of them happening at the same time. We are simply, it should be made clear, trying to control the 'peak', which now will likely be a series of 'peaks'.
At present, ministers are not admitting this. They are presenting lockdown as a way of "beating this virus." In order to enforce lockdown, they are haranguing and scaring the population into compliance.
Covid-19 is being presented as a deadly killer that does not discriminate. Young, old, we are all at risk of contracting this dreadful disease. Every night, the television news has story after story of young people who have been infected, and who have died. In fact, just five people under 20 have died so far.
There is hardly anything said about the fact that the average age of death is around 80, that the vast majority of those dying are old (92 percent are over 60), and have several other serious medical conditions.
The reality is that for anyone younger than about 60, Covid-19 is only slightly more dangerous than suffering from influenza. The infection fatality rate (IFR) currently stands at around 0.2 percent in those countries doing the most testing. This figure will inevitably fall once we can identify those who were infected but had no symptoms.
By avoiding this more reassuring message, by frightening everyone into compliance, the government has painted itself into a corner. How can they say to people that last week you couldn't drive two miles to walk in the countryside, or go to the beach, or go to a restaurant, or lie in a park sunbathing, in order to prevent the spread of this deadly killer disease... but this week you can?
Worse than that, when cases begin to rise again, about a month after lockdown is relaxed, will we all have to lock down again to prevent the next surge? How will the public respond to this? I don't know, but I expect that it is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to force everyone back into lockdown again.
By this point, millions will have been financially crippled and will be desperate to work, if their jobs still exist. Thousands of businesses will have fallen over, bankrupt. Hundreds of thousands of operations, and cancer treatments, will have been postponed and cancelled. I have already warned that it's possible, perhaps even likely, that significantly more people will die as a result of the lockdown than will die from coronavirus.
That great harm is being done by it was made clear in an article this week in the Health Service Journal:
"NHS England analysts have been tasked with the challenging task of identifying patients who may not have the virus but may be at risk of significant harm or death because they are missing vital appointments or not attending emergency departments, with both the service and public so focused on COVID-19."It may well seem that all this suffering was... well, for what exactly? To simply prevent a surge of cases. This government, all governments, must be honest about this and admit that in the longer term, we cannot prevent almost everybody getting infected and acknowledge that some of those infected will die.
"A senior NHS source familiar with the programme told HSJ: 'There could be some very serious unintended consequences [to all the resources going into fighting coronavirus]. While there will be a lot of COVID-19 fatalities, we could end up losing more 'years of life' because of fatalities relating to non-COVID-19 health complications.'"
When lockdown restrictions are lifted, this does not mean that the virus has gone. It does not mean that people cannot infect each other. It does not mean we can simply carry on as before. It means that we have kept the first surge under control.
So, what is the exit strategy? The answer is that we don't have one. We have a strategy of delay and mitigation which will continue until... when? Until everyone has been infected? Until we have an effective treatment? Until we have an effective vaccine? Until enough people have been infected that we have achieved herd immunity?
The government must tell us the truth and be clear about what end point they are seeking to achieve. Only then can we have an exit strategy.
Malcolm Kendrick is a doctor and author who works as a GP in the National Health Service in England. His blog can be read here and his book, 'Doctoring Data - How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense,' is available here.
Reader Comments
The lockdown is not saving any lives. It's only postponing deaths by slowing down the spread of the virus. The people who are weak enough to succumb to an infection will die whether they get it now or next month. But the lockdown has massive costs, including human lives.
I agree that any life has value, but what does that have to do with this situation? There's no strategy for actually saving any lives here (any more than they get saved every day under normal conditions). We have no means of stopping the virus. The strategy is to slow down the virus, but in the end, almost everyone will get infected, and the weak will still die. Nobody is being actually saved, but a lot is being destroyed, including lives.
And also, if you're saying that the life of a 5 year old girl who has maybe 80 years before her and the life of an 85 year old woman with cancer who will die in the near future no matter what we do have the same value, then I respectfully disagree. And we are destroying lives of both young and old in order to prolong the lives of the old and sick for a few weeks.
1) Amen.
2) Ay. There's the rub. Getting folks to cross that line - to see the intentionality behind what the psychopaths are doing; they can't or won't see it! ARGH!
Sottites are probably more likely to think that the lock-down route was implemented because the end objective was to implement mandatory vaccines