Omicron has been detected — and may have first arisen — in Gauteng province, South Africa. There have only been a few hundred cases detected, so it’s hard to say much about it with any real certainty. But it appears to be more transmissible and there are concerns that immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection, will be less effective against it. There have been, as I write, three cases detected in the UK, and there are real (and justified) fears that we are heading once again into a lockdown Christmas. 

But nonetheless, we have been very lucky.

We mustn’t forget that the virus is constantly mutating. Every time it copies itself, there is a chance that it will make some minor error. Most of those mutations either have no effect or make it less effective at spreading. But every so often one will improve it: perhaps make it harder for the immune system to see, or make the virus quicker at copying itself.

The other new variants, notably Alpha and Delta, had several mutations, but Omicron has dozens: around 50. And 10 of them are on the bits of the “spike” protein on the virus’s surface which bind with our cells — the “receptor binding domains”. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and former member of SAGE, tells me that these are exactly the kind of mutations which virologists have been expecting and dreading: “It’s biologically plausible that they will drive higher transmission. They’ve been identified before as ones we should be really careful about.”

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So far, it doesn’t sound very lucky. But in one mutation, Omicron has been kind to us. Like Alpha before it, it has a particular mutation, 69-70del, two missing RNA letters in its genome — part of the “S gene” which codes for the spike protein. By happy chance, those missing letters are at one of three places that many PCR tests look at.

What it means is that if a PCR test comes back positive on two out of its three areas — if it has an “S-gene dropout” — then you can be pretty sure you’ve got one of the variants. It means that Alpha last year and now Omicron can be tracked pretty effectively, just with PCR testing: even without sequencing the genomes, you can see where these S-gene dropout results are happening and it’ll give you a good idea of how the variant is spreading.

“It’s a complete gift that the S-gene dropout hits this variant,” says Ewan Birney, the deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. If it didn’t, we would have much less of an idea where Omicron is. (We’ve actually been lucky twice. If Delta hadn’t replaced Alpha, then the S-gene dropout wouldn’t have told us anything, because both the circulating variants would have had it.)

So far, so good. But is the new variant more transmissible and/or more able to bypass our immunity, whether from vaccines or infection? And is it more or less dangerous to people who catch it?

These are hard questions to answer, because at the moment, we only have data from South Africa, and South Africa’s population is tricky to compare with ours. It’s younger, for a start — the median South African is 26-years old, while the median Brit is 40. It’s also much less vaccinated: somewhere around 75% of Britons have been double-jabbed, while barely a quarter have in South Africa (which is, to my surprise, more to do with uptake than supply). It has also had far fewer confirmed cases per capita.

That said, we can make some guesses. When a new variant emerges, it’s difficult to tell whether it has spread because it is better at spreading, or because it happens to have arisen in a convenient place. Imagine a virus which happened to mutate into a new variant in someone who was about to go to a major conference. It might infect hundreds of people and show up all over the country, but it wouldn’t be because it was any more transmissible — it was just that it got lucky.

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With Omicron, this seems unlikely to be the case. Thanks to the S-gene dropout, we can see that it’s spreading faster than you’d expect. Farrar says that “there has been a clear upswing of transmission in Gauteng, which seems to be driven by the variant”. “It probably can outcompete Delta,” says Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, “although by how much is still up in the air.” 

Is that because it’s better at spreading in general, or because it can evade immunity? So far, we don’t have the data to say for sure. Soon, we’ll start to get results from laboratory studies, and later from epidemiological observations, but Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks it’s “a few weeks before we get useful information, and the other side of Christmas before we know anything definitive”.

But on the plus side, antibodies aren’t the only part of our immune system. We also have T-cells, which are less easily fooled by mutations. To oversimplify, antibodies stop you getting infected in the first place, but T-cells stop you from getting very ill. So Javid and Birney think it is plausible that Omicron will spread quite easily among vaccinated and/or previously infected people, but will be less likely to kill them or make them severely ill.

There has also been speculation that Omicron is inherently less deadly to people with no pre-existing immunity. That’s not impossible, but everyone I spoke to said that any definitive conclusions are premature. “The speculation is extremely uninformed,” says Beale. “We just don’t know until it gets into a more vulnerable population, which sadly it seems it’s likely to. We can hope it’s less pathogenic, but it’s foolish to make that assumption.”

So it might be better at spreading, and able to escape our immunity to at least some degree; and while it’s theoretically possible it might be less deadly, that’s certainly not a proposition we want to put any weight on. The question is: what should we do, and are we facing a second bleak Covid winter?

The pandemic should have taught us that acting early is usually better than acting late, and that preparing for worst-case scenarios is important. It’s like chess, says Beale: “You play your moves in the most flexible order.” If we assume it’ll all be OK, we might be right, but if we’re wrong, we’ll end up with Omicron spreading all over the place. Whereas if we assume it’ll be pretty bad, we can always open up again later on.

I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them very sensible, suggesting that there’s no point closing borders to South Africa because variants will get through anyway, and that it’s just punishing countries for doing good surveillance. But I think they are wrong. 

Yes, the variant will get through, if it hasn’t already. Farrar points out that it was first identified on 11 November, and its sequence suggests that it had already been circulating for some time before then. “I think it may already be on every continent,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to reduce its spread. “Border closures might buy you a little time.” Birney agrees: “Shutting the borders until we understand it, minimising the seeding events, is a good rational move.”

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It’s true that there’s a risk of punishing countries for responsible surveillance, but I don’t see what the alternative is — pretending that they don’t have lots of Omicron circulating? Perhaps the thing to do is also put restrictions on countries with poor surveillance.

Because “buying a little time” might be important. If nothing else, it gives us time to understand it: if Omicron is highly virulent and vaccine-resistant, then our best response will be rather different to what it would be if it isn’t. It also gives us a chance to get more boosters in arms and to stockpile antiviral drugs. 

All the same arguments apply to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as introducing vaccine passports or asking people to work from home if possible. But there are other things Britain can do, too. 

One thing is to hugely increase our vaccine manufacturing capacity — something which would be good for us and for the world. Rolling out children’s vaccines and booster jabs faster wouldn’t hurt. One scientist I spoke to suggested making antiviral meds available by post when people get a positive result: “They need to be given quickly to have a good effect, so you can’t rely on GP appointments. You need to link them to Track & Trace”. Cheaper, quicker PCR testing at airports would help.”

But while those measures are important, they’re not addressing the root of the issue. For Farrar, the emergence of Omicron is just another reminder that we need to vaccinate the world, not just the rich world. “There’s been political drift for months now, in terms of access to vaccines,” he said. “The rich world thought it was over, so they’ve been kicking it into the long grass.” Variants like Omicron will continue to arise until the world has a decent level of immunity.

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We’ve been lucky, with Omicron. But it may well still end up becoming the dominant strain, just as Delta did before it. If it doesn’t, then another one will come along. And it will be “incredibly disruptive”, says Farrar: “Everyone’s putting restrictions in.” Certainly, to avoid another lockdown Christmas, we need to act now.

But if we want to be sure we don’t have another one next year, we need to get this pandemic behind us — and that means billions more doses of vaccine, distributed around the world. We won’t always be so lucky.

It seemed reassuring. I know this because I messaged something like “It seems like they might know what they’re doing!”  in a science-nerdy chat group that I’m part of. But my optimism was not echoed. “It seems like they’ve just killed all our grannies,” responded someone.

I recall this to make two points. Firstly, I can’t claim any sort of foresight. I didn’t see then, though perhaps I should have done, that the early response of the British government to Covid was disastrous and wrongheaded. Instead, I was falsely reassured by the confidence of the scientific advisers, Whitty and Vallance. 

But secondly, other people did see it. The failings were predicted. And not just by my friend: a large number of smart, numerate generalists outperformed public health experts repeatedly in predicting the course of the pandemic in those early months.

On Monday night, two House of Commons select committees released the findings of their report into England’s Covid response. The headlines yesterday were stark: the “worst public health failure ever”, “big mistakes”, “damning”. 

The individual mistakes — failure to protect care homes; failure to move quickly enough on lockdowns; failure to build testing infrastructure and more — are certainly worthy of criticism. But having read the report, I want to talk about what strikes me as the overarching theme: being too bloody clever by half.

Let’s return to early March 2020, when I was falsely reassured by the Whitty/Vallance/Johnson press conference. The “flatten the curve” strategy that the three men introduced involved slowly introducing public health measures one by one. The idea was to carefully control the R value – the number of people that each infected person would, on average, give the disease to. The idea was to keep it at just above one, so that the disease would slowly spread through the population rather than either burning through it or dwindling down.

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In paragraph 87 of the report, the committee writes: “It is striking, looking back, that it was accepted that the level of Covid-19 infection in the UK could be controlled by turning on particular non-pharmaceutical interventions at particular times.” 

“Striking” is certainly one word for it. This was a novel disease. We knew almost nothing about its behaviour. On March 6 2020, I went to a gig at Alexandra Palace. Looking back now, it should not have been allowed to go ahead — but because the consensus at the time was that the disease was spread by fomites, by touching surfaces, the only advice was to keep washing our hands. In fact, it is spread largely through the air. 

So we had a completely wrong idea how the virus behaved, but we nevertheless had a confident plan to control it very precisely by now banning large gatherings, then closing schools, then encouraging working from home. We were trying to thread a needle blindfolded.

This sort of overconfidence in highly uncertain science crops up over and over again. As well as flattening the curve, the phased introduction of distancing measures had another purpose: it was not believed that the public would accept long-term restrictions on their freedom. “There is a risk,” Whitty told the public in one of the early press conferences, “that if we go too early, people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.” 

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This was also the official Sage position: “Sage agreed that a balance needs to be struck between interventions that theoretically have significant impacts and interventions which the public can feasibly and safely adopt in sufficient numbers over long periods.”

It’s not clear what this claim was based on. Other behavioural scientists questioned it, with 200 of them signing an open letter to the Government asking for the evidence. But what evidence were they hoping to receive? What comparable situation have we ever faced? A few small-scale experiments about people obeying instructions under laboratory conditions probably can’t tell us anything at all about what people would be willing to do in order to save hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens, very possibly including their own elderly relatives. Nonetheless, we based highly counterintuitive policy decisions — not imposing strict lockdowns even as the disease was spreading and killing, despite seeing it being successful elsewhere — on this apparently unevidenced belief.

And let’s be clear: the coming hundreds of thousands of deaths were very much known about. The report rightly says that we over-relied on a plan for pandemic flu. That was a huge mistake, and it led us to strange things like moving to “delay” the virus rather than “contain” it, and stopping community testing. 

That meant that we had no idea how widespread the virus was. “The UK was reduced to understanding the spread of Covid-19 by waiting for people to be so sick that they needed to be admitted to hospital,” says the report. “For a country with a world-class expertise in data analysis, to face the biggest health crisis in a hundred years with virtually no data to analyse was an almost unimaginable setback.”

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So, yes, sticking to the flu plan was a disaster. But if you read the flu plan, it wouldn’t have worked any better for flu. The disaster that arrived was completely foreseen, yet it confidently said we couldn’t do anything about it, so we shouldn’t try. It said that planners should “aim to cope with a population mortality rate of up to 210,000–315,000 additional deaths” within 15 weeks of a virus arriving, and should “plan for a situation in which up to 2.5% of those with symptoms die”. 

The lowest number there, 210,000 over 15 weeks, works out at 2,000 deaths a day. At the peak of the second wave, the seven-day rolling average of deaths briefly – for nine days, in fact — broke 1,200 a day. 

That period was horrifying, but the pandemic flu plan was to “cope” with at least 2,000 deaths a day for 15 weeks. That appears to have been based on the idea that we, the British public, were so profoundly wedded to liberty that we would rather let the equivalent of the entire population of Norwich die in three months than have the nightclubs closed. 

More than that, in fact, it was important to keep them open so that people didn’t get depressed: “Large public gatherings or crowded events where people may be in close proximity are an important indicator of ‘normality’ and may help maintain public morale during a pandemic.” The possibility that people might not want to attend large public gatherings if it might kill them or their family, or might value the lives of their elderly relatives highly enough to stay home for a few weeks rather than watch them die in their thousands, was not considered..

Over and over again, the British response was one of unwarranted confidence in highly uncertain outcomes. We were, of course, dealing with a largely unprecedented situation. But that meant that the evidence was necessarily weak. 

So statements such as “There is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission” (from the pandemic flu plan) were on the one hand true, but also basically meaningless. There’s very limited evidence either way. 

But the common sense attitude would be that being in a large group of people probably helps the virus to spread. And given that the alternative, which the plan explicitly endorses, is at least 210,000 people dying in 15 weeks, it seems incredible that the approach was “well, there’s no evidence that it works, so we might as well not try”.

There are other areas where this overconfident, clever-clever approach backfired. For instance, Matt Hancock told the committee that in the early months, they were advised that “testing people asymptomatically might lead to false negatives” so you shouldn’t do it. Of course, it would also lead to lots of true positives. But the fear of a hypothetical second-order effect — like Jenny Harries’s claim last March that wearing masks could increase the risk of infection, because it would make people more confident — overshadowed the very obvious and real risk of disease. It’s like the plan was based around not wanting to be obvious, but always being clever and counterintuitive.

And the reliance on the pandemic flu “flatten the curve” plan meant that there was no modelling of the impacts of a lockdown. Dominic Cummings told the committee: “You are going to have to lock down, but there is no lockdown plan. It doesn’t exist. Sage haven’t modelled it.”

Often, simply plotting an exponential curve on a graph might have done better than the more complex forecasts the Government used. Vallance told a press conference that we were “four weeks” behind Italy, when simply looking at the number of deaths showed that we were 14 days behind. And when other countries locked down, with some success, we didn’t learn from their example, because we had a plan, and we were confident in it.

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And, of course, border closures. Naively, you’d think that stopping people coming into the country would reduce the likelihood of the disease coming here. But overconfident modelling told scientific advisers that it wouldn’t, so they trusted that, rather than thinking “OK, but if the model is wrong then we’ve completely messed up.”

This isn’t to place all of the blame on Whitty, Vallance and Sage — or to exonerate the politicians. There was plenty of cowardice and dithering on the part of the Government, not least (as the report shows) when they ignored scientific advice to impose a short “circuit breaker” lockdown in autumn 2020, presumably because they feared being unpopular. 

But the valuable lesson, I think, is not “we should have done X” or “we should have done Y” specifically, but that we should be less confident in our ability to predict highly complex situations. And more than that: we should look at the possible results of being wrong in our attempts to predict those highly complex outcomes. If you’re 60% sure that lockdowns won’t work, then that implies there’s a 40% chance they will, and that implies that you think there’s a 40% chance of saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, it seems like the whole way through, the thinking was “it probably won’t work so let’s not try”.

I didn’t foresee any of this. I should have: it was all there in the pandemic flu plan. Others, smarter and more conscientious than me, did, or at least foresaw that disaster was a realistic probability. But the takeaway should be not “in the next pandemic, we need to protect care homes” — although we should — but “in the next pandemic, we should stop trying to be so damn clever”.

Behavioural science — a catch-all term for a strand of psychology, with micro-economics, sociology and other disciplines mixed in — has been unusually prominent during the pandemic, and particularly so in the UK. For a while at the start of 2020, it was touted as the answer to all our prayers. “Nudges” to change people’s behaviours were suddenly the order of the day. “Behavioural science can”, we were assured, “save lives”; without it, “our attempts to defeat the virus will fail”. On the BMJ’s blog, UCL psychologist Susan Michie and her colleagues wrote a post entitled: “Behavioural science must be at the heart of the public health response to Covid-19”. Boris Johnson himself was directly advised by “behavioural psychologists”, and specifically referenced them at a press conference.

At the end of March, just after lockdown began, I wrote for UnHerd about the bad predictions and faulty logic of psychologists (and other people writing about risk). I argued that low-quality evidence was being relied on to support arguments that downplayed the danger of the disease. But the story of our Government’s engagement with behavioural science during this pandemic extends far beyond that. Now that a whole year has passed since the UK recorded its first Covid cases, it’s a good time to look back at what the much-lauded discipline contributed to our Covid response.

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Behavioural science had great press for a few weeks, but it all fell apart pretty fast. As case numbers and deaths in the UK increased throughout March, many began to wonder why we weren’t following the example of other countries and locking down. The blame, according to some, lay at the feet of the behavioural scientists. Apparently, they’d advised the Government that the population would suffer “behavioural fatigue” — that after just a few weeks of strict lockdown measures, we’d get bored and frustrated, and start bending the rules in an attempt to get back to normal life.

Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries, Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, and others all made this argument explicitly in the media. It would be counter-productive to go too hard too soon, they said. Such a huge change to people’s lives wouldn’t be sustainable, and people might make a collective break for freedom just as the virus was most prevalent.

But behavioural scientists, whose discipline was supposedly the basis of the Government’s policy, were outraged by this narrative. Michie, a member of the Government’s SAGE subcommittee on behavioural science, SPI-B, told the Guardian that the concept of “fatigue” had never been used in any of their reports (which was true). Indeed, she said, “[fatigue] is just not a concept that exists in behavioural science”. Warwick behavioural scientist Nick Chater agreed, writing that behavioural fatigue “has no basis in science”. Another member of SPI-B, Robert West, made much the same argument. An Open Letter from UK psychologists and behavioural scientists urged the Government to reveal the evidence base for the fatigue concept (I was among nearly 700 signatories).

As it turns out, there was evidence in the scientific literature for the idea of “behavioural fatigue” all along. The neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell, as far back as late March, reviewed a selection of papers (all published pre-2020) that discussed the fatigue idea in the context of people’s rule-compliance in past disease outbreaks, though they didn’t necessarily use the specific word “fatigue”. As Bell noted, some found evidence for it, some against — and the studies certainly weren’t all top-quality. But the idea spread by behavioural scientists before the first lockdown — that “behavioural fatigue” was a concept entirely divorced from the scientific literature — was flat wrong.

So far, so embarrassing: the psychologists either weren’t aware of the relevant evidence, or wanted to shift the blame for the delayed lockdown away from behavioural science (even though they’d never advocated for it). Whitty, Harries and Vallance, for their part, never pointed to any of the science they were relying on to make their claims. Confusion reigned. The lockdown was delayed on the basis of some unknown evidence. Behavioural science seemed to have failed its first and biggest test of the pandemic.

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To make things worse, the “fatigue” debate was essentially irrelevant to what the Government should have been doing in the face of the virus. Regardless of whether people’s compliance with the rules would decay over time, it would still have made sense to lock down earlier, because the virus spreads exponentially. Stopping it from taking hold early in an outbreak (a policy that worked in countries like New Zealand and Taiwan) means that the population — even if they start to break more rules as time goes on — will be at far less risk of the disease. To put it another way: despite the hype, the behavioural science should have been very much secondary, something to worry about only if a government fails to properly contain the spread of infection.

You’ll have noticed, of course, that our government did fail to properly contain the spread of infection. We didn’t lock down early enough — twice — and we’ve now had over 100,000 coronavirus deaths. So perhaps there’s more of a role for behavioural science now. But have we learned anything in the past year about how to mould human behaviour to keep people from Covid?

My behavioural scientist colleagues won’t like me for saying this, but the answer is: not really. A number of recent studies have explored how to improve interventions such as hand-washing, face-touching, mask-wearing, and vaccine-getting. (Let’s leave aside the awkward fact that the first two probably aren’t all that relevant to stopping the spread – the behavioural scientists weren’t to know that at the time.) These interventions are a smorgasbord of tricks to get people thinking differently about the virus: asking them to plan for the future; targeting their emotions; telling them how social distancing can save the economy; focusing them on reasoning rather than gut feelings; and so on — all things that might be adapted into government messaging, if they work.

But do they? Some of them, such as asking a person to write down the name of a loved-one they want to protect, have shown no effects whatsoever. Others, like focusing on moral messages, or those delivered by a respected figure, are supported by patchy evidence that shows generally small effects. Some have shown effects only in particular circumstances: one study tried a range of different interventions and found that some worked, but only for people who had just recently begun social distancing. For those who had been social distancing for longer, the interventions backfired — the participants reported going outside more and distancing less after they’d taken part in the intervention. Oops.

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Even for the studies that appear more promising, one has to remember what’s actually being measured: in most cases, it’s people’s self-reported intentions to do things like wash their hands or wear masks. It’s what they tick on a questionnaire during the experiment — not necessarily what they’ll do in the real world. Of course, intentions and actions will be related to one another, but not perfectly. Researchers should be a lot more careful than the authors of the questionnaire study that appeared in September, whose very title claimed that “Empathy Promotes Physical Distancing and Wearing of Masks”. The only data they gathered concerned self-assessed motivations — not behaviours. “Intentional science” sounds somewhat less impressive than “behavioural science”, but it would, alas, be much more accurate.

Yet more evidence is appearing all the time: perhaps the behavioural scientists will crack a solid, reliable intervention soon. But the discipline’s contribution to the pandemic feels like a classic case of over-promising and under-delivering. The confident claims at the start of the pandemic — that behavioural science would play a crucial role in the Government’s toolkit to keep us all safe — simply fell flat when the actual data were examined. Had the hype been dialled back a little, behavioural science’s messy evidence base would look more like a discipline doing its best to find out what works (which is a genuinely difficult task), rather than a big disappointment.

Even if our ability to alter human behaviour using clever psychological techniques is weaker than we’d like, it is still useful for understanding human behaviour in the pandemic. To take just one example: knowing what people believe, and how those beliefs change over time, is important for governments and health systems to target their policies.

UCL’s Covid-19 Social Study is packed with interesting data on this topic. One of the overall findings is that people’s compliance with the rules (again, self-reported, so caveat emptor) has waxed and waned along with Covid cases: the recent second wave was accompanied by more people saying they follow all the rules. The main driver of people’s behaviour seems to be how many infections there are in the country (which ultimately depends on government policies like lockdown and border control); “soft” behavioural science interventions like nudges are only going to be useful at the margin.

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To those new UK Government adverts, they seem to be an attempt to use a mixture of empathy, shame and fear to promote compliance. Although there’s plenty of evidence to show that the latter of these has worked in previous contexts, it’s hard to apply any previous research to our unprecedented situation. It certainly feels to me that more attention paid to actual Covid patients, rather than just graphs of case numbers, would jolt people out of complacency — but that’s the hunch of a behavioural scientist, rather than evidence from behavioural science.

And there’s nothing wrong in theory with a behavioural scientist giving you their opinion — if they’re clear that’s what it is. The superficially convincing sheen of “science” is too easily applied to what are often just thoughts and judgements by well-meaning, well-informed experts (or mostly well-informed: the “fatigue” debacle illustrates how even the experts can fail to be on top of their brief). Setting the behavioural scientists up as some kind of oracular group of truth-tellers who’ve figured out the intricacies of the human mind is setting them up for failure — and trivialising the very real contributions they can make.

So can I look you in the eyes and tell you that the new adverts will work? Not really. But what do I know? I’m just a behavioural scientist.

Tuesday’s session of the Commons Science and Technology Committee was a grilling for the Government’s Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Advisor. Professor Whitty and Sir Vallance were asked whether their projected figures for hospitalisations and deaths take into account the effects of the Tier system, which is only a few weeks old? The answer was evasive. They were asked why, in Saturday’s Press Conference, they had displayed poorly-labelled graphs implying that there could be 4,000 deaths a day if nothing were done. The research group who modelled that scenario had already revised it to a much lower estimate of 1,000 daily deaths.

After wondering whether it was “sensible or fair” to display a misleading graph that will have frightened a lot of people, MP Graham Stringer asked why SAGE never presents equivalent predictions or quantifications for other impacts of lockdowns, citing an April study that suggested they would cause 200,000 deaths in the long term. “I think the public would be very surprised to see that was the other side of the equation,” he observed.

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It’s only right that the cobbled-together visual aids used in Saturday’s Press Conference come under scrutiny, both in the media and by the MPs who were asked to vote in new restrictions. The UK Office of Statistics Regulation (OSR) wrote to Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Whitty, to remind them that data “should be published in a clear and accessible form with appropriate explanations of context and sources.”

“We welcome the fact that the sources for the data used in the slides were published,” noted the OSR in a simultaneous blog post, “albeit three days after the slides themselves.”

Despite continuing efforts to brand any objection to anti-Covid restrictions as a form of treason — some accuse dissenters of wanting to “Let It Rip” through the population — a space to discuss rational alternatives is emerging. Scientists and public health professionals are increasingly willing to distance themselves from arbitrary and counterproductive measures, like involving the police in contact tracing and isolation. The British Medical Association told The Register:

“For the test and trace system to be effective it needs to have the full confidence of the public, with transparency about the appropriate and secure use of their data. We are already concerned that some people are deterred from being tested because they are anxious about loss of income should they need to self-isolate – and we are worried should police involvement add to this.”

Professor Susan Michie of UCL warned the Huffington Post that the 10pm curfew had predictable consequences that would be counterproductive, calling it, “another example of a restriction brought in without a coherent strategy and without sufficient consultation with relevant experts and communities.” A campaign called Recovery has tabled “Five Reasonable Demands” (which I support) for a more balanced approach to Covid-19. The insistence that “there is no alternative” to lockdown, to use Boris Johnson’s words, is unravelling.

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And yet, on Wednesday Parliament voted in another lockdown, slightly less restrictive than the first, but one that has forbidden outdoor group sports for children, and closed golf courses and open-air swimming pools, bookshops and gyms. What is the evidence that these venues were a significant site for infections? Where is the modelling that shows the lives saved by preventing outdoor swimming outweigh the negative long-term health impacts? If they exist, the Government hasn’t seen fit to share them with the public.

Lurking behind this new lockdown is a difficult truth. Every winter, hospitals run close to, or at, their capacity, thanks to normal winter illnesses and the increased challenge cold weather poses to the frail. The added burden of Covid-19 could push that capacity to the point where, at best, non-emergency treatments are cancelled and postponed. At worst, people die untreated, whether from Covid-19 or other conditions.

The Nightingale Hospitals, which mostly stood unused in the Spring peak of the pandemic, offered beds but not doctors or nurses. One of the reasons they were so little used was that hospitals could only transfer patients there if they also sent staff. Their potential to take the strain now would rely on an influx of skilled personnel, and it’s hard to see where those people could be found in a chronically understaffed NHS.

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By Henry Jeffreys

This, at heart, is the justification for the second lockdown: shut down society to save our ailing health service from being overwhelmed, as it was in winter 2017/18. Tens of thousands of people had their treatments postponed or cancelled that year, as a bad flu season pushed demand above capacity. Those pre-emptive cancellations may have been designed to prevent a crisis like the one preceding it, in winter 2016/17, when overflowing hospitals had patients dying in corridors.

What has changed since 2018? There was no question of reorganising society around the needs of the NHS, even though 55,720 people in the UK fell victim to Excess Winter Deaths in that season. There were not even calls for people to avoid social interaction with the elderly, to wash hands more often, or to stay home if they had a fever. Those at risk were exhorted to get a flu jab, and the rest of us were left to get on with it.

Covid-19 is not seasonal flu. Left unchecked, it would spread faster, and kill more people. But we are not leaving it to spread unchecked. The Tier system of regional restrictions appears to be having effects already, with cases falling in the Northeast, and the R number shrinking back towards one since early October. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty admitted to the Commons Science and Technology Committee that he thought Tier 2 and 3 regulations were having an effect, but that those effects were not included in the models used to justify a second lockdown.

The most profound problem with current Covid-19 policies, though, is this: the public, whom the measures are supposedly protecting, are now seen as the problem. The CEO and deputy chief of the NHS, calling on MPs to vote for the new lockdown measures, claimed that dissent within parliament would “reduce public compliance” with the measures. Writing in the Telegraph this week, Rishi Sunak reminded us scoldingly that “the responsibility for tackling this virus is personal as well as collective”, before issuing a plea: “however frustrating and difficult, I am asking everyone to follow the rules.”

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Was the two-metre rule one big lie?

By Timandra Harkness

Clearly, the Government doesn’t trust us. That’s why the press conference wheeled out misleading graphs to frighten us into compliance. The less we are convinced by arbitrary and ineffective rules, imposed without evidence or even common sense, the more the government resorts to threats. Our willingness to make sacrifices — in Spring, 85% of the public adhered to the “Stay Home” instruction — has fractured into mutual distrust. 53% of recently surveyed adults blame “The Public” for recent rises in Coronavirus cases (the only other option was “The Government”, with “Nature, Red In Tooth And Claw” somehow omitted).

Instead of cultivating the upsurge of altruism that drove millions to volunteer back in March, the Government has treated us as a volatile rabble, to be contained and kept passive. No wonder they are so willing to shut down public performances, shared sporting and religious activities, meetings and demonstrations, formal and informal social events. They place no value whatever on public life. All the things that make human life something more than individual survival or passive consumption of products, physical or virtual, in our isolated households, are seen as superfluous. The coming together of human minds and bodies to create new ideas, projects, experiences, relationships, is quantified only in terms of viral transmission.

It’s time we had a rational debate about balancing social measures to suppress Covid-19 against social harms. The evidence presented in support of the new lockdown is weak. Evidence that the resulting damage has been researched alongside the hoped-for benefits is almost non-existent. “There Is No Alternative” is not an argument, when not only livelihoods, but the fabric of society, is being devastated in the name of controlling the virus and protecting the NHS, which should be protecting us.

This debate needs to recognise the corrosion of public life that results from sweeping measures imposed with little or no evidence. And, most importantly, it needs to be a debate about public life that actually includes the public.