Only one acceptable exit from lockdown – the irreversible kind

It was truly heartening to venture from my house on Monday to go to the gym and see people eating and drinking out, going to the shops and taking advantage of our much-missed freedoms. It’s a bit corny to say so, but it put a spring in my step and a song in my heart.

I have spent months wishing away my life, looking forward to being released from house arrest and taking advantage of restrictions easing. Lockdown, for me, has been a personal hell that took me to breaking point. Yet I still understood the necessity.

Yet for weeks now a single word has been ringing around my brain. That word is “irreversible”. The word has a rather unequivocal quality to it, does it not? Irreversible. When the roadmap out of lockdown was announced in February the Prime Minister said progress must be “cautious but irreversible”. It is a word he has used repeatedly when discussing the end of lockdown.

On 1 March, Boris Johnson visited a school in Stoke-on-Trent, where he announced that the UK was embarking on a “one-way roadmap to freedom designedly cautious to be irreversible.” This week, Boris hailed the reopening of stage two as a major and “irreversible” step in the roadmap of easing restrictions.

It is a word that is difficult to convincingly caveat. A word that has given me hope. In fact, it’s why I have supported the cautious nature of the roadmap and don’t believe we should rush to bring it forward. As the vaccine programme goes from success to success, I believe it wise to be patient and put up with the infringement on our ability to live our lives for that bit longer, so the UK is in a strong position when we are set free. The condition for this is that the roadmap out of lockdown is indeed, irreversible.

No more. No more of this.

The reopening comes as just seven coronavirus deaths were reported in the UK within 28 days of a positive test, the lowest number since mid-September. The number of vaccine doses administered is close to 40 million, including over 7 million second doses. On Saturday, more than 400,000 second doses were given in the UK for the fourth consecutive day, along with 111,109 first doses.

Boris is, rightly, urging caution but it seemed unnecessary for him to bring us all down a notch by pointing out that the “bulk of the work in reducing the disease has been done by the lockdown”. This was a basic statement of fact, but nonetheless it was a strange message to send with even stranger timing with the data looking good – no rise in cases caused by reopening schools and all top nine priority groups vaccinated.

The government should stick to one basic message: vaccinations are working. Get yourself vaccinated. Continue to follow the guidance because we are nearly there. Now is the time for optimism after a miserable year. Lord knows we all need it.

Instead, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) was quick to dash hopes by stating that vaccines “aren’t enough” to squash the coronavirus once and for all. 

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want false hope or blindly optimistic dishonesty. Covid is not going to vanish – there will be more hospitalisations and deaths. It stands to reason that the rise in socialising, shopping, commuting, and large gatherings is going to lead to some kind of third wave in the winter months.

I’m no Covid sceptic either – 127,123 deaths in the UK is devastating. The theories of Covid sceptics have proven to be consistently wrong. They were wrong on false positives and the idea that most people were merely dying with Covid, rather than from it, was utter bunkum. Data published by the Office for National Statistics throughout the pandemic has shown the percentage of people who died with Covid where Covid was the primary cause. In November this was 90 per cent.  

Still, that word rings in my ears. Irreversible. Irreversible. Cautious. But. Irreversible. When a third wave comes it should not be anything like as bad as previous waves thanks to the vaccines. Although vaccines are not 100 per cent effective and not everyone will be fully protected it would be a grave error and betrayal to overreact to any bumps in data by instinctively removing our freedoms.

Instead, the government and its advisers should be on hand to explain why the rise in cases and – yes – deaths are tolerable as long as the Health Service can cope which, thanks to the success of the vaccination programme, it should not. There are hardly any Covid-19 infections anymore in Israel. This is because vaccines work.

We will have to learn to live with risk. Not out of indifference to suffering, or the false dichotomy of economy vs public health, but out of acceptance that is essentially inhumane and unrealistic to continue the cycle of lockdown and lifting. When will it end?

An epidemic of mental health issues, the rise in domestic violence and child abuse, the backlog in criminal court cases, the increase in unemployment, poverty and homelessness amount to a social disaster. Most local councils, many already at breaking point financially, have reported increased numbers of people needing help for homelessness. They warn that poorer households will face “disaster” unless support is extended beyond the pandemic.

And all the while the government gets a little too used to its new powers, and it’s going to be very difficult to wrestle them out of its greedy hands.

The goalposts of public health policy can no longer be shifted. I accept a cautious roadmap for the health and safety of the nation, but our exit must be irreversible. We must move towards a policy of mitigation and risk assessment that does not include full national scale lockdowns. The coronavirus is a long-term challenge and government policy must be sustainable. This hellish cycle is not.