The long closures and confinements to beat Covid were a mistake, and they did more harm than good. This was claimed by Professor Mark Woolhouse, an expert on infectious diseases at the University of Edinburgh, one of the leading epidemiologists in the United Kingdom. The most serious mistake was to think that Covid “affected everyone”, while instead we have never seen an epidemic more selective than this.
Woolhouse, in a forthcoming book entitled “The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir”, also indicates the exact moment in which the the error. It was on March 10, 2020, when Minister Michael Gove said during a government meeting at 10 Downing Street that the virus would not discriminate against anyone and that everyone was at risk. Nothing was further from the truth. “In fact – the scientist told the ‘Guardian’ – this is a very discriminatory virus. Some people are much more at risk than others. Those over 75 are 10,000 times more at risk than those under the age of 15 ”.
The failure of the British government, but also of the governments of nearly every other country in the world, to understand the broad spectrum of individual responses to the contagion has led to bad decisions, such as the imposition of long-lasting general blockades. “We have done great harm to our children and young adults, who have been robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence. They have also compromised their future prospects, inheriting an unprecedented mountain of public debt ”. “All this – said Woolhouse – to protect the national health service from a disease that poses a much, much greater threat to the elderly, the frail and the infirm than to the young and the healthy.”
According to the epidemiologist, the world was hypnotized and panicked, further worsening the crisis. Instead of taking precision countermeasures, safeguarding only those who were truly at risk, he did the exact opposite, blocking everything and everyone. It would have been better to make contacts between people safer, rather than forbid them. The masks and tests, according to Woolhouse, would have been enough to keep the virus at bay.
The decision to block everything was made because for the first time in human history there were the tools to do so: the company can function quite well with online shopping, work from home and video conferencing. Only a few years ago the system would have collapsed instead. But it was a lazy choice, made because they were unable to implement more adequate containment measures. Closures are never a public health policy, Woolhouse says. Rather, they mean a failure of health policy.
In some countries, such as Sweden, the focus was on voluntary changes in behavior, which worked after some initial difficulties. But this does not mean that we should have listened to those who proposed to let the virus circulate freely, chasing the mythical herd immunity. Such a strategy, explains the expert, would have led to a more widespread epidemic than the one experienced in 2020, because there was a complete lack of a plan to protect the most vulnerable people. A lot of money was badly spent, when it would have been necessary to allocate funds to provide families with the elderly and sick with routine tests and more precise indications than the generic recommendations sent by letter. The carers and nurses involved in home care were left alone. The government spent a fortune killing the virus and almost nothing to protect those who could be killed from the virus. It was necessary to invest in both suppression and protection, but only one path was chosen.
With Omicron, everything has become even more chaotic: it is a much less dangerous variant, but on TV all you do is list the number of infected people with a worried air. Old mistakes are repeated and panicked once again, instead of protecting those in need (including no vaxes) and freeing those who will develop more or less the symptoms of a cold with Omicron. We have not yet freed ourselves from Covid, and many more will be said. But perhaps it is not too early to take stock, to understand what mistakes have been made, and not to repeat them next time.