What Is The Justification For Keeping Lockdown In Place? Two Questions For The UK Government
Written by Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford
Given the success of the vaccine roll out in the UK and the higher than expected drop in COVID-19 deaths, it is legitimate to ask whether lockdown should continue to be the key strategy to contain the pandemic or whether the ‘roadmap’ announced by the UK Government should be adjusted. Because lockdown is a very exceptional measure, the burden of proof is on the Government to provide answers as to why the easing of lockdown is proceeding at the current pace and not faster. The impact of lockdown is devastating for the economy, mental health, and employment rates and the cost and benefits are in many cases very unevenly distributed. For instance, the young are at highest risk of redundancy, but benefit less from lockdown because COVID-19 pose a very low risk on them. There is a serious concern around the rise of referrals for mental health assistance for children and teenager over the past year. If the lockdown is justified at this stage, the Government has the burden of proof of providing a strong justification for this.
Such justification might need to be updated with respect to the one offered when the roadmap was announced on 22 February. That justification was centred on the target of “keeping infections rates under control” as determined by 4 tests: successful vaccine deployment program; vaccines being successful at reducing hospitalizations and deaths in the vaccinated; infection rates not putting unsustainable pressure on the NHS; and the risk assessment not being significantly altered by new variants.
Even assuming those criteria are fair, the justification now needs to take into account the “very very impressive” and “spectacular” results of vaccine rollout, to quote a lead researcher from Public Health Scotland. As we shall see below, there are reasons to think that the vaccines are producing better results than those expected by the Government and assumed by the modelling used to inform the roadmap. Plausibly also because of the vaccine roll out, the drop in COVID-19 deaths in the UK is now three weeks ahead of the estimates of the modelling that the Government has used to design its roadmap: while the modelling estimated that COVID-19 deaths would fall below 200 a day after mid-March, we reached that point on 25 February. The model suggested we would have as few as 150 deaths per day by 21 March, but we are at that point now.
In light of these data, the Government would need to justify using indiscriminate lockdowns to achieve something – protection of the vulnerable and the NHS – which data suggest is now achievable without overburdening the whole society (as lockdown is doing) and possibly even without burdening those who need protection the most (as selective shielding would do). Vaccines are offering a level of protection to the vulnerable (roughly 80-90% drops in hospitalizations and deaths) that, if it was achieved through measures like selective shielding, would plausibly justify considering selective shielding successful. But vaccines do this without the downsides of indiscriminate lockdown or of selective lockdown.