Hurrah for a vaccine — but was lockdown actually worth it?
The development of the vaccines has changed many things.
It has even influenced the opinion of the Prince of Lockdown himself, health secretary Matt Hancock. Life, he pronounced at the weekend, would be back to normal by the spring and the “blasted regulations” abolished.
But one thing has remained constant: the government’s continued refusal to publish a proper cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns.
A perfectly standard methodology exists to do this. It is used not just by our own National Institute for Health Care and Excellence (NICE), but across the western world.
In essence, this involves placing a monetary value on a human life.
Many may see this as a sinister and macabre thing to even ask. But it is, regrettably, something which has to be done.
To illustrate this, imagine a purely hypothetical scenario. Two people suffer from a very rare disease from which they will die within a month. Only one dose of the cure exists, but it is guaranteed to save the life of whichever gets it. One of the patients is 100, and the other is an otherwise healthy 20-year-old.
Who should get the medicine? For most, this choice would be obvious.
This is the quandary in its most basic and understandable form. Of course, people in health systems have to make much more complex decisions on which drugs should be bought and how many people can get a particular treatment all the time.
The key concept is what is known in the jargon as “quality-adjusted life years” (QALYs). Analysts then consider how many of these QALYs would be saved were a given amount of money spent in a particular way.
Like many policy-oriented metrics developed by economists (GDP, for example), the concept of QALYs is not without its critics. But, again like GDP, it is a useful and practical tool. We need a way to determine whether it is worth spending the money available on a particular course of action, and the only way to do that is with a metric to measure benefits against costs.
Armed with the concept of QALYs, it is easy to see why estimates of the benefits of lockdown do not yield huge numbers.
Many of those who have died from Covid-19 are very old — the average age of a coronavirus victim in the UK is over 80. Around 95 per cent of people who have died of Covid have had some serious underlying health condition, so the quality of their remaining life was not high.
In contrast, the costs of lockdown are massive, and impact everyone in the country. Just for starters, Rishi Sunak presented a plausible estimate of a loss of output in 2020 of over £200bn — nearly £3,000 per man, woman and child in the UK.
That is to say nothing of the economic impact of missed education, long-term unemployment, and negative mental health effects caused by lockdown policies.
The government refuses to crunch the numbers. But economists and medics have done it for them using the same approach that the NHS already relies on.
In June, David Miles of Imperial College, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee, concluded that “the costs of continuing severe restrictions in the UK are so great relative to likely benefits that a substantial easing in restrictions is now warranted”. In October, Barry McCormick, a former chief economist at the Department of Health, also showed that the benefits of lockdowns are greatly exceeded by the costs they create.
Hopefully the health secretary is correct and the problem will soon vanish as the vaccine is rolled out. But the government must be kept under pressure at every stage of the reviews of both Tiers themselves and the restriction system as a whole.
A well-established methodology, already used in our health service, shows the costs of lockdown far outweigh the benefits.
Main image credit: Getty