As various countries around the world go into Covid-management inquiry mode, it’s worth remembering the useful things we learned from the crisis – admittedly, most of them in the “what not to do” category.
There was the idea of injecting bleach, courtesy of then-US president Donald Trump. Turns out this is not recommended, though, to be fair, this treatment would technically get rid of Covid by killing the infected patient and would have had the additional benefit of making a bleach-administering country’s Covid mortality stats look better.
Then there was the nasal hair-dryer treatment mooted by then-British prime minister Boris Johnson. As the UK’s official Covid inquiry reminded us this week, Johnson was advised that his suggestion, even assuming the hottest setting on one’s Vidal Sassoon nozzle aimed up the snout, might have certain eye-watering effects, but none that would trouble the coronavirus.
In fairness, Johnson’s staff did provide an invaluable new hack for the world’s future convenience: a wheelie suitcase makes discreet transport for when you need to sneak wine into the office without Puritans noticing.
So far, the inquiry has confirmed two dominant features of the UK’s coronavirus response. First, every official and politician dealing with the emergency believed every other politician and official dealing with the emergency was a thorough-going cretin, moron, tosser or some other example of numptyness printable only in asterisks. Second, that they were all, mostly, correct in these assessments.
Probably nowhere in the world are government-authorised Covid inquiries capable of being constructive, evidence-based blueprints for doing better next time, because the appetite for blame remains overwhelming. Politicians, officials and scientists are still at butt-protectant war over the most basic facts. And there’s considerable public suspicion that Covid restrictions were unnecessarily heavy-handed, and even that they’ve done more damage to societies and economies than Covid could ever have done.
The logic behind the latter stream of opinion is that the unlucky additional people who would have died under a non-lockdown response would not then have gone on to complain about the economy and people’s social lives being put ahead of their mortality, leaving the lucky still-alive to carry on none the poorer. Result, surely?
Inconveniently for this ethos, a report from the UK’s Royal Society makes some tiresomely evidence-based findings endorsing the rag-tag combos of lockdown regulations so retrospectively despised. It found that masks, lockdowns, social distancing rules, testing, tracing and isolation of the infected and border controls did retard the virus’s spread and saved lives.
Collated from six evidence reviews covering a number of countries which used various combinations of restriction, the report found all combos reduced viral spread, especially in the many months before vaccines were available.
As for the critical “what worked best where?” question, the only consensus emerging from the global orgy of hindsight is: it depends. Lockdown-eschewing Sweden, the sceptics’ holy grail of what-about-ery, did indeed come through the crisis no worse off in mortality than most other European countries after an initial surge in deaths.
But Sweden has a sparser population and a smaller commuter population relative to many countries. It has more single- and low-occupancy households than most, and fewer international visitors than many. It also has a notoriously socially compliant population. Not legally obliged to socially distance, wear masks and so on, Swedes largely did so under their own steam. The government felt able to trust people’s good sense.
Those who laud the Swedish Covid response model are, by extension, advocating a high-trust approach for all countries.
The ungrateful undead might care to reflect on whether this approach would prove Swedishly Utopian in their country, or simply Darwinian.
