Survey of 15,000 Brits reveals many believe we should have never gone into lockdown as scientists warn of “collective amnesia” towards the threat from a new virus
Four in ten Brits now believe the UK was wrong to go into the first Covid-19 lockdown as scientists warn of a new “collective amnesia”. Today we reveal the result of a nationwide survey of 15,000 Brits on the five-year anniversary of the most far-reaching limitations ever imposed by a UK government outside of wartime.
It shows 61% of respondents felt that the country was right to have gone into lockdown but a significant minority of 39% believe it was the wrong decision. Experts warn people are forgetting about the threat posed by new and unknown virus and question whether we will be prepared for the next one.
The Mirror’s parent company, Reach Plc, which owns a host of national and local news organisations, has conducted unprecedented research into current attitudes towards the historic restriction. Taking only Mirror readers, they were more overwhelmingly in favour of lockdown with 71% saying it was necessary.
Prof Danny Altmann, from the department of immunology and inflammation at Imperial College London, said: “There is no doubt that lockdown was absolutely critical in our efforts to limit hospitalisations and deaths. The modelling clearly shows that vital time was lost due to the delay in doing this. The delay is estimated to have cost 25,000 lives.
“As one who is closely involved with Long Covid, the persistent symptoms affecting two million in the UK that can linger for years, often causing disability and pushing people out of work. Many of the most severe and lasting cases are among those infected by the initial variant in that pre-vaccine period in March 2020.
“As time has gone by there’s been a tendency towards a kind of collective amnesia and complacency as we try and move on from that period, but let’s not forget the terror of that period. A new, highly contagious virus to which we had no immunity and daily evidence that even state-of-the-art intensive care medicine in the finest hospitals often seemed unable to save people.”
Nationally only 14% of people felt that lockdown happened at the right time while 49% felt that lockdown should have happened sooner. Then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared a full, legally mandated lockdown on 23 March 2020, a week after issuing guidance to stay at home if possible.
Modellers from Imperial College London later estimated that if the legally mandated lockdown, with fines for non-compliance, had come in a week earlier then 25,000 deaths could have been avoided.
Professor Stephen Griffin, cancer virologist at Leeds University, told the Mirror: “No-one is going to say lockdown was a good thing but it became necessary because of our lack of preparedness. I think a lot of people have their retrospectoscopes on. It’s worth remembering lockdown is the most extreme measure you can do. The reason we had to do it was because of years of health infrastructure being underfunded and pandemic planning hadn’t been done well.
“By mid-March there really wasn’t any choice. Ultimately we were being overwhelmed. The first wave only actually saw 9% of the population exposed. If we hadn’t acted it could have been ten times that.”
Pro-lockdown sentiment is now strongest in England with 63% in favour of the measure that was taken five years ago, followed closely by Wales with 62% saying it was the right thing to do. Readers in Scotland were less enthusiastic, with 51% of respondents saying the country should not have gone into lockdown. Opinions in Northern Ireland were divided 50-50.
The country is more divided on whether or not schools should have been kept open during lockdown. Some 53% of respondents across the UK said that the government was right to close schools. Most people feel that the NHS has not recovered from the pandemic at 76%, compared with just 8% believing that it has.
Professor Griffin told the Mirror that at the time of the first lockdown he and other virologists in NHS labs across the country had at the time offered to help set up mass testing but were ignored. The Tory government eventually set up “NHS Test and Trace” from May using private outsourcing companies such as Serco. These used non-medically trained call centre workers on the minimum wage but it had little impact on the epidemic.
Prof Griffin said: “Several of us were in touch offering to get involved in testing. Many epidemiologists, public health and NHS labs all wanted to help but it all became centralised. There had been a mentality of the futility of suppressing the virus and we did not take a leaf out of the book of south east Asian countries to test, trace and isolate people. Test and trace wasn’t set up until May and then it was done by private industry which was a mistake.”
Professor Yvonne Doyle was Medical Director at Public Health England at the time and responsible for ensuring effective responses to public health emergencies. She said: “Lockdown of varying kinds was instigated in many countries in the early or mid-Spring of 2020. A Lancet review in the same year looked at the lessons learnt from nine of these countries, three of which were in east Asia.
“Countries that acted early were notably in East Asia where there was previous experience of serious population level spread of new infections; and consequently were willing to take extensive measures including isolating people away from their homes. Success depended on previous public health and clinical capacity to handle such profound demands – including serious testing capacity – and the willingness of the population to trade off current curtailment of liberty for the greater good.” She added: “Lockdown did curtail mortality and offered protection to the most vulnerable patients, but not to front line workers as we know now.”
Readers were asked about other pandemic measures and one in every four people surveyed say that they still wear a mask. A quarter said that they sometimes wear one, with another 2% saying that they wear one whenever they’re not at home.
Participants had the option to select up to three emotions they felt during lockdown. The most commonly selected were isolated at 38% of respondents, followed by anxious at 37% and 29% felt angry.
The polling also asked ‘on reflection, did lockdown change your life?’ Some 44% said there had been no material change while 12% said it had changed for the better and 44% for the worse.
Our survey also showed 58% say they don’t think there will be another lockdown. But Professor Griffin says that Britain’s pandemic test and trace capability has largely been dismantled in the years following the pandemic.
Prof Griffin said: “The reality is we are not very well prepared for the next pandemic at all. It’s quite worrying but we needn’t be like this if we implement the lessons from Covid. We don’t have to have this false binary of lockdown versus freedom. Obviously you have this freedom argument that ‘this doesn’t affect me, I’m healthy’ – for a start shows a complete lack of understanding of immunology.
“There has been a lot of revisionist commentary saying ‘all of this was a mistake, we shouldn’t have done it’. The problem is though it’s not a false binary of lockdown versus open – there is the middle ground which is mitigation. We should be doing this and improving our surveillance systems.”
But Professor Altman is more hopeful and says lockdowns may not be needed for the next pandemic. He said: “Because of the enormity of that experience, there has been a tendency to link the words ‘pandemic’ and ‘lockdown’ as if one inevitably leads to the other. The events of 2020 were unusual, encompassing an airborne virus, highly infectious, and with virtually no cross-protective immunity in the population. It’s by no means certain that the same features will apply to the next pandemic.
“The answer is that we need maximal efforts in relation to comprehensive disease surveillance and pandemic preparedness, whatever form that pandemic may take. Note that a reason we were caught napping so badly in 2020 was that we had prepared on the basis of over-simplified assumptions, either that it would be a flu pandemic, or, once it was known to be a coronavirus, that it would be easy to screen for and limit spread, as with SARS and MERS. We need to be fleet of foot in our responses.”