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Covid: UK scientist says ‘substantial’ degree of mortality inevitable in future
Sage professor says death toll will reduce over time and life will ‘get back to normal’
Prof Andrew Hayward, a member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage):
Looking back on the beginning of the pandemic, Hayward, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCL, said: “I think one of the reasons that we’ve had so many deaths is that we left things far too late, in terms of taking more restrictive measures.
“We should have been taking social distancing measures – if not a full lockdown then other measures that were trying to separate people – much earlier. At that time, of course, we also didn’t really have the same mechanisms to measure how much disease there was in the community, so we were largely only really seeing the tip of the iceberg of cases.
“By the time you start to see major increases in deaths then it was really too late to take action, and hence the levels got extraordinarily high before we took effective action, and it took a long, long time for them to go back down again.”
Asked if he thought epidemiologists did not really have the ear of government in early March last year, Hayward said: “The concept, you know, the political concept of going into lockdown and doing something like that seemed so extraordinary.
I think we didn’t learn our lesson from that and we didn’t really learn the lesson that lockdowns are going to be way, way more effective if you start them earlier.”
Hayward said it was much easier to put out a very small fire than put out a big forest fire. “When it came to the following autumn, we didn’t learn that lesson,” he said.
In other words, political decisions caused mass death. Conscious political decisions. Twice the UK Government went with a policy of allowing the virus to take hold - the second time knowing that the first failure led to mass death. Which is why lawyers are calling for the International Criminal Court to broaden its remit to such politically accelerated catastrophes.
