My Lords, the Coronavirus Act one-year report, published earlier this week, states:
“Since the start of the pandemic, we have dramatically improved our understanding of the virus: the physiological impact it causes, how it transmits, and most importantly, the measures we can take to reduce infection.”
What it tellingly neglects to say is that we have also, dramatically and painfully, improved our understanding of the mental and physical health impacts of those measures—tellingly, because our draconian restrictions have produced a new social order that has infection reduction as the one overriding priority, regardless of how low infections are.
A public health-determined yardstick of risk is firmly in the ascendant and seems likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Polling showing public support for restrictions cannot be the sole occupant of the driving seat in this House. We are here to scrutinise the likely effects of legislation. We know enough about the effects of lockdowns to give us pause before we renew the regulations being debated.
For the sake of time, I will focus on brain and mind. The monotony of lockdown depletes our memories and makes us sluggish, and screen overload cramps our ability to concentrate. Isolation causes brains to shrink. Lonely people’s brain volumes reduce in the region affecting decision-making and social behaviour. Prolonged isolation affects regions associated with learning, memory and the processing of emotion. Basically, the processing capacity of a brain not constantly challenged through social interaction begins to decline. Loneliness releases stress hormones affecting neuro- transmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and adrenaline, which profoundly influence brain function and mood. It also sharply increases the rate of Alzheimer’s disease among the elderly.
Finally, uncertainty drowns creativity—the elixir of progress and the main natural resource for our island race. We were told that the road map would bring certainty, but instead its rate-determining steps inherently mean constantly changing goalposts. For example, if risk assessment is fundamentally changed by new variants of concern, does that mean, as some fear, that our borders will remain indefinitely closed?
Fear is an important factor, which the Government and their spokespeople in the scientific community seem to have no interest in dissipating, possibly because they see it as a vital tool of social control to force people to abide by our particularly extreme restrictions. Their effect has been to penalise the many, due to fear of the misbehaviour of the few. Holidays always seem one more unattainable metric away.
Many parallels have been drawn with the Second World War and the need to keep morale high over that long campaign. I am not a historian of that period, but I seem to recall that the population were regularly inspired to keep going. The diet of public pronouncements we have been living on cannot be so described. Deaths—key to another of the four criteria—are now even lower than in non-Covid times, but this is hardly mentioned. Fear can now be retired and inspiration can take its place.
Finally, if SAGE meeting attendance is determined by the Chief Scientific Adviser and the Chief Medical Officer, surely the likely emphasis will be the low level of risk acceptable to public health, leaving little oxygen
for mental health and other considerations, such as the need to boost morale, resuscitate the economy and get those who have been laid off working again. My question for the Minister is: at what daily rate of infections, hospitalisations and deaths will we unlock?
At the risk of sounding dramatic, many are concluding that a world run according to a level of risk acceptable to public health is one that might be hardly worth living in. It is absolutely clear that, when the day of reckoning comes as to their handling of the pandemic, the Government will be held to account not just for how well they held down infections but for how they balanced this against these other harms that have emerged over this torrid year.
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