Why can't we come out of lockdown sooner? The arguments from both sides

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What’s the story?

Boris Johnson has announced the Government’s plan for the end of lockdown, setting out a gradual easing of restrictions that will see the country return to normal by June 21 at the earliest.

But the ink on the Government’s roadmap was barely dry before there were calls for the plan to be sped up, from Tory and Labour MPs alike.

After Mr Johnson’s statement announcing the plans, he faced a litany of questions from irate backbenchers who wanted to know why their constituency’s pubs/restaurants/theme parks could not be opened sooner.

There is an organised force on the Tory benches for this argument in the Coronavirus Recovery Group (CRG), a sizable caucus of MPs who have questioned the evidence for continued lockdowns and called for the publication of criteria for our release.

Your correspondent also hears rumblings of a similar group being set up in the Labour Party. Together, they will do all they can to increase the speed of the roadmap and get the economy moving again.

The Government’s response to this argument is to say that there must be five weeks between each step of the roadmap, to allow scientists to study data on the state of the pandemic and the all-important case numbers, and hospitalisation and death statistics.

That timeline is based on four weeks for observation and decision-making, and an extra week to put the country on notice for what changes will be made.

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Sir Patrick Vallance gave another reason for delays. Even if 80 per cent of people accepted a jab that was 80 per cent effective, he said, there would only be around 50 per cent of people who were protected from the disease.

That is because there will be vulnerable groups of people, children and refuseniks who aren’t vaccinated. So we must watch the case numbers and spread of the disease regardless and stop it getting out of control.

Looking back

Some close to the Prime Minister say he will be even more cautious this time, because he feels a personal responsibility for the scale of the second wave of the pandemic and the number of people it has killed.

Although the unlocking in summer last year did not immediately precipitate a rise in infections, there are those that argue the Government was too hesitant to reimpose restrictions in the autumn, especially since the exponential nature of the growth of the disease means that every week ministers delay, the higher the eventual peak will be.

To make matters worse, all this is much more difficult to predict than in the first unlocking last year because there are many more factors in the modelling that must be considered.

This time, a key consideration is the effect of vaccines. Scientists making predictions about the effect on the pandemic must estimate how fast the roll-out will be, how many people will accept a jab when it is offered to them, and how effective the vaccine will be at stopping infection, hospitalisation and death.

My colleagues revealed in today’s Telegraph that some in Government expect that the unlocking plan could be sped up, depending on the latest data on vaccine effectiveness.

A senior government source said that if the positive results from an early Public Health Scotland study on vaccines were replicated in England, "that would change the calculations" on the timings.

The Scottish study last week showed that the AstraZeneca and Pfizer jabs had a "spectacular" effect on the number of people hospitalised with the disease, suggesting that the current modelling may be too pessimistic (but more on that later).

Prof Neil Ferguson, the original Prof Lockdown, said yesterday that there was a small chance the roadmap could be sped up – but he wasn’t confident the data would allow it.

Second, one eye must be kept at all times on the emergence of new variants, which have the potential to be more infectious (like the B.1.1.7 “Kent” variant), more deadly or more resistant to the vaccine.

In fact, the evidence suggests that having a high rate of transmission in the UK at the same time that plenty of people are vaccinated is the ideal scenario for the emergence of a new variant that finds its way around our defences.

If a new vaccine-resistant variant was to become the dominant one, then we would have to develop an entirely new jab, slowing down the speed at which we can return to normal.

Anything else?

For those of a lockdown-sceptical persuasion, this amounts to “moving the goalposts”.

The CRG says ministers told the public they would be let out from their lockdown prisons when there was no material risk of the NHS being overwhelmed, and it seems intuitive that the more high-risk groups are vaccinated, the fewer people will be admitted to hospital.

To now start using the case numbers as the yardstick for measuring the UK’s recovery creates yet another test that the public has to meet, they say.

What’s more, the group have been digging into the SAGE modelling data published online and are not sure that they trust the figures that the scientists have been using.

Mark Harper, the CRG’s chair, tweeted yesterday that the estimates for the vaccine’s effectiveness raise “serious questions” about how reliable the modelling actually is.

He points out that the modelling estimates that the vaccine roll-out would jab two million people per week, but the data (until this week) suggested it would be much quicker than that.

The Government has always been cagey about exactly how many vaccinations it hopes to deliver, but the estimates for the modelling were provided by the Cabinet Office and were downgraded between February 11 and February 17, suggesting there is some worry about how fast the roll-out will be for the next two months.

Seizing on the suggestion that the vaccine could be more effective than expected, Mr Harper pointed to the pessimistic numbers from Imperial College London and Warwick University used in the modelling, which estimate that the effect on transmission will be 15-20 per cent lower than real-world data suggests.

There is also some uncertainty about how many people will actually take the vaccine. So far we can only rely on polling, which anticipates that more than three quarters of people will accept a jab, but the Government is working on increasing figures among hard-to-reach groups, including some religious and ethnic minority communities.

For the lockdown sceptics, this is just another example of SAGE being too pessimistic about the pandemic.

Many point to a dramatic press conference last year, in which Prof Chris Whitty presented a very scary graph showing exponential growth of case numbers – which did not actually transpire as quickly as he had suggested.

But for the Labour front bench, any questioning of the underlying assumptions of the modelling constitutes "misinformation".

Sir Keir Starmer used Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions to ask Mr Johnson whether he would "have a word" with the CRG about their comments, which he called "irresponsible".

Mr Harper replied in a tweet: "If Sir Keir spent less time flailing over my Twitter threads and considering whether to topple statues, he might do less dreadfully in the polls. Perhaps he’d like to suggest what’s wrong with my analysis?"

The Refresher take

Ministers have been quick to rule out any suggestion of the roadmap being sped up – and, if anything, have been keen to emphasise that it could be slowed down, stretching lockdown into the summer.

Today’s Telegraph warns that the Government must not lose sight of the economic harm being caused to the businesses that contribute so much to the national coffers and employ millions of people.

We must ask what is the point of running a world-beating vaccine roll-out if we then continue lockdown unnecessarily, but nor does it make sense to risk the re-emergence of a variant that could undermine all our hard work.

Ministers should be more open about communicating the risks of another version of the disease that is resistant to the vaccine.

If not, the temptation to call for a faster easing will become unbearable, as data shows the roll-out and effectiveness of the jabs beating expectations and protecting more people than we could have hoped.