Why can’t the lockdown be eased more quickly? No one in government is willing to answer this simple question

Why can’t the lockdown be eased more quickly? We didn’t get much of an answer from Boris Johnson yesterday, so today we tried asking the real prime ministers, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, who appeared before the Science and Technology Committee of MPs.

Yesterday, the prime minister said he thought people would rather have “security and certainty” than “urgency and haste”, and that infections were rising in other European countries.

Today, the people who wield the real power gave more detailed answers, but they still seemed to leave some scope for lifting restrictions earlier than the timetable set out by the government.

Whitty, the chief medical officer, warned: “A lot of people think that this is all over; I would urge them to look at continental Europe where a lot of countries are going back into rates going up and having to close things down again.”

But we are far ahead of them in vaccinating our population, said Greg Clark, the former cabinet minister who chairs the committee and who is one of the best cross-examiners in the business (anyone who thinks Keir Starmer is “forensic” should listen to Clark). Whitty said that most younger people haven’t been vaccinated yet, and they would drive the spread of infections if we opened up too fast. This, he explained, would kill a significant number of people, because the vaccines don’t offer total protection, and young people can still die.

Graham Stringer, the Labour member for Anti-Lockdown Central, was not convinced. He thought the number of deaths suggested by the models used by Whitty and Vallance was too high, and wanted to know why, if the approach really was “data not dates”, the lockdown couldn’t be eased earlier if the data warranted. Vallance confirmed that there were no numbers attached to the timetable that would allow the committee to judge whether it was on course. “In my opinion, it’s a slogan, then,” Stringer muttered, half under his breath.

The committee returned repeatedly to this question, asked most directly by Carol Monaghan, of the SNP: what number of deaths is “acceptable” as the price of opening up society? Unsurprisingly, Whitty didn’t want to answer it, saying it was a matter for ministers and parliament. But they are even less inclined to answer it – how could they possibly?

To be fair to our government of scientists, it tried rather harder to answer questions than our nominal government of politicians. Whitty said that this year we have had almost no deaths from flu, because of the restrictions to stop the spread of coronavirus, but that did not mean that the country should be locked down every winter to prevent the 10,000 flu deaths that would normally happen.

He said that “everyone agrees” the risk from coronavirus is too high now, but that zero Covid was not realistic – yet he failed to volunteer the number of Covid deaths between “too high” and “zero” that would be compatible with an open society.

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Whitty also tried to answer Monaghan’s other blunt observation, that the five-week gap between dates “seems awful long”. Each planned easing of restrictions consisted of “a very substantial block of things with a very high risk if you put it all together”, he said, and that there would need to be at least four weeks before the effects of those changes were clear in the data. “What would you want to add?” he asked.

Some people would like to add allowing vaccinated people to meet unvaccinated people indoors in small groups, as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has just advised in the US. Unfortunately, Whitty and Vallance were not asked that question. Others might ask why, if the government (the scientific one or the political one) needs four weeks to assess the data, does it need another week to give people notice of changes? Just tell us what we’re allowed to do and let us get on with it.

It may be that the real constraint is public opinion, as Johnson hinted yesterday, saying, “I think people would really rather” have certainty than haste. And it may be that he has been burnt twice by trying to lead public opinion towards opening up too soon – once when he resisted the idea of a “circuit breaker” lockdown in September, and again when he tried to open up for Christmas.

If so, that is unfortunate, because it may be that the vaccines would actually allow a reasonably safe return to normal some time before 21 June, but that public opinion is too fearful to allow it.