Lee Cain

What Rishi Sunak gets wrong about lockdown

We did discuss the trade-offs

(Getty)

Rishi Sunak presents an alarming picture of what happened during lockdown in last week’s Spectator interview – one echoed by lockdown sceptics who claim that Covid policy was a disaster, stoked by fear and based on questionable scientific advice. Worst of all, they cry, the trade-offs were not even discussed.

But none of this is true – it is Covid revisionism. I know because I sat around the cabinet table as politicians, scientists, economists and epidemiologists agonised over the extent to which lockdown would devastate lives and livelihoods. It was not an easy decision for anyone. We locked down because we knew the cost of ‘letting Covid rip’ was far more damaging to both the health and wealth of the nation. But as the pandemic fades into our collective memory – and critics try to rewrite history – it’s clear that the biggest mistake we made was not locking down but doing so too late.

I vividly remember the morning of Saturday, 14 March 2020 when, as part of a small team of advisers gathered in the Prime Minister’s office, Boris Johnson was told that the initial plan for managing the pandemic was failing. Without urgent intervention, the country’s healthcare system would collapse under the strain of tens of thousands of seriously ill patients. The challenges facing us in that first wave were immense. We knew the NHS didn’t have enough beds, there was a massive shortfall in PPE and a severely limited number of ventilators.

The initial modelling used for crucial decisions, we found out, was very wrong. A review conducted by data experts recruited by Dominic Cummings uncovered that, unless we changed course immediately, the NHS would be overwhelmed within three weeks.

When faced with the scenes we witnessed in Lombardy, would anti-lockdown advocates really have been willing to ‘let it rip’ for months on end?

The PM sat in silence as three scenarios were sketched out on a whiteboard.

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