In his testimony to the Health and Science select committees, Dominic Cummings heavily criticised the Government’s handling of the pandemic. One of the biggest mistakes, he argued, was the failure to impose border controls:
Obviously, we should have shut the borders in January. We should have done exactly what Taiwan did… Yes, that has some disruption, but the kind of cost-benefit ratio is massively, massively out of whack, and at least it is worth a try, like lots of things. At least you try it … If it doesn’t work, you still have the whole nightmare to deal with, anyway.
However, Cummings somewhat absolved the Government of blame on this score – at least with the respect to the period before April – insofar as all the scientists were advising against border controls:
He was told, and we were all told repeatedly, that the advice is not to close the borders, because essentially it would have no effect… you cannot blame the Prime Minister directly. That was the official advice. The official advice was, categorically, that closing the borders will have no effect.
Cummings’ testimony is consistent with the evidence from SAGE meetings in January and February of last year. For example, the minutes of a meeting on January 22nd record that “NERVTAG does not advise port of entry screening”.
Another factor Cummings mentioned, as to why the Government didn’t impose border controls, is political correctness:
At this time, another group-think thing was that it was basically racist to call for closing the borders and blaming China, the whole Chinese new year thing and everything else. In retrospect, I think that was just obviously completely wrong.
What should we make of Cummings’ argument that border controls were at least “worth a try” in January? On the face of it, the argument seems very reasonable. In the best-case scenario, we could have achieved the same outcomes as New Zealand – zero excess mortality and just a small decline in GDP. And in the worst-case scenario, we’d have been in the same situation as otherwise.
However, the latter outcome – being no worse-off – isn’t necessarily the worst-case scenario. A potentially even worse scenario is if we’d contained the virus until the autumn, and then experienced a major epidemic at the same time as the NHS came under its normal winter pressures.
This was in fact one of the reasons why scientists were initially advising against both border controls and lockdowns. Cummings was apparently told:
Even if we therefore suppress it completely, all that you are going to do is get a second peak in the winter when the NHS is already, every year, under pressure … If you try and flatten it now, the second peak comes up in the wintertime and that is even worse than the summer.
This argument should not be dismissed out of hand. Several of the European countries with the highest death tolls – Poland, Bulgaria, Czechia – are ones that escaped the first wave, only to get clobbered in the second. (Of course, there may be several reasons for the high death tolls in these countries; I’m not suggesting the epidemic’s timing is the only one.)
Deciding whether to impose border controls therefore represents a trade-off between the benefits of buying time and/or achieving containment versus the risks of postponing the epidemic until the winter.
Comparative evidence suggests that achieving containment would have been a tall order for the U.K. Although some Western countries have successfully contained the virus, they are all geographically peripheral nations with relatively low population densities and few ports of entry. Britain has the advantage of being an island, but it’s larger, denser and more connected than most of its peers.
Indeed, there are several countries that failed to contain the virus despite imposing early border controls. To identify when countries introduced restrictions on international travel, I will rely on the Oxford Blavatnik School’s COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. And for charting the epidemic’s trajectory, I will use the daily number of deaths per million people, as reported by Our World in Data.
Canada imposed a total border closure on March 18th (see chart below). This was too late to prevent the first wave. Yet the policy has been in place ever since, and it did not stop a second wave from emerging in the autumn.
Hungary imposed a total border closure on September 1st (see chart below), but this did not prevent two major epidemics from burgeoning in the autumn and the spring. Note: the Blavatnik School rates countries’ travel restrictions on a 0–4 scale (with 4 corresponding to a “ban on all regions or total border closure”) and Hungary’s rating hasn’t gone below 3 since March 9th 2020. (By comparison, South Korea has never had a rating of 4.)
Argentina imposed a total border closure on March 16th (see chart below), but this did not prevent a major epidemic from burgeoning in the country’s spring. Note that the policy was put in place 199 days before the peak of daily deaths, which would be the equivalent of the U.K. having closed its borders on September 27th 2019.
Colombia imposed a total border closure on March 25th (see chart below), but this did not prevent a major epidemic from burgeoning in the country’s spring. Note that the policy was put in place 131 days before the peak of daily deaths, which would be the equivalent of the U.K. having closed its borders on December 4th 2019.
Although several East Asian countries have apparently used border controls to great effect, it’s unclear whether the U.K. would have been able to replicate their success. In a recent article, the Economist suggested that people in East Asia may “benefit from ‘cross-immunities’ – a level of protection against SARS-CoV-2 conferred by past infection by other viruses circulating in the region”.
Assuming Britain wouldn’t have been able to contain the virus, deciding whether to impose border controls then becomes a trade-off between the benefits of buying time versus the risks of postponing the epidemic until the winter. I’m not sure what the correct answer is here, but given the risks of postponement, Cummings is wrong to suggest that imposing border controls was “obviously” the right thing to do.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I was a little disparaging of Joanna’s last piece in DS, but this has far greater merit. I recognise myself and all my dangerous far right friends in these words. How to get this across succinctly though.?
Live and let live?
Sadly though the whole philosophy espoused in this article is now simply history. There is nothing I do not recognise but it is a longing for that which will never return. I fear that the next few years will brutalise our country and its British people. To imagine that our future is not dystopian is to close eyes to the wreckage that has been wrought and the wreckage that is to come under this WEF Labour government.
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
That is the future.
” is now simply history. ”
I know what you are saying but her words very much describe my life and where I live. I know I am lucky and privileged but the world she describes does still exist, here down the deep lanes of North Devon as depicted in the wonderful photographs of Jame Revilious. I will be out on Wednesday night at the village emergency committee, checking the list of the village’s emergency chainsaw operators. It may not last for ever and it may be under threat but at the moment it does still exist.
I’m with you on this SD and a good article yes – open gardens in our ‘village’ (fast growing into small town – thankyou central government planning overrule) bought people out in droves and umbrella’s yesterday to nosey around and call in and view the little garden my friend (82 + old frail & widowed) has made – a perfect small south facing garden, tamed by her knowledge and interest. And fortified by my rather fine (I say so myself) chocolate checkerboard cake. She and I both agree we are lucky to have the space to enjoy and the interest and the company to keep us both going. For as long as we can.
It’s the same where I live in the west country and it’s why I moved here 8 years ago.
But it’s changing fast: already a small town which was 98% white has visibly growing numbers of “ethnic minorities” who I very much doubt were able to afford to buy a property here, so they will be occupying social housing. I am not making a comment about them as individuals, they may all be perfectly lovely people, but the fact is the area is visibly changing … very quickly.
“And the creed and the colour and the name won’t matter” …. except as we see around the country and particularly in some areas the creed does matter … and it matters a great deal.
Ditto in rural Oxfordshire
Enjoy it while it lasts. Where I live was pretty much the same till bout 5 years ago. Now new packets of migrants get opened every week.
It isn’t 1955 anymore. The Vicar doesn’t cycle down the lane and my grandmother does not get her mangle out from the Anderson Shelter. There was no such thing as “diversity”. You got no money unless you worked, which is why my grandad spent 50 years down the Michael Pit. We didn’t eat micro wave junk and fill our belly with Cheesy Wotsits and Irn Bru. Young girls didn’t push their babies along in a pram and ignore them completely because they are fiddling all the time with their silly phone. ——-But then again people will say I have to move with the times. —-WHY?
Varmint yr family are very lucky to have you.
Why thankyou . I am very humbled.——–If you mean it
Agree.
I have never believed in change for changes sake.
The red thumbs down people are big Cheesy Wotsit fans obviously
How about this – conservatives care about people as individuals, the left just cares about the system.
They just care about power.
and votes
It’s an absolutely superb article. I may have been disparaging about her last piece too. I think what she’s saying here is the left (Tory, labour communist green lib dem) essentially has a complete god complex. Who here doesn’t think David Cameron would rather see Dianne Abbot as pm rather than Nigel Farage?
This!
Thomas Sowell puts it very well.
The policy arguments between liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians, do not arise just from differences in priorities regarding freedom, equality, and security. At root, they draw from different conceptions of the nature of man. The Left holds an unconstrained vision: Given the right political and economic arrangements, human beings can be improved, even perfected. Success is defined by what people have the potential of becoming, not by people as they are. The Right holds a constrained vision: People come to society with innate characteristics that cannot be reshaped and must instead be accommodated. Success in political and economic policy must be defined in light of those innate characteristics.
I recognise elements of this in the place I live – a county town in a fairly rural area, traditionally Tory. We now have a Labour MP. I think the problem is that a lot of the people involved in the kind of thing described in the article are simply too “nice” or too asleep.
Very well put, Joanna. I enjoyed this article a lot. I nodded a lot, too. Thank you.
Bang on… with the exception of enjoying Love Island! Nice, uplifting piece.
I do hate any article that makes a claim of something being better without saying what it is compared with.
It is as bad as claiming that change is a virtue when it is Labour change, whereas climate change is bad.
I take it from the article that we have not had a Conservative government for years, and probably decades.
PS I don’t have a deep memory of Lord Salisbury, I am not quite that old and anyway I don’t mix in those circles.
Not to mention warm beer and old maids cycling through the mist to church.
Give me a break. There is a horrible kind of demanded conformity in the vision outlined here. A kind of socialism, if you like, or subordination of the individual to the collective.
Thanks, Joanna, for reminding me that I am not, and never will be again, a Conservative. Let’s hear it for William Gladstone and not be seduced by the siren song of Disraeli.
Well, I don’t know if I am a conservative or not. Any society will have some element of “demanded conformity” won’t it? Don’t the problems start when the “demand” is with menaces – you must voice the right opinions otherwise you will lose your job, you must take this injection, you must give the state all your money?
That’s a nice village that you live in, Joanna!
You have nailed it Joanna
Sovereignty of the individual, self-responsibility, self-respect, self-discipline, self-sufficiency, property Rights, celebration of heritage, our common language, morals, values, manners, traditions and Common Law, free market capitalism/free trade.
Conservatism is adopt and conserve what gives best outcome – but experiment, evaluate, evolve – not obsession with process irrespective of outcomes.
Welfare State, NHS, State education, redistribution of wealth via taxation, State intervention in the economy, social engineering, telling us what we may/may not put into our bodies, State determination of values, morals, is not Conservatism. But that describes many ‘Conservatives’ and every ‘Conservative’ Government since the war.
Love it! Thank you Joanna.
Ah, what a lovely vision of Olde Englande, suddenly brought crashing down by… “LOVE ISLAND”????
She claims that “We Conservatives” all enjoy DISGUSTING PORNOGRAPHY and VOYEURISM????
Speak for yourself, Joanna.
And where in your Item 2 is the village pub and post office?