David Paton is a professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School. He’s also a lockdown sceptic and a member of the Health Advisory & Recovery Team. During the pandemic, he’s written articles about lockdowns, Sweden, the pingdemic and Covid forecasting. He tweets under @CricketWyvern. I interviewed him via email.
On 4th February, you wrote a piece for The Critic titled ‘Seven indicators that show infections were falling before Lockdown 3.0’, which argued that infections probably peaked before England entered full lockdown on 6th January. Could you briefly summarise the evidence you presented?
Working out when infections start to go up or down can be tricky for several reasons: not everyone with an infection will be tested, symptoms typically appear some time after the initial infection, and there will be a longer lag before an infection results in hospitalisation or death. These lags will vary from case to case and in an unknown proportion of cases, there are no symptoms at all.
The interesting thing about January’s lockdown is that every single indicator tells us that infections peaked well before the full lockdown was in place. Since my article in The Critic, two further pieces of evidence have confirmed this.
First, we now have the more formal analysis of mortality data by Professor Simon Wood of Edinburgh University, which concludes that infections were falling before each of the three English lockdowns.
Second, the ONS Official Incidence Estimates were published in mid-March and put the peak of infections between 20th and 26th December. By the time of lockdown, the ONS estimate infections had already fallen by 40%. These are estimates, but even the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval for 20th–26th December is higher than the upper bound for the week of lockdown.
In my view, saying infections “probably” peaked before the lockdown is no longer a fair reflection of the evidence. Rather, we can be “virtually certain” that they did.
This has important implications. It means that, like the first two lockdowns, the January national lockdown was not necessary for infections in England to start falling. Put another way, hospital admissions would not have continued to rise to unsustainable levels in the absence of lockdown. Of course, this does not answer the secondary question of whether earlier tiered-restrictions had any significant impact on infections. However, it is worth noting that infections were falling pre-lockdown even in regions like Yorkshire which were never put into Tier 4.
Then on 18th March, you wrote an article for Spiked titled ‘The myth of our ‘late’ lockdown’, which argued that locking down earlier wouldn’t have made much difference. In the article, you referred to “the discredited assumption that governments can turn infections on or off like a tap”. What did you mean by that?
For the past two years, Governments around the world have made policy based on the assumptions that: Covid cases continue rising indefinitely unless restrictions are introduced, restrictions and lockdowns inevitably lead to lower infection rates, and lifting restrictions always leads to cases surging. All of these assumptions are wrong.
An interview with David PatonRead More
