A Response to Lord Hannan on Public Support for Lockdowns

On December 31st, Lord Hannan revealed in his Telegraph column that he’s no longer “a rational optimist of the Norberg-Ridley-Pinker school”. Instead, he’s swiftly becoming a “rational pessimist”. One of the reasons for this change of heart, he explains, is the British public’s enthusiastic embrace of lockdown. Hannan writes:

When, in January 2020, I heard that the Chinese authorities were closing and quarantining cities, I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a nation where such things were unthinkable. The months that followed taught me some hard truths. It became clear that many of my countrymen couldn’t give two hoots about liberty, either in the abstract or in practice. A horrifying survey in July 2021 showed that, with or without a virus, 26% of people wanted nightclubs closed, 35% wanted travellers quarantined and 40% wanted mandatory facemasks.

Hannan’s point – that “many of his countrymen couldn’t give two hoots about liberty” – is not without merit. A large percentage of Brits did support lockdown, and polls show that a large percentage also favour higher taxes and nationalisation of industry.

But when it comes to the British public’s support for lockdown, there’s one major caveat that needs to be mentioned: they massively overestimated the risks of Covid. So to some extent, it’s not surprising they favoured lockdown.

In April of 2020, Ipsos MORI asked Brits what are the chances of needing hospital treatment if you catch Covid. The median answer was 30%, whereas the correct answer is closer to 3%. So respondents overestimated the risk of hospitalisation by a factor of 10.

Similar findings have been reported in many other polls and surveys. As George Davey Smith and David Spiegelhalter noted in May of 2020, “levels of personal fear” are “strikingly mismatched to objective risk of death”. And Spiegelhalter ought to know – he was formerly the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge.

Why did people overestimate the risks of Covid?

Part of the explanation is that they are bad at estimating quantities in general; they tend to ‘rescale’ small percentages upwards toward 50. But another part of the explanation, I would argue, is that politicians intentionally exaggerated the risks in order to increase compliance with lockdown.

The use of fear tactics during the pandemic has been documented extensively by Laura Dodsworth in her book A State of Fear. As one scientist told her, “The Government was very worried about compliance… There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.”

In other words: the public embraced lockdown so enthusiastically, at least in part, because they’d been led to believe that Covid was more dangerous than it really was. So from their point of view, infringing civil liberties to protect people from Covid seemed justified.

Brits clearly aren’t the intrepid freedom-lovers of libertarian fantasy. With that said, lockdown wasn’t a ‘fair test’ of their commitment to liberty.