Public Health: Coronavirus Regulations

John Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend—and he is an honourable man—makes an important point that has wider context than just his constituency, which is that we must make sure that we control the virus. My heart goes out to the families of those in his constituency who have died. The only alternative to suppressing the virus is that it then expands exponentially. That is what happens with a virus when the R is above 1. I know that some people feel that we should adopt a more relaxed approach, but that will lead to more of the sort of thing that my hon. Friend has related from his constituency.

Some people have set out this more relaxed approach, including those in the so-called Great Barrington declaration. I want to take this argument head on, because on the substance, the Great Barrington declaration is underpinned by two central claims and both are emphatically false. First, it says that if enough people get covid, we will reach herd immunity. That is not true. Many infectious diseases never reach herd immunity, such as measles, malaria, AIDS and flu, and with increasing evidence of reinfection, we should have no confidence that we would ever reach herd immunity to covid, even if everyone caught it. Herd immunity is a flawed goal without a vaccine, even if we could get to it, which we cannot.

The second central claim is that we can segregate the old and vulnerable on our way to herd immunity. That is simply not possible. As the medical director of the NHS said yesterday, we cannot somehow fence off the elderly and the vulnerable from risk while everyone else returns to normal. It is neither conscionable nor practicable—not when so many people live in inter- generational homes, not when older people need carers who of course themselves live in the community, and not when young people can suffer the debilitating impact of long covid. Whenever we have seen cases among young people rise sharply, we then see cases among the over-60s rise inevitably thereafter, and we are not the kind of country that abandons our vulnerable or just locks them up.

If we let this virus continue unchecked, the loss of life would be simply too great to contemplate. We know that it would put our NHS at risk, as my hon. Friends have just said. We know that both because of what happened in March and because of what is happening right now. We have already heard from the heads of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine that, if we do not act fast and come together to quash the virus, we risk putting the NHS under extraordinary strain both for covid treatments and for non-covid treatments.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

How long do the scientists think we will need these lockdowns for, and what is their exit plan?

[Matt Hancock]

We have seen the exit plan from local lockdowns. For instance, in Leicester, where we had a firm local lockdown, the case rate came right down. We lifted that and we have sadly seen it start to rise again. The case rate is determined by the amount of social mixing, and it reduces during a lockdown. In some parts of the country where the case rate has continued to rise, there is an argument for further ensuring that we do not reach the level of contact that is at the root of the virus spreading. The challenge is how to calibrate the lockdown to get the virus under control while doing the minimum damage to the economy and to education.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

The Government are desperately trying to find that balance point between protecting livelihoods and protecting lives, and I am grateful to them for all they are doing to try to bring that off, but the only way forward is to get maximum buy-in from the public. There is no perfect set of rules or laws that can be enforced. We do not have enough police and that would require a mighty explanation task, so the more they can do by means of persuasion, the better. Sharing with the public the dangers and showing them how hand washing, distancing and not mingling in enclosed spaces are going to work are the way forward. I am apprehensive about how much of this is enforceable.

Test and trace can work only if people who are traced are willing to co-operate. Quite a lot of people leave funny names, apparently, or they are not available when people are trying to contact them, or when they are told that they are a contact, they decide they are too busy to follow the procedures. They might genuinely be too busy and have real conflicts in their lives about looking after relatives, sorting out children, cooking meals at home or whatever it is, and it is very difficult suddenly to isolate if they do not have the property and the means to do all that, so we need to carry them with us. There needs to be a more energetic reliance on persuasion and less on formal rules.

My other worry about this strategy is that we need a plan B for the possibility that there is no early and successful vaccine. We all hope that the Secretary of State is right and we all hope that, by spring, there is a vaccine that works that can be produced at scale and that enough people want to take it so the problem goes away, but there might not be and this might fall down on one or more of those requirements. I urge the Government to think through what is plan B, because we do not want this continuous cycle where the virus pops up, we impose controls, the virus goes down a bit, we relax the controls and the virus pops up again.

That is deeply destructive to social life and community life. It is going to destroy many more businesses and many more livelihoods. Many more jobs are going to be lost. Businesses need some greater certainty that they will be able to trade, so I urge the Government to be more open with us about what is plan B for no vaccine and more open with everyone about how long these controls have to last and what their purposes are.

The 10 o’clock rule has become the iconic one that is opposed by some and supported by others. The problem with it is that people find easy ways round it. They comply with leaving the pub, but then congregate in each other’s homes and use off-licence booze. They might be breaking the rule of six, but feel that is a tolerable thing to do. The police cannot go to everybody’s home to find out whether they are breaking the rule of six, but they can enforce turning out the pubs. It might be worse for people to drink at home than to drink in the pub, so rules have their limitations. Let us get more buy-in by persuasion. That is our job as politicians.