Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I had wanted to spend my three minutes spelling out the potential alternative to lockdown, namely focused protection, because the Government have not taken it seriously enough. A staggering 45% of the UK’s Covid deaths have come among the 0.6% of people who live in care homes. That is where our efforts should be focused.

However, like others, I was so disturbed by what I have learned about the numbers used last Saturday to bounce us into lockdown that I must devote my few minutes to that issue. We were told that the virus is spreading faster than in the reasonable worst-case scenario. Like my noble friend Lord Lilley, I had to find out from Ed Conway of Sky News that the scenario was drawn up a long time ago in July and had absurd assumptions about the timing of the second wave. We were told that we could expect 4,000 deaths a day on a chart that did not even disclose where the projection came from. That is more deaths than have occurred on any day in any country, even those with vastly larger populations than ours.

The fatality rate of the virus is about 0.2%, as the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, said, and falling. Therefore, as my noble friend Lady Noakes said, 4,000 deaths a day implies 2 million infections per day, with the entire population infected within a month. That does not pass the common-sense test. What we were not told, and had to drag out of the secretive conclave of oracles known as SAGE, was that that was a nearly three-week-old projection that subsequently had been updated twice, producing much lower numbers which were ignored. The death toll was undershooting not just that model but all three projections shown on that graph. I echo the despair of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, at the performance of the models. They mostly still do not take into account matters such as the heterogeneity of infectiousness, whereby in each wave the superspreaders are depleted and the wave therefore crests, which is why Sweden now has almost no daily deaths, as my noble friend Lord Balfe said, after no lockdown.

It is not true, as my noble friend the Minister said twice in his speech, that the numbers are rising exponentially; they have not been for several weeks. Even by last weekend, and certainly today, it is clear that the second wave is peaking. Cases peaked in Liverpool, Nottingham, Newcastle and Manchester well over a week ago. As we have heard this evening, the King’s College data show that cases are now starting to nudge downwards nationally.

I have huge sympathy for the Government but, in the light of the failure to produce proper evidence for this measure, as my noble friend Lady Altmann said, the Government have every justification to pause this lockdown, with its inevitable products of further deaths from suicide, untreated cancer and heart disease and its miserable consequences of mental ill health, unemployment, bankruptcy and poverty, and go back and demand proper evidence-based graphs from SAGE.