Covid-19 Pandemic: Heed The Calls For Immediate Lockdown Or Perish?

By Jude Fernando –MAY 26, 2021

Jude Fernando

By May 24, 2021, COVID-19 infections in Sri Lanka had peaked, reaching 2,900 reported new infections each day. According to the Reuters COVID-19 Tracker, Sri Lanka has seen 161,242infections and 1,178coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began. The percentage of the population living with trauma, anxiety and fear will continue to increase. Yet instead of a countrywide lockdown, the government continues to place its faith in selective restrictions that fall short of a comprehensive and sustained lockdown. Those countries that initially opposed locking down, or who have opted for partial or sporadic lockdowns, have experienced high infection and mortality rates. Countries such as the UK later abandoned such inaction in favor of more stringent nationwide lockdowns. A countrywide lockdown for at least a month is indispensable to contain virus spread. The absence of such lockdown measures, obstruct efforts to contain the spread of the virus, delaying economic recovery, undermining the effectiveness of quarantine, vaccination, and treatment efforts, and creating opportunities for political and economic exploitation of the pandemic, and exacerbating its’ disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities. Countries closing their borders to Sri Lankans make these crises intractable. The arguments against lockdown are unfounded and misleading and have been responsible for the intractable spread of the virus. A nationwide lockdown will make it easier to face these pandemic challenges if the health care professionals are the main drivers of decision making and there is an efficient system to distribute the abundantly available necessities to sustain people’s needs during the lockdown period.

Herd Protection vs. Herd Immunity

Evidence does not back up the claim that countries are likely to quickly reach herd immunity by permitting most of their population to contract the virus. Epidemiological studies of previous pandemics have shown that countries achieve herd immunity most rapidly by minimizing the opportunities for the virus to transmit and increasing the vaccinated percentage of the population. Arguments against lockdowns impede the creation of positive synergy between herd immunity and herd protection while entrenching in society the forces most responsible for health and social vulnerabilities during the pandemic, which disproportionately impact the most marginalized groups.

Herd immunity refers to the immunity of a population developed either through vaccination or previous infection, and herd protection means slowing a spread of the virus by preventing communities from contracting it (Paul, 2004; Smith, 2010). Herd immunity and herd protection complement each other and pursuing one without the other is catastrophic (Cheng, 2020). Christie Aschwanden’s (2021) analysis has proven the near impossibility of achieving herd immunity simply by exposing people to the virus. Sweden, which made headlines earlier during the COVID-19 pandemic for eschewing lockdown in favor of rapidly achieving herd immunity, is nowhere near reaching that goal. A group of 200 scientists and medical experts charged that the argument for herd immunity was based on “flawed and cherry-picked science” and that “the evidence provided for its success was based upon limited and selective data” (p. 12). Sweden’s leading epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, paused the collection of data from children because he thought that doing so would create anxiety among the public, stating that “allowing a deadly virus to just spread in the hope of eventual ‘herd immunity’ made no sense to me scientifically, given our then limited knowledge, and it absolutely made no sense to me ethically” (p. 17).

Far fewer people have died in neighboring Denmark, Norway, and Finland where all have much stricter lockdowns. Dr. Nick Talley, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia said that Sweden had got it wrong, “in my view, the Swedish model has not been a success, at least to date”, and that the target of herd immunity was “not achieved, not even close, and this was arguably predictable.” In December 2020, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden admitted, “We have a large number who have died and that is terrible. It is something we all suffer with” (p. 21). The high rates of COVID-19 infection and subsequent deaths in some developed and developing countries directly correlates with the intentional political decision, urged by uninformed “experts” from all walks of life, not to lock down, so that mass gatherings of all kinds can proceed.

The core assumption of the herd immunity argument—that everyone who recovers from COVID-19 is immune to reinfection—has been called into question by mounting evidence of large numbers of people with proven reinfection and by the difficulties of estimating reinfection rates. The positive accounts of herd immunity provided by some Brazilian epidemiologists during the early months of the pandemic, for example, were subsequently proved wrong. From an ethical point of view, achieving herd immunity at the cost of large numbers of deaths is unacceptable, particularly because the most vulnerable populations suffer disproportionately.

As material and behavioral factors have continued to create opportunities for the spread of the virus, the herd immunity argument has collapsed, with the rapidity of the virus’s spread far outstripping humans’ ability to develop herd immunity. Gypsyamber D’Souza, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has said that “because the variables can change . . . the number of people susceptible to a virus, herd immunity is not a steady state.” Marcel Salathé, an epidemiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, has noted that “even once herd immunity is attained across a population, it is still possible to have large outbreaks, such as in areas where vaccination rates are low.”

According to Samuel Scarpino, of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, “most of the herd-immunity calculations don’t have anything to say about behavior at all. They assume there are no interventions, no behavioral changes or anything like that” (cited in Aschwanden, 2021). Epidemiologists have repeatedly shown that studying herd immunity takes time. “To understand the duration and effects of the immune response we have to follow people longitudinally, and it’s still early days,” says Caroline Buckee (cited in Aschwanden, 2021), an epidemiologist at the School of Public Health, Harvard University.

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