ENGLAND didn’t need a second lockdown because daily covid-19 cases were already peaking under previously imposed regional restrictions, according to a researcher leading a popular . “It was unnecessary, if you looked at the latest data on the curves,” says Tim Spector at King’s College London, who oversees the Covid Symptom Study. Other researchers disagree, however.
Almost 3 million people have signed up to the study’s app, which asks users to log how they are feeling each day and input results from any covid-19 tests.
Information from the app indicates that daily cases in England peaked at about 33,000 around 23 October before gradually falling. Modelling by the Office for National Statistics suggests that the peak came later, in November. The second lockdown in England was announced on 31 October, and started on 2 November.
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Spector says the government relied too much on , SAGE, instead of the data being reported by users of the app, which makes information available faster than the surveys relied on by SAGE. He suggests that the three tiers of restrictions introduced on 14 October, with levels varying by region, were already reining in the disease. “We really need to learn lessons from this for the third wave, and not keep repeating the same overreacting or under-reacting problems,” he says.
SAGE’s work shows that the lowest tier was failing to stop cases growing but the two highest tiers were putting the brakes on the epidemic before the national lockdown started. A paper by the group published on 27 November found that cases were still growing in areas under the lowest restrictions, tier one. In tier two, cases were shrinking in many areas. Most areas with the toughest measures, tier three, saw cases declining.
“We need stable restrictions to stop people rushing to the pub before lockdowns”
However, that doesn’t mean the lockdown was unnecessary. Andrew Hayward at University College London (UCL), a member of SAGE, says the rate at which cases were curbed by regional or national measures matters too.
“It’s not just the case of whether you’re peaking, but also the speed at which you’re declining that is relevant. A gradual decline in those high-incidence areas would still be devastating in terms of the number of deaths and hospitalisations that could have been avoided,” he says, adding that Spector’s analysis of the daily case curves is “a bit simplistic”.
Christina Pagel, also at UCL, says: “Tier three reduction is slow and hospitals would still have been more likely to be overwhelmed compared to a faster reduction.”
Schools being closed for half-term at the end of October will also have contributed to the slowing in cases then, with less social mixing and travel, says Hayward. However, disentangling that impact is hard, he adds.
Devi Sridhar at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says she is sceptical about how well the epidemic can be tracked through people reporting symptoms to Spector’s app. “There are major limitations,” she says.
The UK government has earlier regional restrictions were working well enough to render a national lockdown unnecessary. England is now back in a system of tiered restrictions. Spector says that maintaining a stable system of restrictions until April is key, to avoid “people rushing to the pub” before further lockdowns.
