But Was There Any Other Choice?

"All you have to do is look at the places that have had big lockdowns."

"You can see that the peak in the number of cases is a few days after the lockdown, and then the cases just keep dropping."

"There's no easy answers. No cheap, magic bullet."

Dr.Mark Jit, epidemiology professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom

"We must open up society to save many more lives than we can by attempting to avoid every case [or even most cases] of COVID-19."

Dr.Ari Joffe, critical care physician, University of Alberta

"This is not to deny the terrible health outcomes of COVID-19 infections."

"Among my patients, however, the acute challenges created by lockdowns are much more apparent."

Dr.Sonia Malhotra, family physician, Toronto

Scientists are scrambling to work out what effect specific measures, such as social distancing, have in slowing the spread of COVID-19.   Credit: Ivan Romano/Getty

When the novel coronavirus struck it was with a vengeance. Governments and their health advisers knew they were facing a strange new threat. The immediate reaction was to go into stark defensive mode; lockdown. Not universally by any means. It was the reactive position of Chinese authorities, where the SARS-CoV-2 virus first struck, to isolate and issue stern orders to remain in situ. And most countries did the same once the virus infiltrated their negligible defences. Those that did not, hoped to save their economies while trusting their populations to exercise the care of physical distancing. 

Since then, a year has brought millions of deaths attributable to the effects of COVID-19, hospitals and health personnel stretched their limits, and national economic meltdowns. Society has been left to pick up the pieces of shuttered-for-good businesses, ailing economies, high unemployment, fears of food scarcity, and the need to stretch state treasuries in an effort to cushion the blow both for government and business enterprises. And in support of families facing financial desperation.

Through it all, the mental and physical side effects of the coronavirus, the billions that governments have had to shovel out, the businesses hanging on by a thread of hope, medical experts remain uncertain just what reaction was the right choice universally. Dr.Joffe of the University of Alberta published a paper arguing the lockdowns to curb the spread of COVID resulted from 'group-think' not rational decision-making, he argues in the journal Frontiers of Public Health.

However, orders to restrict human-to-human contact has its champions and they are legion; the fact is, this is what has worked to set back the spread of the virus. It alone stands out as the most singular weapon in the 'non-pharmaceutical interventions' (NPIs) playbook of government-enacted COVID-preventive orders, according to Peter Klimek, a Medical University of Vienna, Austria physicist. It has been, in fact, policy combinations; border restrictions to banning gatherings, that succeeded in curbing cases.

Early preventive actions the key to long-term or repeated lockdown avoidance according to his research. "If you wait for too long, you have to use higher and higher measures to gain control of the situation." University of Greenwich, England researchers reviewed 348 other studies to discover them to "universally show" the importance that NPIs have in pausing the spread of COVID-19.

 

South Korea both controlled case numbers and deaths, permitting its economy to remain open, by and large; a study estimates infections would have exploded 27-fold in the early stages of the pandemic had the country not taken strict counter-measures which succeeded. There is no hard-and-fast formula however; whether to order people to remain at home or wear masks in public spaces, according to a University of Toronto epidemiologist, and head of the Centre for Global Health Research, Dr. Prabhat Jha. 

 

The journal Nature Scientific Reports published a Brazilian paper recently where head-to-head comparisons were made between similar places globally which in the view of the authors were either 'controlled' or 'uncontrolled' when respect to ensuring populations were ordered to remain within their homes. No evidence surfaced that lockdowns reduced numbers of COVID deaths per capita, according to the scientists. Peculiarly enough Australia -- with among the lowest death rates from COVID in the world -- was rated by the study as uncontrolled. 

 

Yet Australia imposed strict measures including hard border closures, mandatory hotel quarantine for arriving travellers and targeted lockdowns, while avoiding long-term stay-at-home orders. Then there is Florida where relatively few social restrictions were imposed and where the per-capita death rate is 2.5 times higher than Canada's following a series of lockdowns reflecting its 'controlled' designation.

Dr.Jlt and his colleagues had a paper published in the journal BMC Medicine which studied 130 countries by comparing their COVID strategies in the first months of the coronavirus to the rise and fall of cases, concluding that closing schools and restricting internal movement of people resulted in a strong effect on halting the spread of the virus, along with shuttering workplaces and providing income support to those whom the measures affected.

Researchers from Oxford University published a study in the journal Science verifying that eliminating small gatherings, closing non-essential businesses and restricting the size of family get-togethers headed a list of measures taken in over 200 countries slowing the virus's transmission. Including imposing border restrictions, increasing mask use and closing educational institutions. 

Hong Kong and Chinese academic researchers studied 190 countries in the pandemic's early stage suggesting that social distancing with school closures, restricted restaurant use, and shutting non-essential businesses were the most effective in restraining the virus contagion. Yet it is undeniable that these measures, while meeting the virus head-on working to slow its advance, came at a steep price, reducing peoples' emotional and financial well-being in the process.

According to Dr.Malhotra, lockdowns contributed to social fatigue, an emotion that has continued to grow as the situation wears on and a third wave headed by mutated viruses producing variants that surfaced in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil have continued to take a heavy toll. Too little attention, she contends, has been given to the health impact of "blunt, sweeping" containment tactics.

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