Mick Hartley

Former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption returns to the pages of the Sunday Times. He's not happy about this new "rule of six" – or indeed about anything that this government is currently doing on the pandemic front:

The prime minister has declared that he will do “whatever is necessary” to stop the spread of the coronavirus. One of the things that is necessary, apparently, is to stop us enjoying the company of our friends and family in numbers above six. There are at least three fallacies behind these bossy declarations. One is that the spread of an endemic virus is amenable to government control. The second is that legal coercion is a good way of doing it. The third is that stopping infections is all that matters, so that one does not have to count the human cost.

If one thing has become clear over the past six months, it is that aggressive measures of social distancing make little difference in the long run. They buy time, but reduce deaths only if they last indefinitely. Even buying time comes at a heavy price in depression, mental illness and misery. Ministers were warned about this by their scientific advisers in February and again in March. But we have a government that lurches from pillar to post, surprised by every development, even those that it was warned in the clearest terms to expect.

Every day that passes bears out the warning. Spain took the most extreme and brutally enforced measures in Europe. Sweden had the mildest measures: no lockdown or school closures and only moderate measures of social distancing. Yet Spain now has the worst second spike on the Continent and Sweden none at all.

There are many variables that affect the long-term progress of the disease, including the population’s state of health and age balance. But one thing that does not seem to affect it is government policy.

The reason seems tolerably clear. People can spread Covid-19 before their symptoms appear — and even if they have no symptoms. So isolating known cases is always too late. Whatever distancing measures you take, short of shutting everyone indefinitely in a box and feeding them through a tube, the virus will still spread, but more slowly.

The only way of eliminating Covid-19 is to achieve widespread immunity. That requires either an effective vaccine or a build-up of resistance through exposure to the disease. A safe and effective vaccine is a fast route to collective immunity, but we have no idea how long it will take to get one. Without it, we are condemned to take the slow route through exposure to the disease. The more time we buy with our distancing measures, the longer that will take. Christmas? Easter? One year? Two or three? For how long can we suspend human civilisation?

Collective (or “herd”) immunity is routinely condemned as a heartless policy. But that is just a comfortable evasion. Collective immunity is not a policy. It is not something governments can choose to adopt or discard. It is simply a description of how viral epidemics burn out. You do not need to be an epidemiologist to understand this. You just need to read the material that the epidemiologists have provided to governments and apply a reasonable measure of logic, judgment and scepticism.

Of all the ways of buying time, legal coercion is the most inefficient. Legal coercion is indiscriminate, whereas this virus discriminates. It attacks the old and clinically vulnerable. Across Europe and the UK, the upsurge of infections is heavily concentrated among healthy people under 50.

The increasingly absurd health secretary Matt Hancock gets cross about this being pointed out. But, with a handful of exceptions, the infected young will experience only mild symptoms or none. What matters is not infections but hospital admissions and deaths, which have increased relatively little, both here and in other European countries. This suggests that, while the young and healthy are getting on with their lives, the vulnerable are sheltering themselves. It is happening spontaneously.

What is more, it is exactly what ought to be happening. People are making their own judgments, guided by their own vulnerabilities and their own tolerance of risk. The result is a far more discriminating approach than the government’s regulatory blunderbuss. Left to themselves, people can manage this virus better than Boris Johnson and Hancock because they can fine-tune their precautions to their own situation and that of the people around them. Taking the decisions out of their hands and imposing one-size-fits-all measures is despotic and ineffective….

Sumption previously and previouslier.