Ben Lowry: The vast harm and costs and deaths caused by lockdown needs more balanced scrutiny in Northern Ireland

I have covered the falling statistics since first joining a Northern Ireland newspaper 20 years ago.

The slashed road death toll is one of the best stories around, but also one of the most buried.

When politicians refer to carnage on NI’s roads they have a point in absolute terms – 60 or so people die each year, and it is the biggest cause of accidental death of a person in their prime.

However emphasis on the downside (‘one death is too many’, etc) misses the fact we entered an era of mass car use yet also cut car deaths.

In the late 1960s /early 70s NI road deaths averaged 300 or so per year. Over the last ten years that fell to 61 – a fifth of the previous toll.

In fact, the proportionate fall is even better. Before lockdown, traffic levels had risen to be at least 2.5 times higher than in the 1970s.

Around 800 people would die on our roads each year at 1970s rates (deaths per mile travelled). In any one year 750 people are alive who would have been killed at that past death rate. Those survivors would almost fill Belfast’s Opera House.

Yet over the last decade I have heard barely a politician say: let’s celebrate what we are doing right.

The decline in deaths is happening in most rich countries, due to safety measures (seat belts, speed), stiffer penalties (drink or reckless driving), better risk awareness (adverts, talks to schools), car design (computers, crumple zones, air bags), roads (ones with a barrier in the middle are safest), better road markings and tougher driver tests.

Yet it is hard to get the public interested. Each January I analyse progress in road deaths, but online feedback shows few people read it.

A train crash, however, gets huge readership. Each major crash in the UK has led to outcry (Clapham Junction 1988, Southall 1997, Paddington 1999, Haddington 2000, Selby 2001, Potters Bar 2002).

In the 1990s Westminster considered a safety system called Automatic Train Protection (ATP) to placate public demands for action.

But it was not worth the cost — not even close in official estimates of tiny numbers of lives saved. Yet the mere hint of a financial calculation of deaths caused uproar. Economists were abused for raising it.

Meanwhile UK road deaths were then about 10 people a day (3,500 a year). Pre lockdown, by when the yearly toll had halved to 1,800, five people died on UK roads a day, more in a week (35) than the worst disaster above (31 at Paddington).

Per mile, we are dozens of times more likely to be killed by road than train. Yet politicians lurched towards pleasing ill informed public opinion on ATP. The £ billion or so cost would have been far better spent on further road safety (in the end there was a fudge on ATP).

We can probably still halve NI road deaths, via cameras in cars and a 40 mph rural road limit (and maybe even cut drivers some slack by lifting limits on the safest roads, motorways, to 80mph). But road policy will never get the coverage extremely rare rail or air deaths do.

Something similar is happening on Covid-19 — not in terms of stark statistics (we still don’t have enough info) but in terms of people noticing some deaths over others.

It is a hideous virus but its novelty causes such alarm that it is easy to miss a parallel emerging disaster.

This week UK cancer experts said that 60,000 patients could die, as many as Covid-19, from lack of treatment. There are similar fears about heart attacks in lockdown.

Ten days ago I wrote (see below) about a rise in unexplained excess deaths while half of NI hospital beds lie empty for Covid. Since then further data puts unexplained deaths at about 250 daily in UK (which if it continues will be almost 100,000 in year).

We keep being told lockdown works, and common sense suggests it slashes infection. But it has vast side effects: economic, other untreated health, and, perhaps worst of all, mental health.

Yet even if NI Covid deaths rise steadily from the current 280 level in coming weeks, say treble to 800 after care deaths are added, it is far below Robin Swann’s lower 3,000 prediction (let alone his 15k one).

All the while new data shows how massively disproportionately Covid affects the very vulnerable.

Please do not interpret this point as callousness about the elderly. On March 11 (see below) I wrote in dismay about people still routinely shaking hands, and said: “If the only bad thing coronavirus did was to reverse [improvements in life-span for the elderly] then on those grounds alone it would be a global disaster. Imagine the horror of a rapid cull of the oldest people we know and love.”

I am as deeply fearful as I was then for the older people I know.

But most nations are now moving towards targeted protection of vulnerable. Even that will be hard — some old folk might feel their life has little value if they can’t see their grand-kids and rebel, which is perilous (back in early March some of us wondered if talking through windows might be a solution).

So this is not to say that easing lockdown is simple. A New York antibody survey suggests 14% of the state has been infected. If so, it is about a quarter of the way to herd immunity, but that will mean four times more the deaths it has had.

Yet all nations face many deaths from one cause or other, whatever we do. Targeted lockdown is the increasingly plain direction of travel.

How it will apply to Northern Ireland is little discussed here. Much of the local news is made up of grim announcements (latest toll), sermonising (lockdown works), scaring (a shocking, atypical story) then heart warming (a sentimental story).

There is much mention of how organisations are suffering financially but it is often through the prism of a complaint that the massive UK generosity is not enough, or has not been paid fast enough.

It is all overlaid with a hovering implication that Ireland has handled this better.

There is still nowhere near enough information to say that. But I predict the Republic will soon be grappling with the thorny matter of targeted protection too.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry on March 11: Far from panicking over the coronavirus, we have been too laid back about the risks

• Ben Lowry: It is good that the NHS is nowhere near as badly hit by Covid-19 as feared but other ill patients might be dying

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