Ben Lowry: A zero risk approach to fighting Covid is not noble, it just means a rise in risks from other diseases and other forms of ruin

The rise is partly because far more people are being tested in the Province than tested at the height of the first wave, in late March.

Even so it is an alarming situation, particularly if the virus starts entering care homes again.

But this latest outbreak confronts society with a reality that we have denied now for six months.

There is no easy way forward.

Almost every response to this involves tragedy and huge suffering.

If we did nothing to contain Covid, vulnerable people would face life threatening risk. Many would die.

Yet a return to full lockdown might harm more people than the virus would do – maybe many more.

It would ruin businesses, it would consign many people to chronic loneliness, it would ruin relationships by forcing people back into confinement over winter, and inflict lasting damage on the NHS.

It would damage active older people, by robbing them of the contact that sustains them late in life. Most of us know such people who were harmed by the first lockdown.

This was all predicted in March.

The government said if you close schools too long, you inflict great damage on the education of children who are at low risk, and hamper the ability of parents to work.

Behavioural scientists warned against early lockdown because populations after a while would get fed up and break rules, perhaps at a riskier point in the Covid cycle.

In March two Canadian infectious disease experts who had worked on SARS 2003 called lockdown “a sledgehammer approach” that will affect people for whom Covid is little “more than a cold”.

Early in the pandemic a US medical expert in a concept called Total Harm Minimisation at Yale University, Dr David Katz, wondered if young people should have Covid parties, to build immunity.

And experts such as Sweden’s former state epidemiologist Prof Johan Giesecke said it would not be possible to halt Covid’s spread.

Many of these predictions were dismissed in the clamour for action, yet all of them were correct.

Schools closed too long, harming pupils and wreaking havoc with working families — as predicted.

Populations began to tire of, and break, lockdown – as predicted.

A sledgehammer approach has, some data says, led to unprecedented economic harm – as predicted.

Few nations have been able to control Covid — as predicted.

The financial cost of furlough has been vast, as was inevitable (even before you consider matters such as the P6 story about grants paid in error, which is probably the tip of an iceberg in mis-payments).

And Covid is spreading among the young, as some experts wanted.

It was clear in early April that NI Covid hospital admissions had not justified emptying hospitals and was accompanied by an alarming rise in other, non Covid deaths, as other conditions went untreated.

The accuracy of all these predictions has had a belated impact, as has the knowledge we all gained from living through lockdown. Politicians are wary about reintroducing it. But there are still righteous advocates of stringent measures (some of whom picture themselves on social media accounts in masks, as if a symbol of their rectitude).

Some such voices emphasise that they are not concerned about trivial matters like cost. Yet how many of them face financial ruin? I am struck by how many people – in science, administration and politics – are employed by the state, or comfortably retired at the expense of the state, and were untouched by lockdown. Few of them live in small homes with no garden.

This is not to suggest Covid is harmless. I wrote on March 11 (see link below), and still think: “If the only bad thing coronavirus did was to reverse [big increases in life expectancy among the old] then on those grounds alone it would be a global disaster.”

I dreaded then the older people I love getting the virus, because it is so perilous for over 70s, and I do so again now (having begun in mid summer to think they were safe).

But Covid is a tiny risk to the under 40s, and low risk to the under 60s, as was clear as early as late March and is all the more so now.

We all revere older generations, but the nation can’t afford a lockdown that applies as much as to the young as the vulnerable. The painful thing is that we will probably have to advise the young to stay away from the old.

Unless, that is, we are prepared to see rising deaths from other medical conditions, and radical financial measures to fund lockdown such as huge tax rises and pay cuts for the hitherto untouched public sector (exempting frontline staff).

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

• Ben Lowry: Ruth Dudley Edwards is fearless in the face of anonymous trolls

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

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