Neil McCarthy: The doctor who talked about the huge harm of lockdown had a point

Sinn Féin have even seen themselves successfully outflanked on an all Ireland approach to Covid-19 by the DUP (and broad public opinion in Northern Ireland) in relation to families being able to visit the graves of their loved ones (it is difficult to resist the temptation to point to the irony inherent in republicans seeking to prevent people going to graveyards, but I will resist it).

With contact tracing set to resume shortly throughout the UK, any differences between the approaches of the two administrations on this island have all but vanished; and death rates from the disease in the two jurisdictions are almost identical.

So there is now space to look at this crisis beyond the politics of Orange and Green.

Two remarkable things have happened here in the last few days.

First, Michelle O’Neill let slip at a news conference last Friday that, in her view, social distancing “[is] going to be a feature of our lives for perhaps up to a couple of years and beyond”.

That this was not some uninformed solo run has been made clear in comments made to this newspaper by Queen’s University, Belfast medical professor Dr Ultan Power and expert virologist Dr Connor Bamford, also of QUB, in the days since.

Both made comments broadly compatible with what the deputy first minister said.

The second remarkable thing was the anonymous interview given to this newspaper by a doctor who has worked in one of Northern Ireland’s dedicated Covid-19 centres and published earlier this week. (The story can be read here: ‘Doctors on Covid wards sitting around with nothing to do – whilst NI hospitals are nearly emptied of regular patients,’ April 29)

He simply revealed something that has been widely reported on in American hospitals and hospitals outside of the larger cities in Great Britain: that medical staff have almost nothing to do whilst people with legitimate non-coronavirus symptoms are not visiting out of fear.

These are facts. PUP man and retired GP John Kyle has echoed his comments.

Yet it would seem that these comments have brought on quite the backlash, to the extent that it was deemed necessary for an editorial comment to be released by the News Letter (see below) to counter any possible offence taken, albeit that the editorial focussed on the doctor’s personal view that these facts meant for him that the lockdown is “doing at least as much harm as good”.

I would add that on Channel 4 news this Wednesday evening, the second part of a special report showing how Craigavon Area General Hospital is dealing with the crisis contained an arresting moment when the director of Emergency Medicine took the reporter Paraic O’Brien into the special Accident and Emergency for respiratory patients and revealed it to be empty.

When O’Brien expressed surprise, the director paused and said: “To see it empty is … unsettling.”

These local developments are remarkable in my view because they show that even though the disease is clearly in retreat in Northern Ireland at the moment, there appears to be a stultifying orthodoxy taking hold in our political and medical decision making circles. Social distancing is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

The lockdown is here to stay for a good while too, and even when it comes to an end, it may well be followed by new ones should there be any upswing in cases.

The ‘indirect’ costs of the lockdown (as the CMO across the water, Chris Whitty, puts it) are not to be talked about; and our hospitals are, for the time being, for Covid patients and Covid patients alone.

Bear in mind three sets of newly issued statistics this week: for cancer patients in the UK as a whole the Daily Telegraph reports that “lack of treatment during the coronavirus crisis” may lead to 20,000 excess cancer deaths in the next year; British Airways have announced that they are planning to lay off, not furlough, 12,000 of their staff; BBC health correspondent Nick Triggle has revealed that University of Bristol researchers have posited that a 6.4% decline in the size of the economy is a “tipping point” which if reached would see a loss of three months of life on average across the population.

These three terrifying statistics were all released on the same day this week: Wednesday April 29th, one day after the anonymous doctor’s interview.

The critical sentence uttered by that doctor, and the one that got this newspaper into trouble, was, let us remind ourselves, this: “the lockdown is doing at least as much harm as good.”

You must admit, the good doctor certainly had a point.

• Neil McCarthy is a writer and teacher based in Dublin and London

• Editorial April 30: ‘Lockdown has been an entirely appropriate precautionary response to a health crisis’)

• Neil McCarthy March 21: Some voices in Ireland have used Covid to cast Britain as backward

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