Governments were so mesmerised by the once-in-a-century scale of the global Covid pandemic they succeeded only in making the crisis even worse, says one of the UK's top infectious disease experts.
Professor Mark Woolhouse, from the University of Edinburgh, says by the time the UK went into lockdown it was already too late.
He writes about it in a new book The Year the World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.
A man wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic rides his bike in central London, England on May 5, 2020. Photo: Ilyas Tayfun Salci / Anadolu Agency / AFP
"In New Zealand, of course, you have a zero covid strategy. And I think there's no argument that that lockdown is probably the only way realistically in which you can achieve that.
"But for the UK, looking back on it, zero Covid wasn't a realistic goal from probably the second half of February (2020), the number of infections that had come in from abroad, which we now know from the genome sequencing studies, was truly enormous, many 1000s, there was no possibility of eliminating the virus from the UK from that point onwards."
That meant that interventions to deal with the pandemic at that point had to be sustainable, he told Afternoons.
The UK responded too slowly and then went too hard with relatively ineffective measures, he says.
"We didn't do that [lock down quickly] first-time round and perhaps that's excusable because we were facing a new and largely unknown threat.
"But we had two further lockdowns in the UK when we knew much more about the virus. And I really do think it's hard to justify those."
Lockdowns are not a gold standard response to pandemics, he says.
"I don't think you'd find the word lockdown in any public health textbook from before 2020.
"The UK's planning was around pandemic influenza and social distancing was part of the plans for that, it's an appropriate response to an influenza pandemic, including things like working from home and closing schools that are a long, long way short to shutting down society and giving people legally enforced stay at home orders, we had not contemplated that.
"And obviously it's an important question to establish whether we should ever contemplate it in the future, and my vote is definitely not."
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Lockdowns were intended to save lives but didn't do a very thorough job even at that, Prof Woolhouse says.
"We've done an analysis of the first wave in Scotland, in which many 1000s of people died. And it turns out that most of those people who died actually got infected after the lockdown came into place, simply because of the build-up of infections by that time.
"So, lockdown didn't save those people. An awful lot of people got infected in the community, particularly in places like care homes, and also anyone who had to go to hospitals were at enhanced risk."
This shows that a multi-pronged approach was needed.
"I think it's crystal clear that it wasn't enough, that we needed to do more to stop those infections, particularly reaching the most vulnerable, that small fraction of the population that are particularly likely to be hospitalised or die if they get infected."
The highest price paid for lockdowns was by the young, he says.
"Children and young adults, who it turns out, in fact we knew this from the very early stages, are really at a very low risk from this virus, not none, absolutely not none it's a significant public health problem and proportionate measures to try and reduce the public health burden were completely warranted.
"But to close our schools, to stop our young people going about from a virus... that is, in my view, an extreme response."
Both locking down and doing nothing are extreme responses, his view is a more measured response is better.
"It's a classic middle-of-the-road response that looks at the strengths of the public health response, where we can suppress the virus without causing undue hardship, and how well we can protect the vulnerable.
And that's all it is, quite straightforward, quite simple. It follows basic public health principles. But that isn't what we did in the UK in 2020."
