THE lockdown stay-at-home order was “never necessary” and the SNP Government went too far with school closures, a top diseases expert told the UK Covid inquiry today.
Professor Mark Woolhouse savaged the handling of the pandemic and blasted the “absurd” clampdown on people spending time outdoors – despite ministers already having evidence it was low risk.
The Edinburgh University epidemiologist also warned that many Scots died due to the focus on Covid at the expense of treating other illnesses.
And he said the Holyrood administration “froze” and didn’t take warnings about the impact of the virus seriously enough in the months before they locked down the country in March 2020.
At the inquiry in Edinburgh, lead counsel Jamie Dawson KC asked about Prof Woolhouse’s advance submission on how there was scientific evidence that relaxing the stay-at-home order earlier in 2020 would not have led to a virus surge.
Prof Woolhouse replied: “I would take that further, the stay at home order was never necessary.”
At the start of the pandemic, strict measures were introduced meaning people were banned from gathering in groups in public and from leaving their homes apart from for a list of exempted reasons.
The Scottish Government said people could only “take exercise once a day” – although this was never set down law.
Wider measures forced sporting events including football matches to be played behind closed doors.
Asked about which other significant restrictions “could and should” have been released more quickly, Prof Woolhouse said: “Outdoor activities. We had very good evidence coming back from China that the novel coronavirus transmits very poorly outdoors, very poorly.
“So, there was pretty much zero public health benefit to keeping us indoors, that wasn’t required at all, we never needed to do that.”
Prof Woolhouse agreed that people being allowed to mix outdoors would have “counterbalanced” physical and mental health harms but said: “I heard or saw very, very little consideration for those harms when we went into lockdown.”
And on football games, Prof Woolhouse said: “Football matches were on the cusp… I mean, you’d need to do a fairly detailed public health appraisal of where you drew the line, but we in the UK arrested people for going on solo walks in the mountains – that’s utterly absurd.
“That devalues the whole idea of social distancing, that anyone can see this is nonsense.”
He also hit out at the “outcry” in summer 2020 of people going to beaches, saying: “There was never, ever an outbreak of Covid-19 anywhere in the world linked to a beach.”
Children were out of school in 2020 from March to August, and then again from December 2020 for several months – with some only back at Easter 2021 – with the loss of education blamed for issues including pupil performance and mental health.
Prof Woolhouse said closing schools “essentially as a precautionary element of the first lockdown” and governments were “practically panicking at that stage”.
He added: “But we should have realised much, much more quickly based on the evidence emerging from around the world, this was not an essential element of a lockdown.
“So, in my view, and I argued it repeatedly and frequently over that whole summer, schools in Scotland could have reopened in May 2020, just as they did in Denmark.”
Giving evidence earlier this week, Scottish Government national clinical director Jason Leitch said “in hindsight”, there may be “further reflection” about the decision to close schools as quickly and for as long as they did.
While Prof Woolhouse said it was “arguably” correct to shut schools again in January 2021 as a precaution due to the Alpha variant, “it very quickly became apparent in that second wave that schools did not need to remain closed and we could still control the virus”.
He added: “Yet, they weren’t fully reopened here until May 2021. This was unnecessary. Forgive me, this is one of the aspects of the pandemic that I really feel very strongly about what we did to the children.”
In his evidence, Prof Woolhouse also suggested “probably hundreds” of Scots died due to the Scottish Government’s focus on Covid at the expense of treating other illnesses.
He said: “Most of the hospitals in Scotland had their quietest time in living memory during the first wave because no-one else was going to hospital.
“And a lot of those people should have been in hospital, and in the UK, thousands of them died. There was a massive spike in this.
“In Scotland, I think it was probably hundreds, I wouldn’t want to put an exact figure on it.”
During the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon, right, pursued an “elimination strategy” – also known as “zero Covid” – despite warnings that wiping out cases would be near impossible or require harmful social restrictions.
But Prof Woolhouse said: “Because no Covid death is acceptable, other kinds of deaths apparently are, and they rose.”
Expressing his frustration over a lack of urgency among decision-makers at the time, Prof Woolhouse agreed with KC Jamie Dawson that government advisers “rather froze” when it came to being faced with calculations around the potential number of cases.
He said: “You put all this very basic information together, and what you get is an unfolding catastrophe.
“And I think a lot of people simply couldn’t get their heads round that, even though as I say, this is very simple.”
And he said he had to reach out to England’s former Chief Medical Office, Sally Davies, in a bid to get Scotland’s CMO Catherine Calderwood “to listen to me because she’s not listening”.
Later, Professor Stephen Reicher, an expert in psychology at St Andrews University, said fear was used to “frighten people into adherence” with rules.
He also said mistakes were made by referring to “social distancing” when it was “physical distancing” that was needed.
And he said that people needed to continue to socialise. He said: “The importance of physical connection – not only for physical but also for mental health – feeling part of a community .. benefits you.”
Top of page picture: A Scottish covid patient fighting for his life in hospital.