COMMENT | To lock down or not to lock down?

COMMENT | For the past three months, this metropolitan area of nearly five million people, the capital of the Australian state of Victoria, has been under one of the world’s tightest lockdowns. You may leave home only if shopping for essential items, meeting medical needs, providing care, taking up to two hours of daily exercise, and going to work if it is impossible to work from home.

Travel of more than five kilometres (3.1 miles) from home, or across the boundary of the metropolitan area, is prohibited. Police hand out heavy fines to violators.

The Victorian government ordered the lockdown on July 5, after a day in which the state, which has a population of 6.7 million, recorded 191 new Covid-19 cases – the state’s highest daily total since the pandemic began. The outbreak peaked at 723 new cases on July 30 and then began to fall. By Oct 4, the 14-day moving average had dropped to 12.

At the time of writing, the state has had over 20,000 cases and 800 deaths. All the other Australian states together have had fewer than 7,000 cases and under one hundred deaths, making it possible to hope that Australia could eliminate the virus, as neighbouring New Zealand has come close to doing.

No major political party opposes the lockdown. Organised protest rallies were sparsely attended, perhaps because police warned protesters that they could be fined – and many were. Protesting is not one of the permissible reasons for leaving home.

When faced with a highly contagious disease that puts vulnerable people at risk, few Victorians are moved by abstract calls for “freedom” coming mostly from younger people who are at a lower risk. Most accept that the lockdown is necessary because it saves lives. And the steep decline in the number of new cases and deaths during the lockdown suggests that it does prevent deaths from Covid-19.

But that is only part of the picture. In the United Kingdom last month, 32 scientists signed a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson pointing to the significant harms that lockdowns cause ...