Covid Crackdowns Are Contagious

T he policies of lockdowns, vaccine passports, mandates, and masking are contagious. They spread between neighboring countries and regions. We discovered this at the very beginning of the pandemic. Many governments in the West had plans for a pandemic caused by a SARS-like respiratory disease. The United Kingdom’s government had a very detailed plan that included identifying those who were especially vulnerable while protecting liberty for the maximum number. But then the leader of their public-health response saw what Italy was doing (partly on the advice that Italy was receiving from China), and suddenly it became plausible. “It’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said Neil Ferguson, “and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”

Well, they’re getting away with it again. And the contagiousness of these measures is why even as an American, it is nerve-wracking watching Europe these days. Austria tried a lockdown of the unvaccinated, which failed instantly to control spread and was abandoned for broader non-pharmaceutical interventions and impositions. But that didn’t stop Germany from imposing the same policy weeks later.

Boris Johnson had in the past campaigned and written against the idea of vaccine passports. But this week, under pressure in the press for a coming winter wave, he is now imposing them in limited respects. This was after the devolved Scottish government released a study on its own vaccine-passport system in September. This study could not bring itself to say definitively that segregating vaccinated people from unvaccinated people at certain establishments ultimately reduced transmission. It could not find data sufficient to conclude that the increased hassle on the unvaccinated had salutary effects, noting that “it is difficult to draw clear trends and conclusions between implementation of vaccine certificates and vaccine uptake.”

Despite the fact that over 91 percent of its eligible population is vaccinated, Ireland is now re-instituting its strict limits on the mixing of households socially.

Here’s the problem. The effect of these non-pharmaceutical interventions on transmission, hospitalization, and death is totally overwhelmed by the effects of Covid’s seasonality, and the vaccines themselves. Austria implemented its lockdown of the unvaccinated but saw no change in case growth rates. Why would these policies, which ultimately failed to arrest the spread of the Alpha and Delta variants, suddenly show themselves as mission-critical to stop a new, more contagious variant such as Omicron?

The dynamic at work across governments is almost surely a kind of collective CYA effort. If you don’t institute these policies, and you see bad results, your government can quickly lose the Mandate of Heaven and be ushered out in the next election.

But these policies also have another psychological effect that governments surely understand. They allow governments and experts to seemingly shift responsibility for the ongoing spread and restrictions to the people. Politicians can show you the studies demonstrating that in controlled environments, Zooming in to school and working from a sarcophagus in your basement should stop the spread of the disease, so clearly you’re just not complying hard enough. Only the stupidest government authorities say this out loud themselves. It’s far better for them when they get the public arguing among themselves and blaming each other.

But it is so depressing, at this late stage of the pandemic, that governments are acting as if the vast majority of their populations are still immunologically naïve to Covid. In Europe and America, we have seen the fastest-ever uptake of a vaccine. We are perhaps days or weeks away from the approval of extremely effective therapeutics. And all the initial evidence coming out of South Africa is that the latest variant, though spreading quickly, is afflicting people with mild illnesses, or none at all.

There is nothing really all that surprising. We know viruses evolve to become more infective, and generally they get less deadly over time. We know that coronaviruses evolve in a way that makes them difficult to halt altogether with a vaccine.

What we need are leaders willing to level with themselves and the public: No better invention or strategy is coming along. We’ve learned a great deal about how to navigate the risks of this over the last two years. Anything that we are unwilling to do forever, we should cease doing now. Normal life has a weight, authority, and value of its own. There is no longer a reason to trade it away for the false promise of a perfect defense against this disease.