Excerpt:

Travel on the London Underground on a rainy day and you will be informed by a recorded message, broadcast over the sound system in the station, that surfaces may be wet and you should take care not to slip. The Mayor of London, or whoever is responsible for the message, seems to believe that people either do not know that wet surfaces are slippery or do not adjust their behaviour in response to increased risks.

He is wrong. No one is so stupid as not to know that wet surfaces are slippery, and people adjust their behaviour to the risks of a situation, even without advice from their betters. That doesn’t mean no one will run and slip. They may be in such a rush to get to an important business meeting or a date with an impatient lover that the risk is worth it.

In the case of wet tube stations, we are merely warned. But the authorities often force our hands, banning behaviour that they deem to be not worth the risk, such as smoking in bars and driving without a seatbelt.

We liberals think governments shouldn’t do this. Each individual is in a better position than any politician to know whether the risks he takes are worthwhile. Even if a politician knows the health risks entailed by smoking in bars, he can’t know how much I enjoy hanging out in smoky bars. So he can’t know whether the risk is worth my taking.

Some of us liberals thought this logic extended to the Covid pandemic. The government should have left each individual to decide for himself how to respond. Other liberals supported the lockdowns, claiming them to be a classic example of a warranted governmental restriction on liberty (for reasons I’ll get to soon). A book by academics at Johns Hopkins and Lund University, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs last week, shows us purist liberals to have been right.

The report describes the results of a meta-analysis of the life-saving effects of strict lockdowns, such as the one imposed in the UK (compared to a baseline of the liberal Swedish response). It shows that they reduced Covid deaths by only 3.2 per cent. In other words, the lockdowns saved 1,700 Brits. European lockdowns saved 6,000 lives and American lockdowns saved 4,000.

The principal reason for the tiny life-saving effect of lockdowns is that voluntary responses sufficed for most of the life-saving. Once people heard about rising case numbers they began working from home, reducing their socialising, and cancelling visits with elderly relatives – and that was all before the formal introduction of lockdowns. This shouldn’t be surprising. People don’t want to die, and they don’t want their friends and relatives to die either. They don’t need to be forced to avoid crowds or wear masks on buses when a lethal virus appears on the scene.

But they also want to keep their business open; they want their children to attend school; they want to see their friends; they want to attend weddings and funerals. Many would have considered the Covid risks entailed by achieving these goals to have been worthwhile.

They weren’t allowed to make such choices. The UK government forbade them acting on their own judgement. By doing so, it imposed a massive financial loss on the population, irreparably damaged children’s educations, eliminated most socialising and made millions profoundly sad and anxious. All for the sake of saving 1,700 lives, which is less than 10 per cent of the average annual death toll from flu. Lockdowns were a monumental policy blunder. That’s what the study shows.

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