COVID-19 Rates Were Already Falling Before Lockdown, Study Finds

This new study by statisticians at the University of Edinburgh has found that COVID-19 infections were already declining across much of Europe before national lockdowns were imposed, challenging claims that earlier restrictions would have saved thousands of lives.

Analyzing daily death data from 10 European countries between March 2020 and March 2022, researchers estimated infection trends by working backward from the average time between infection, symptom onset, and death. Of 17 lockdowns examined, only Belgium’s first and Italy’s second were introduced before infection rates began to fall. In countries including England, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark, infections had already peaked prior to lockdown orders.

The findings, published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, also indicated that people had started voluntarily reducing their social contacts before formal restrictions were enacted. Professor Simon Wood of Edinburgh’s School of Mathematics said the results cast doubt on conclusions from the official UK Covid Inquiry, which relied on modelling by Imperial College London to suggest that locking down one week earlier might have saved 23,000 lives. Wood argued that while lockdowns may have further suppressed transmission, they were largely unnecessary in reversing infection waves and reflected political pressure rather than underlying epidemiological data.

To read how, by June 2021, it was known that almost a third of British people dying with the COVID-19 ‘Delta’ variant were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, see this article on our website.