Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I want to talk quickly about the problems arising from this great lockdown. It is bankrupting businesses at the moment. People are losing money as they have to cancel with no compensation. The fine versus the average wage is quite enormous, and for ordinary people that must be crippling. Families are being torn apart. A dying 96 year-old who I have been told about cannot see his granddaughter. What a miserable way to die. It is not the hospitality industry that fuels the growth, it is the fact that people have a need to socialise, which will overrule many things. Cromwell cancelled Christmas and ignored Parliament. Do this Government want that to be how they are remembered?

I know this sounds a bit one-sided, but the trouble is that you cannot just deal with diseases by trying to shut everyone away. They will spread. I am interested that Sweden still appears to be on track—with a few blips, but in general it is trending downwards. Perhaps there is something in the fact that the human body can build up immunities to the virus, as with many other diseases, and populations can build up immunities slowly. Sadly, not everyone will be able to, but what is the greater good? The other big problem for people is that no one can plan. It is very unsettling and upsetting, particularly for people with Asperger’s, autism and Down’s syndrome, like one of my daughters. They usually see certainty in their plans and get very upset, which affects their mental health, if they cannot.

As for the problems with the ways around the virus that the Government are looking at, with test and trace you find out four days later and you have been close to hundreds of people. That soon gets unmanageable if you are to lock everyone down the whole time. Mass testing means more false positives. Would people be resistant or would there be more positives? Some people will be resistant with T-cells and immunity. We do not know much about it. Locking everyone away is not necessarily the solution. It is interesting: if you tested all 68 million people in the UK and you got just 1% false positives—that is what people think—you would have 680,000 people locked down unnecessarily, plus their immediate bubbles. It will cripple us.

I was thinking about the effect on climate change. There is very good advice about opening all the windows: get the air moving through. It takes the disease away— quite right. What about EPCs and all the buildings that are hermetically sealed now? I think we may have been building wrong for a while.

I shall run through some figures very quickly. We have 68 million people, as I said, with 23 million tested so far, 435,000 positives, and only 42,000 deaths. New cancer drugs are being delayed in the meantime, and diagnoses are declining drastically. I read that on 21 April the Covid daily death toll was 1,166; yesterday it was 17. Are we not winning the battle to a large extent? Around 450 people a day die of cancer. Is that not a bigger problem? The trouble is that government regulations have, as far as cancer is concerned, halted or drastically delayed drug development. Which should we be worrying about? Why are we destroying the future for what was our population of whatever it was—33 million with 5 million self-employed? This could end up being a pyrrhic victory, and that is what worries me.