Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of Covid-19 lockdowns on trends in people’s quality-adjusted life years.

It is vital that we carefully consider all the impacts and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, both from the pandemic itself and the measures taken to address it. The intention of the lockdowns during COVID-19 was to save lives and protect the health of the population, and to protect the National Health Service, but it is also important to consider the other impacts on society and the public’s health.

During the pandemic, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies commissioned and published a series of papers on the impact of the pandemic, including impacts on morbidity and mortality. These papers presented the net impacts of the pandemic and highlighted the difficulty in separating out the impact of infections, interventions, and voluntary changes in behaviour.

It isn’t possible for any assessment to retrospectively attribute impacts specifically to lockdowns, in part because we don’t know what would have happened without lockdowns in place.