SA’s Nobel prizewinning scientist Prof Michael Levitt: Lockdowns are “a huge mistake”

Professor Michael Levitt, a product of Pretoria Boys High whose family left for England when he was 15 years old is a recipient of science's greatest honour, the Nobel Prize, in his case for chemistry. As you'll hear in the highlights of this interview with Freddie Sayers of Unherd.com, the 72-year-old professor of computer science and structural biology at California's top university, Stanford, still has his South African accent the globally respected scientist who's been tracking Covid-19 data since January has a critical message for the land of his birth. The lockdown is a huge mistake he says. And those countries which have been applying them will be harshly judged by future generations. – Alec Hogg

The big test is going to be in Sweden. Sweden is practising a level of social distancing that is keeping children in schools and keeping people at work. They are obviously having more deaths in countries like Israel or Austria that are practising very strict social distancing, but I think it is not a crazy policy. The reason I felt that social distancing was unimportant, is that I had two examples in China to start with and then we had the additional examples. The first one was Korea, Iran and Italy. Beginning of all the epidemics showed us slowing down and it was very hard for me to believe that those three countries could act as social distancing as well as China. China was amazing, especially outside Hubei, in that they had no additional outbreaks. People who left Hubei were very carefully tracked, had to wear face masks all the time, had to take their temperatures all the time and there were no further outbreaks. This did not happen either in South Korea, Italy or in Iran. Two months later, something else suggested that social distancing might not be important and that is that the total number of deaths we're seeing in New York City in parts of England in parts of France in northern Italy, all seem to stop at about the same fraction of the population. Are they all practising equally good social distancing? I don't think so. The problem is outbreaks occurring in different regions. The social distance that stops people moving from London to Manchester, is probably a really good idea. My feeling is that in London and in New York City all the people who got infected were infected before anybody noticed. There's no way that the infection grew so quickly in New York City without the infection spreading very quickly. One of the key things is to stop people who know that they're sick from infecting others. China has three very important advantages that are not high tech that doesn't involve security tracking of telephones. What they involve is number one, The tradition in China for years of wearing a face mask when you're sick. As soon as the Coronavirus started everybody wore a face mask. It doesn't have to be a hygienic face mask, it just has to be face covering that stops you spraying microdroplets of saliva on somebody you talk to. The second thing in China is that because of the SARS epidemic, they were so scared of it in most airports and stations where you pay tolls etc. there are infrared thermometers that measure your temperature. Having your temperature measured at every single store entrance either with a hand-held thermometer or with something mounted in a wall is completely standard in China. The third thing is that almost all payments in China do not use a credit card. In some senses, it is easier there to practice social distancing, in addition, they know where people are.

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