Everything you always wanted to know about Covid and lockdowns*
*but were afraid to ask
Why did the government put us into lockdown in March?
One of the main reasons the government did so is because of the computing models of Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College Oxford. His model forecast a worst case scenario of 500,000 deaths. This figure provoked a panicked response, to put it mildly.
One problem was that Ferguson had in the past made similarly apocalyptic forecasts, many of which had been astonishingly wide of the mark.
In 2001, he predicted that foot and mouth disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing less than 200.
In 2005, he told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440.
And in 2009, a Government estimate based on one of Ferguson’s models estimated the likely death toll from swine flu at 65,000. In fact, it was 457.
Ferguson’s predictions haven’t been out by a mile or two, they’ve been out by the length of a whole motorway (he's been out by a factor of 10 on UK Covid deaths).
Scientists such as Ferguson will always tend to estimate figures on the much higher side because there is no chance of reprisal if the actual figures turn out not to be as big as forecast. The only cost to their reputation, which would be high, would be if their forecasts were too low.
In also pondering the question of why the government went for lockdown, don’t forget that this was the first pandemic in the time of social media and 24-hour news channels. It’s highly unlikely that the response would have been so extreme in less frenetic days. I go into the many other, deeper reasons why we responded as we did here.
Wouldn’t the NHS have been "overwhelmed" if we had not taken any action?
As Lord Jonathan Sumption has pointed out, the NHS acute bed capacity was less than half used at the peak of the first wave of the virus. As Sumption says: “This was before the lockdown could have had any significant effect and before the Nightingale hospitals opened.” And the seven Nightingale hospitals have seen but a handful of patients; one has even been dismantled. So no, the NHS was never in danger of being overwhelmed, and you should keep in mind the Conservative Party’s promise at last December’s general election that they would prioritise the NHS; you should also keep in mind Vote Leave’s promise to spend the “£350 million we send to the EU every month” on the NHS. These are all clues as to why the NHS featured so heavily in the government’s persuasion tactics, and why they were desperate to avoid pictures on the news of the slightest sign of it not being up to snuff.
Okay. Basic question: did the lockdown work?
Supporters will say it did because it prevented further loss of life, but that is unprovable - like Bertrand Russell said of a teapot revolving around the sun, you can't prove that it's not there (such an assertion cannot be proven wrong). The best we can do is to look to other countries, regions and US states that did not lock down, or had very light lockdowns. In Europe, Sweden and Belarus were pretty much alone in having no actual "lockdown", so they are useful to study. Sweden's deaths per million figure are similar to ours, lower in fact. The economic hit they took was considerably lower, their healthcare systems were not overwhelmed, and perhaps most importantly, their citizens could live relatively normal lives. Their mental health was not shattered and there were no state diktats on seeing your friends. If you were to place different countries' graphs alongside one another showing Covid deaths, you would not be able to say which countries locked down and which didn't.
But surely it’s common sense that lockdowns will produce less fatalities than no lockdowns? I mean, there’s less chance for the virus to spread.
The only way lockdowns can reduce death is if they stopped hospitals from becoming overwhelmed and having to triage patients (which, incidentally, is what hospitals do anyway), selecting who might die sooner than others, and finding that some die who they didn’t get to in time. That is the only way that lockdowns can reduce the death rate (in March, Patrick Vallance spoke out strongly against them). Conversely, there is an avalanche of evidence mounting up that lockdowns cause much more death due to exacerbating other problems and the neglect of non-Covid conditions - an ONS study estimated that 200,000 deaths may be caused by lockdowns, another from Bristol University estimates that there could be a horrifying 560,000 deaths. If you study the data you will see that there is no correlation between population activity and the virus' spread - in fact, Google data on population activity shows that as it increased in late spring and summer, virus cases went into steep decline (the virus was dying out because of wider immunity and warmer weather). We should have protected the vulnerable while healthy people got on with their lives just as before.
Okay, but isn’t it unrealistic to say that we could have protected the elderly while everyone else got on with things? Most people live in multi-generational houses.
Ah, but 92% of working age people don’t live with anyone over the age of 65, so risk is minimised. No approach is 100% risk-free, but nor is life 100% risk-free. I’m not saying that any approach we took would have been sunshine and roses, but some are certainly far worse than others; and the approach we took was almost certainly the worst.
You've mentioned Sweden. But they’re very different to us! More of them live alone, they don’t have multi-generational non-white households, and the country isn’t nearly as densely populated as ours.
17% of Swedes live alone, compared to 15% of Brits; so very little difference there.
The country actually has a greater percentage of non-whites, 15% compared to our 13%.
And most Swedes live in densely populated cities - Stockholm, for instance, is more densely populated than London.
I admit that we were probably always going to take a slightly bigger hit than they did, because we have more international visitors and more of our population is obese, but the point is that lockdowns or no lockdowns, the death rate per million stays roughly the same.
Why were masks mandated?
That’s a good question, considering they were mandated long after the height of the pandemic. Covid cases were at the lowest they were all year when the order came in; the subsequent apparent rise in cases perhaps points to their redundancy. Far be it from me to say, but perhaps they were introduced to inculcate a sense of fear and increase obedience to government diktats… Governments always like it to look that they're doing something, even if that something doesn't actually help.
Masks help though, surely?
Forty years of clinical trials have not produced any definitive evidence that masks are effective in protecting the wearer from viral pathogens (which are thousandths of a millimetre - porous cloth masks don't exactly present much of a challenge to them). The biggest, most recent and most relevant study was published by Danish scientists last month. Here's a quick summary of it:
In April and May of 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, 3,000 people were given masks to wear while going about their lives. 3,000 were told to do the same, but with no mask.
At the end of the study of those who wore a mask, 1.8% had the virus.
Of those who didn't, 2.1% had the virus.
So there was virtually no difference (and a very low infection rate). And volunteers were told how to use them correctly, and have a new one each day, very different from how you see the average Brit wear theirs (worn day after day, stuffed in pocket, slung round their chin, getting touched all the time).
I could link to many different websites with different opinions, which in itself indicates that this is far from a black and white issue. You could check here for a very thorough going through of scores of studies, and here and here also offer interesting articles (warning: they’re long). The decision on masks was made for political, not scientific reasons.
Surely the government was always "following the science"?
The government followed one version of "the science". There are many thousands of eminent scientists in the world who would have taken an entirely different approach to tackling this virus, but few were listened to by governments. The reasons for this could fill several books, and will do. But if you think the government was "following the science" you might ask yourself a few questions, such as: why, in the Rule of Six in England are children included in the six, whereas in Scotland they are not; why is eating in a pub different to not eating in a pub? (and witness the inane discussion about what constituted a "substantial meal"); why are rules different in every country around the world? And more. "Following the science" was a good excuse for politicians to trot out, as it absolved them of blame.
What has been the effect of all this on other health conditions?
Devastating. Try a few of these facts for starters:
- 25 million GP appointments lost (source: Care Quality Commission)
- 3 million people backlog for cancer screening (source: Cancer Research UK)
- 350,000 patients with suspected cancer haven’t been referred (source: Cancer Research UK)
- 986,000 women not screened for breast cancer (source: Breast Cancer Now)
- Nearly 2 million waiting >18 weeks for planned surgery, such as knee and hip operations (source: NHS England)
- 111,026 patients waiting >1 year for treatment (source: NHS England)
- 1 in 10 mental health patients has been waiting 6 months for help (source: Royal College of Psychiatrists)
I’m still not sure. What you're saying I don't hear on BBC and ITV.
At the start of the pandemic, Ofcom issued some regulations to broadcasters: “We strongly advise you to take particular care when broadcasting, for example ... Statements that seek to question or undermine the advice of public health bodies on the Coronavirus, or otherwise undermine people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources of information about the disease”. This inspired the Free Speech Union to challenge the ruling.
So that is probably the main reason you have not seen the BBC or ITV deviate too much from the government’s line.
One might also keep in mind that BBC wanted to keep on the right side of the government, as Boris Johnson had previously threatened to decriminalise the non-payment of the licence fee (he has since changed his mind), and the BBC’s charter is up for renewal in 2027.
Maybe, but on sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook etc, I can’t find much to back up your views.
The tech giants have been keen to ingratiate themselves with world governments. Can’t think why. They’re clever about stuff though. Ever heard of "shadow-banning"? That’s what YouTube did with the TRIGGERnometery interview with lockdown sceptic Peter Hitchens earlier in the year. It means that while the interview is still on the web it doesn’t appear in search results (it was later "un-shadow banned" after an outcry).
This brief video here displays the evidence.
If you do a Google search for The Great Barrington Declaration, which saw thousands of the world's leading scientists challenging the position governments took, you will see that the most prominent results are all for articles rubbishing it. Still not convinced? If you want to see an example of how Google’s algorithms are manipulated to throw up the results they want you to see, rather than what you want to see, get Google Image Search up and type in “American inventors”. These are not the most famous American inventors, they’re the most famous black American inventors. Now type in “straight couples”. Done that? See what they did. Wow. This is reality being bent more than a Christopher Nolan movie.
But what about all the deaths? You can’t argue with them, surely.
Every death is obviously of enormous sadness. However, we must keep some perspective. Around 1,700 people die in the UK every day; over the course of the year only a small percentage of those deaths have been Covid deaths; more people died of the flu in 2000 than have of Covid this year; Covid, in a sense, "replaces" influenza as a killer of the vulnerable.
For Covid we have reasons to believe that the numbers may have been inflated by the following: if you test positive for Covid and die within 28 days of doing so, even though you may have died of something else (even a car accident), you are classed as a Covid death; if you go into hospital for an ailment you may contract Covid there (which is where most infections occur) and if you die, be classed as a Covid death; there are a good many reports of Covid being put on the death certificate even if there has been no actual positive Covid test before death; it has even been suggested that many doctors have written "Covid" on the death certificates of Muslim patients, because it means that they can then be quickly released for Muslim burial, and it could be done within 24 hours if Covid was accepted as the cause of death. Even Neil Ferguson admitted that the majority of people who died of Covid would have died this year anyway. 94% of those who died with Covid had co-morbidities; it is highly likely that the majority died because of those co-morbidities, and not of Covid.
What about this "long Covid" I’d heard of?
Chris Whitty has said that this effects around 2% of victims.
What about Track and Trace?
You probably couldn't come up with a better way to wreck day-to-day life than the government's app. You could go into Greggs, get your pastie, leave; four hours later someone could go into the same branch who was identified as a Covid case and - ping! - you'd get a message saying you had to lock yourself away for two weeks. You could be in a different room in a building as a "Covid case", but the Bluetooth would pick up their reading and - ping! - you'd get a message saying you had to isolate for a fortnight. This is happening all the time with medical staff and teachers, causing the nation's public services to crumble, while having a deleterious effect on mental health. Even if you tested negative you'd still have to isolate, as was recently the case with the prime minister - it is madness.
Isn’t this virus one of the worst mankind has ever faced?
No. It roughly ranks at number nine in our list of recorded pandemics (assuming you believe that every death labelled as Covid was actually Covid). Our recession is the worst in 300 years; this was not the worst pandemic in 300 years, it wasn’t even the worst in the last 100 years. This virus was not extraordinary; it was our reaction to it that was. The Hong Kong Flu in 1968-69 killed at least 20,000 more Brits than Covid has, and there was no self-immolation of society and the economy.
But the government terrified us!
Indeed it did. That became the intention from 22 March onwards, as revealed in Sage minutes that were brought into the public arena by Simon Dolan’s court action. “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased,” Sage said. There had to be “hard-hitting evaluations” and “emotional messaging”. This link takes you to the relevant Sage minutes. Throughout the year, the government has always sought to frighten people into obedience. It never revealed, for instance, that for the under 60s, there is a 1 in 300,000 chance of death if you contract the virus, or that an obese 75-year-old has a 96% chance of survival if they get Covid (my mother knows a 92-year-old who survived it!).
Hang on, hang on. Why would our government lie to us?
Governments lie all the time. Don't you think exactly that at every election cycle? And governments are composed of individual people with all their faults, grievances and follies. Here’s an experiment to try: tell someone a lie and see how they believe you. Obviously it depends on the sort of lie you tell (and please don’t make it anything that will cause harm to them or you), but if you choose astutely you will be able to tell a lie to them, and they will believe it. Extend the experiment. Keep lying to them about whatever it is. You will soon see how easy it is, and how gullible they are. Also, see here. Or think how when you're dreaming you can believe something absolutely ridiculous is really happening.
Alright, but how can you say the response here has been wrong when all round the world governments have done similar things?
If you say “they have all been correct” you could also logically say “they have all been incorrect”. Governments always make mistakes and, especially in the inter-connected world we have now, it is more common to see one copy the other, resulting in a domino effect.
In 1997 the EU threw its weight behind diesel cars, claiming they were more environmentally friendly than petrol, and spent billions subsidising it to make it cheaper than petrol. In 2012 the World Health Organization published a report saying that diesel fumes cause cancer due to high levels of particulates and nitrogen oxides. Consequently, the EU reversed their promotion of diesel.
Those in power get it wrong all the time. Look at bygone cigarette promotion, Prohibition, thalidomide, apartheid, the Iraq War… hell, go back further and you have governments promoting the massacre of Jews, slavery and pogroms.
Official government lines can change with astonishing rapidity. Look at same-sex marriage. Twenty or 15 years ago you would not have found a single prominent political party in the entire world advocating it. Today, at least in Western countries, the exact opposite is true.
But surely, despite all you say, it was better to be safe than sorry?
Well, define “safe”. In this instance “safe” means: the biggest recession in 300 years, the national debt exceeding £2 trillion for the first time (ensuring lower economic growth and thus less spending on public services like the NHS for decades to come), children out of school for several months, scores of non Covid hospital treatments being delayed, thousands of criminal trials put back, grandparents not being able to see their grandchildren for the best part of a year, sport, culture and travel being cratered, a climbing suicide rate, and much more besides. Including not being able to go down the pub with your mates.
According to the respected Centre for Economics and Business Research, the current tier system will cost the UK £900 million a day.
The point is that the "safe" option comes with enormous costs.
I bet if you knew someone who’d died of Covid, you wouldn’t be coming out with all this.
Quite possibly. If I knew someone who’d been killed by a speeding car I might well be out campaigning to have the speed limits lowered. But this only emphasises how personal experience can cloud one’s objectivity. It’s the data you need to look at to make correct decisions, while nurturing a more holistic view of life. So while an alternate universe me might lobby for the speed limit to be reduced to 9mph, I’d hope that another me might also consider the costs of such a ruling - the fact that we wouldn’t be able to drive to our friends and family to enjoy rich human contact, for instance, and that that would be detrimental to well-being. One could argue that Boris Johnson’s own grisly experience with Covid sent him on a non-objective path in which he forgot the collateral damage resulting from his lockdown and tiers policies.
Any more good news?
Not really. You’ve been stitched up like a kipper. Most government actions have been theatre that have done way more harm than good. Our response to Covid was a disaster, a tragedy and a scandal, and we must never see anything like it ever again.
If you like what I have written, or find it interesting, please share this with everyone you know. What I have written here is factual, and I have endeavoured to include as many links to reliable publications as possible (as well as many to other posts on my blog). You can fact check everything I have described, and you will not find errors. I plead with you to pass this blog post on to anyone who still believes that our government’s response to this pandemic has been sensible and proportionate.
Comments
Post a Comment