This is weird. Pretty much everyone I know personally who I think is really smart thinks that Covid 19 lockdowns are an overreaction. Likewise pretty much everyone whose opinion I follow in public life, on social or other media. Likewise every serious epidemiologist who is prepared to analyse the numbers, rather than just trot out platitudes about “staying safe” and the like. But Boris Johnson is smart. So is Dominic Cummings. So why are they bleating like the not-so-smart sheep?
The more or less universal views among the smart people seem to be:
Covid 19 is a medium-serious disease. Worse than a typical flu outbreak, but not as bad as a really serious flu outbreak;
Even at its height, the odds of dying from Covid 19 are low, and pretty much non-existent for young people;
In most Western economies, the impact of Covid 19 is now very much less than it was a few months ago;
Population-wide lockdowns may have some effect in the short term, but are not a viable long-term solution;
A vaccine may or may not become available in the coming months or years, but there is no practical prospect that any vaccine will eradicate Covid 19 from the whole world. Covid 19 is here to stay;
In the short term, population-wide lockdowns are seriously injurious to public health. Among other problems, people are not getting the cancer treatment they would normally get, so that people are dying from cancers that they could and would otherwise be successfully treated for. Similarly, the mental health of people confined to their homes has suffered;
In the medium and long terms, our economies have been suffering very serious damage. Many businesses have failed as a result of lockdowns, and governments have borrowed huge sums of money that will need to be paid back. Such repayments are inevitably going to be at the expense of other government spending.
In this list, I have tried to stick to points about which there is little room for disagreement among sensible people. There are all sorts of other things about which Continue reading →
Governments around the world (or at least many of them) have got the first two things wrong about Covid-19, and some are now well on the way to be getting the third one wrong as well.
The first thing was about the severity of Covid-19. When something like that first appears, you might seek the advice of an expert as to its likely severity. But once it has been around for a while, you do not need to be a champion virologist to assess the issue. The figures speak for themselves. It is about as severe as a nasty flu. Not as nasty as the Russian flu, which might not have been a flu at all. Nor anything like as nasty as the Spanish flu, which was not really Spanish. In Australia, for example, you’re more likely to be killed by falling over than by Covid-19. Well, you might say, falling over is really only dangerous for the elderly and the frail. Indeed. The same is true for Covid-19. It is highly contagious, but not even in the top 20 causes of death when it hits. It is not the Black Death. More a sort of pale beige death.
The second thing was about the appropriate response. Having got the wrong advice on the first issue, it’s hardly surprising that governments again asked for expert input. Which, in many places, was to impose lockdowns. But again, once the dust is settled, and ready comparisons can be made between places that have imposed lockdown and places that have not, you do not need to be a champion epidemiologist to assess the issue. Again, the figures speak for themselves. There is no evidence that lockdown reduces the severity of Covid-19. Plenty of evidence that it causes huge harm. Face nappies are not great either.
So here’s the third thing. Having thoroughly fucked up with the first two things, and caused massive damage, what should governments do? Should they own up to making a terrible mistake? Or should they try to cover up?
There was the problem faced by the United States and its allies after the invasion of Iraq. They said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about that. Not an easy thing to cover up. Instead, we saw Tony Blair try to fudge it, saying that Saddam Hussein was a very, very bad person anyway, which justified the enormous cost and loss of life. So one option would be for Boris Johnson to get in front of the cameras, and to say something like:
Hello folks. There’s been a bit of a SNAFU here. Sorry about that. So let’s put this great country of ours back to work, and forget about all of those precaution thingies. And gosh, we saved quite a bit of petrol with all of that staying at home thing.
But instead, we are starting to see the tactics of Alexander Lukashenko. Cover-up. Brutal repression of anybody who speaks the truth, even on social media. Arrests and massive fines of people who get out on this to the streets to protest.
Bad mistake. You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
I was asked[1] how many machines with petrol engines do we have here at The Phenelry?
The answer I think is 15.[2] All pretty needful on a country property.[3]
And in line with Kitchener’s Rule, which estimates that the number of such machines a chap has is approximately seven times the number of cars he has. Except Land Rovers, for which the multiplier is 14.[4]
[1] I need not trouble you, gentle reader, with what prompted this question.
[2] There is my car, which is a Jeep. And then my love car, which is a Bristol. Louise has a car. There is my Countax tractor (settle down; it is just a garden tractor) and a Toro Timecutter zero turn. There’s a drum mower for cutting the croquet lawn grass and my old lovely Hayter mower (by appointment to Her Majesty), which I use for the longer bits. There’s also a Toro walk behind mower which I use for getting to the bits which are inaccessible for the zero turn. There is a mulcher; it soon became apparent that the small electric mulchers which people have in domestic gardens do not really cut the mustard when you live in the country. And because there are some quite fierce fires in Australia, I have a firefighting pump. And because the last State government was obsessed by green issues, and hence there are frequent power cuts here, I have an emergency generator. And then there are the two-stroke machines. I have a Ryobi strimmer (or whippersnipper, as they call these things here) and also a Kawasaki one which has for some time been fitted with a metal blade instead of the nylon line. For the tougher sort of weed. And, of course, a couple of chainsaws.
[3] Well, more or less. To be honest, I could manage without the Toro walk behind mower, which is a pretty bad machine. For a start, it stops if you let go of the bar up at the handle, which is presumably an elf ‘n safety thing. But it means a lot more pulling of the ripcord, and that the shoot to the collection bag is more susceptible to clogging up, because you can’t leave it for a few moments running clean air through the shoot. Also, it has got two wheels at the back, instead of a single drum, which not only means that it can’t lay down the nice stripes which are necessary for a proper English lawn, but also that it slips around a lot more on hilly bits. In truth, I only bought it because the local repair shop had failed to properly fix my Hayter. And then my friend Jeff fixed the Hayter (it just needed the carburettor washing through).
And I suppose I could make do with just one chainsaw. Again, I only bought the orange one because the yellow one had stopped working. But once I had read the manual for the orange one, I understood that the yellow one only needed a bit of TLC to leap back into action.
[4] My advice is that you do not go searching on the Internet for the origin of this rule. I just made it up. For literary effect.
[And the consequences of getting it horribly wrong]
When is a case not a case?
Since the start of the COVID pandemic I have watched almost everyone get mission critical things wrong. In some ways this is not surprising. Medical terminology is horribly imprecise, and often poorly understood. In calmer times such things are only of interest to research geeks like me. Were they talking about CVD, or CHD?
However, right now, it really, really, matters. Specifically, with regards to the term COVID ‘cases.’…
What Imperial College London did was to use a model that overestimated the infection fatality rate by a factor of ten.
We now know, as the IFR rates of various countries falls and falls, that the Imperial College estimated IFR was completely wrong. The UK, for example, has seen 42,000 deaths so far, which is 0.074% of population. The US has seen about 200,000 deaths 0.053%. Sweden, which did not lockdown down, has seen about 6,000 deaths, which is an infection fatality rate of 0.06%. All three countries are opening up and opening up. Whilst the ‘cases’ are rising and rising, the deaths continue to fall. They are, to all intents and purposes, flatlining.
In Iceland it is around 0.16% and falling. In other words…
Some footage that has been doing the rounds on social media shows a young pregnant mother called Zoe Lee Buhler at home in her pyjamas being arrested, handcuffed, and carted off by a gaggle of policemen in front of her young children.
Her offence? She put up a post on Facebook informing people about a peaceful protest in Ballarat about the Draconian Covid restrictions currently being imposed in Victoria.[1]
Victoria is currently under the premiership of a gentleman called Daniel Andrews, who looks rather as though he is an idiot. But looks can be deceptive. He is a manipulative, hard left thug.
Some have commented that Zoe Lee should not have been either surprised or outraged at her incarceration. It seems to me that we should be both surprised and outraged at this brutish attempt by the authorities in Victoria to suppress any criticism of their policies. In Russia, or China, or Zimbabwe, or Belarus, we might not be so surprised, but we should still be outraged.
Views vary about the wisdom of Covid lockdowns. Personally, I rather agree with Lord Sumption and many others who are expert in the field that lockdowns are absurd. I further agree with him that there is no moral obligation to comply with absurd Covid regulation, and that the imposition of these regulations is an abuse of governmental power.
But more to the point here, I also agree with him about the grave dangers that arise when people sheepishly do what they are told by governments without question. Lord Sumption says:
“I would accept that the majority probably favour the lockdown but that is, I’m afraid, how despotisms arise. Despotisms arise not because our liberty is forcibly taken away by tyrants but because people voluntarily surrender their liberty in return for protection from some perceived threat and it’s in the interests of governments to exaggerate that threat in order to procure compliance.”
I was born in England at a time when, only a few years before, our liberty had been gravely threatened by a German despot. The threats imposed by real despotic power are very real, and yet they have not been felt now for some decades in the Western world. Instead, many of the younger generation worry about issues that are, by comparison, mere froth.
It is worth bearing in mind Richard Dawkins’ analysis, in his books, about the evolution of genes and their intellectual cousins, memes.[2] There is no divine hand or human conspiracy at play.
It is the same, it seems to me, with governmental power. Governments feed off power. Their rival is individual freedom. The more they can suppress individual freedom, the more ascendancy they obtain in this ancient battle. And so Covid is a wonderful opportunity for governmental power. Not only does it enable the government to control where people may go, what they may do and even what they may say, but it also tightens the government’s grip on the reins of the economy. Never mind that that grip strangles the economy. Memes do not gain their ascendancy by worrying about that sort of stuff. There is no conspiracy. There is no grand design.
It is not all a one-way street, of course. Once a society becomes entirely despotic, and its economy ruined, the regime falls, either by political collapse or war. There are many examples. The communist USSR. Nazi Germany. Umpteen examples from the ancient and mediaeval worlds. Sometimes the collapse is slow and partial. Like Venezuela. And Zimbabwe. And Albania. And Cuba. Either way, eventually and after immense pain and many dead, people re-emerge with due respect for the basic principles of freedom of speech and democracy.
What worries me is that so many young people have so little understanding of this process. Their willingness to see people carted off by the police, or handed out massive fines[3], for speaking out against the government should be deeply troubling. Equally troubling is the modern movement to silence and remove from post anyone who fails to agree with current woke shibboleths. And if these things are not deeply troubling to society at large, then I fear that we are headed for despotic collapse.
Hopefully I will be well dead by then. But I worry for my children, and other people’s children, and of course for all those whose lives and livelihoods are now being and will be shattered by this madness.
[1] Ballarat is not a place where there is any Covid, or at any rate any evidence of it (there may be lots of people with Covid there who are entirely asymptomatic, as elsewhere in the world). The explanation for her arrest is not that she was representing any threat to public health, but that she represented a threat to the Victorian government’s dictat.
[2] The ability of successful genes and memes to propagate themselves might seem clever, but in fact is merely the result of iteration. The living world is, in large measure, just a huge Barnsley set.
[3] As in Piers Corbyn’s case, who was recently fined £10,000 for participating in a demonstration against despotic covid regulation.
phenell 