The Emperor Has No Clothes, Government Advisors Begin To Catch Up

Two weeks ago, I posted details of German pulmonologist, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, who is also a mainstream SPD politician, and Vice Chair of the German delegration to the Council of Europe. Wodarg noted that all of the hysteria created around COVID19, was ill founded, and compared the situation with the Hans Christian Andersen story about the Emperor's New Clothes..  In the story, a foolish king is led to believe that he has been provided by a wonderful new suit of clothes, but which does not exist, and leads to the king stepping out with out clothes. None of the courtiers dare to point out the obvious truth, until one child breaks the silence and shouts out that the king is naked. That is the truth about the moral panic that has been created over COVID19, and which has led to idiotic policy responses on the back of it that has closed down the global economy, unnecessarily sending it into a depression worse even than that of the 1930's, within a matters of just a few weeks. 

Scientists at Imperial College in London, basing themselves on data from China, concluded that billions of people across the globe would be infected by COVID19, and millions of people would die. Some caution should have been taken, because the same team had predicted in 2009 that there would be similar consequences from a global Swine Flu pandemic. They predicted that a third of the world population would be infected with Swine Flu, a previous form of coronavirus, and, on the basis of their methodology, based on a study of Swine Flu deaths in Mexico, expected a mortality rate of between 0.4% and 1.4%. In fact, although 20% of the global population were, indeed, infected with Swine Flu, the actual mortality rate ended up being only 0.02%. 

The current moral panic has arisen on the back of similar predictions by the team at Imperial, who, again, on the basis of extrapolating data from the experience of COVID19 in China, have this time come up with projections of 7 billion infections, and 45 million deaths, in a report produced on 26th March, but which is no longer available on their website. This time, they predicted a mortality rate of 0.9%. But, the basis of this calculation was deeply flawed, because it is based upon the number of people confirmed to have been infected with COVID19, rather than the number of people actually infected. In Britain, the only people confirmed to have been infected are those that get tested, and nearly all of those tested are people who go to hospital, because they have become ill enough to require hospital treatment. Only in recent days has the government begun to even undertake some testing of others such as hospital workers, but the numbers of those is abysmally small. Only in the last few days has the government been able to come even anywhere close to undertaking 10,000 tests per day. So, the number of confirmed cases represents only a very small tip of a much, much larger iceburg of actual numbers of people actually infected with COVID19. The reality is that a very large number of people were infected with COVID19, prior to the government beginning testing, and before it imposed its measures to try to constrain its spread. Given that each person infected with COVID19 spreads it to 3 other people, and each of these, in turn spreads it to 3 other people, its quite clear that there was a very large proportion of the population that had been infected prior to the government's measures being introduced. A team at Oxford, estimates that probably a half of the population are already infected. 

In fact, therefore, as was the case with the Swine Flu pandemic, the actual mortality rate is much, much smaller than the 0.9% projection given by Imperial. The government's Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Partick Vallance, over a week ago, admitted that infections were probably over 100,000, and that the mortality rate, was, therefore, at that time, probably only around 0.1%. Yet, despite the fact that he was saying that the mortality rate was essentially a tenth of what the team at Imperial had predicted, the government was persuaded to continue with the course of action it had been pressured to pursue, of calling for a closing down of the economy, which was itself motivated by those previous predictions of deaths running into hundreds of thousands, and perhaps as high as half a million, though that was small beer compared to some of the wild predictions, in the media, of 5 million deaths, as the press sought cheap sensationalist headlines! COVID19 has been better for the mass media even than a good war in providing them with headlines and audiences. 

But, it was not just the team at Oxford, or Wobarg who challenged the alarmist predictions of the team at Imperial. The well respected professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford Univesity, John Ioannidis, wrote in the middle of March that it was shaping up to be “a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”. 

Echoing the point I made above, he warned, 

“Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300.” 

Well, what we do know, however, is that, in Italy, the rapid rise in deaths was caused by the fact that the virus had got into the country's health and care sector itself. In other words, some patients or staff had been infected, and in a closed environment containing a sizeable number of people whose immune systems were already compromised, and who were already suffering from other conditions, or else were simply old, they were a perfect opportunity for the virus to spread, and to kill a proportionately large number of the people it infected. That was facilitated by the fact that Italy, like Britain, has suffered from ten years of austerity that has undermined its health and care sectors, and by the fact that staff were not provided with adequate PPE, so as to protect themselves from infection, and to prevent them, in turn, spreading the infections to patients and residents. The profile of deaths in Britain followed that in Italy, because the virus similarly took hold in the health and care sector, in much the same way that several years ago, significant numbers of people who had gone into hospital with minor conditions ended up dying having contracted MRSA or C-Dif after entering hospital. 

An indication of the extent to which hospitals and care homes have become killing fields of the elderly and vulnerable, from COVID19, is given by the instance of Burlington Court Care Home in Glasgow, where 13 people have died in the last week alone. Multiply that up by the 11,000 plus care homes in Britain, and you can see where the vast majority of potential casualties and current deaths are likely to be. And, as I reported earlier in the week, the death of Eddie Large is typical of COVID19 deaths, of someone who went into hospital with heart failure, and then contracted the virus only after their admission. 

What this illustrates, however, is that, because the virus got into the health and social care system some weeks ago, it must have done, because it takes three weeks from the point of infection to death, then the number of deaths to reported cases will be artificially high, because it has been able to do its worst amongst these captive vulnerable populations in hospitals and care homes for all that time, as it had also done in Italy. In fact, if anything, the policy of lock down may have had a similar effect in exacerbating the mortality rate too. By keeping people confined to their homes, it means that anyone already infected with the virus, but who was asymptomatic, as the vast majority of those infected are, was thereby kept in close proximity to everyone else also locked up in the home, including anyone that might be elderly or suffering some medical condition. 

We would expect, on this basis, that this early mortality rate is, in fact, distorted. It is not a reflection of the actual mortality rate against the total number of infections, because only a tiny minority of infections are actually confirmed by testing, but, also, because the virus spread quickly in the confined environment of these elderly and vulnerable populations, the number of deaths from it will be much higher than would be the number of deaths amongst the same number of infected people in the general population, which does not have the same demographic profile, i.e. its much, much younger, and healthier. Without actual anti-body testing, its impossible to know how many people actually have had the virus and acquired immunity to it, but it is probably now a considerable proportion of the general population despite the introduction of the lock down over the last week and a half. That is probably why the mortality rate in Sweden, which has not implemented a lock down, is no worse, and in fact, is significantly better, on a per capita basis, than in Britain, or even its neighbour Denmark, which also imposed a lock down. Whilst it would be expected that infections and deaths would continue to rise, they are likely to rise more slowly. That is not because the policy of lock down has worked to “flatten the curve”, but, because, if around half the population has already been infected, it has much fewer people left to infect, and because with such a large number already infected, a significant amount of herd immunity will have been developed so that the virus lacks hosts in which to reside, so that it has fewer sources from which to infect others, which means it slowly dies out. 

Similarly, a large proportion of those likely to be infected in hospitals and care homes, already have been, and those amongst them likely to require critical care, as well as to die, will be somewhere along that path. There will be some in hospital and care homes that may still be prone to infection, but their numbers will already have been diminished by the deaths that have already occurred. So, as with the Swine Flu predictions, it is likely that, whilst a large number of people may be infected, the catastrophic projections of tens of thousands, and even millions of deaths will prove highly inaccurate. 

And, now, even those amongst the governments advisors are beginning to admit that the Emperor is to quote Danny Kaye's song, “in the altogether”.

Professor Graham Medley, who is a specialist in infectious diseases at the London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as well as being Johnson's key advisor, has said that the government's lock down policy has painted it into a corner it must get out of, and is potentially doing more harm than good. In fact, there is no potentially about it, it already definitely is doing more harm than good for the reason set out above. He suggested the potential harm caused by the restrictions included economic damage. “I don’t mean to the economy generally, I mean to the incomes of people who rely on a continuous stream of money and their children, particularly the school closure aspect,” he told The Times. 

He also set out that it would do damage to people in terms of mental health, domestic violence and food poverty. In fact, talk of food poverty, is as meaningless as energy poverty, period poverty and so on. There is just poverty, however it manifests itself in an inability to acquire this or that necessity of life. And, he has admitted what was obvious from the beginning, and I have been pointing out, which is that it is totally ludicrous to think that you can simply lock down the economy for anything other than the smallest amount of time, in any meaningful way. If the government lock down had, in fact, been implemented, we would already have had electricity supplies and so on being disrupted, and a catastrophic breakdown of life. With a vaccine being at least 18 months away, therefore, the only rational policy is one based upon the creation of herd immunity. 

Medley says it will require, that we 

“allow people to catch the virus in the least deadly way possible”. As I have been saying for more than two weeks the only sensible way of doing that is to ensure that the 20% of the population at risk from the virus be isolated from it, and that the whole of society's resources be geared to enabling that to happen. It involves ensuring that health and social care workers be provided immediately with all of the PPE required, and that everyone in hospitals and care homes be provided with adequate provision of isolation, so as to prevent the further spread of the virus amongst these vulnerable populations. 

Medley also pointed out what should have again been obvious from the start, which is that the policy of lock down could not work, because as soon as you remove the lock down, any people still infected will simply begin the whole process of infecting the rest of the population that does not have immunity. Medley, hinting at the point I have made that the government, as with governments elsewhere, has been panicked into rash measures not based upon scientific evidence, but on the basis of worst case scenarios, pushed by the mass media, in search of sensationalist headlines, has also said, about closing schools, stopping football matches, closing gyms and so on, that it 

“feels good but isn’t necessarily evidence-based”. 

He has also said, 

“My problem with many countries’ strategies is that they haven’t thought beyond the next month,” 

And so the Emperor's New Clothes are exposed as existing only in the mind's ey of those foolish enough not to look at reality for fear of standing out against the crowd.  It is the classic example of a moral panic, of popular delusion and mass panic.