Daily deaths from flu, in Britain, overtook those from COVID19, in mid June, and have continued to do so ever since. UK deaths from flu and pneumonia have been five times greater than those from COVID19 since that time. Indeed, as deaths and serious illnesses from COVID have continued to fall, in some age groups, deaths from flu and pneumonia are now as much as ten times deaths from COVID19. That is despite the fact that, as the lockdown has been eased, the number of COVID infections, in the UK, as elsewhere across Europe, has risen sharply. For anyone who looked at the material conditions rationally, from the beginning, this is no surprise, because, despite the moral panic that was whipped up by social media, followed by the mass media, COVID19 was never a threat to the vast majority of the population. It was a highly specific threat to the elderly, followed, some way behind, by those who had underlying medical conditions that compromised their immune response.
If we look at the current data on infections, it shows that the number of new infections per day has risen to around 3,000. However, this figure is itself pretty meaningless. For one thing, recent reports indicate that the testing misses about 30% of infections even amongst those tested. That is because it looks for the virus in the nasal cavity and throat, but the virus may not be located in those places. Moreover, the testing only tests whether you currently have the virus. It does not test whether you have already had it without knowing about it, which must be true for large numbers of people, because it is asymptomatic in 80% of the population. Finally, this figure of current infections is only a measure of those who actually get tested. Far more people are not tested than those who are, and someone tested today, might get the virus tomorrow or later today.
So, if the figure for the number of people newly infected stands at 3,000, the actual figure is probably more like 30,000. Yet, despite this sharp rise in the number of infections, the number of people seriously ill, let alone the number dying has fallen sharply. There is virtually no one currently in hospital on ventilators across Britain. The number of deaths has fallen to more or less single figures, with just three deaths recorded yesterday. That is equal to one death in 10,000 infections, or a mortality rate of just 0.01%, as against the initial predictions that the mortality rate was going to be closer to 1%, or 100 times greater!
So, why is this? The reason is obvious. From the beginning, the data from China and elsewhere showed that COVID19 is a virus that is almost exclusively a threat to the elderly. More than half the people who are killed by it, or made seriously ill by it, are aged over 80, with a large proportion of those aged over 85. When those aged over 60 are included, the percentage rises to 92%. Of the remaining 8% of deaths, 7% are people with underlying medical conditions, and we will undoubtedly find that the remaining 1% also had some previously undiagnosed condition that led to their immune system being compromised too. It made absolutely no sense to spread a moral panic that COVID19 represented an existential threat to populations, as some kind of modern day Black Death, or Ebola, which it most certainly is not (the latter has a 90% mortality rate, for example). Likewise, it was completely stupid to lock down economies based upon this entirely false premise. The damage to the economy, and, thereby, to the lives and health of millions has been far greater as a result of the lockdown than COVID19 was ever going to be, and that legacy will continue for years.
Yet, even knowing these facts, we see the media once again whipping up the same kind of panic, purely on the basis of sharply rising numbers of infections. Of course, although such a moral panic never made any kind of scientific or economic sense, it made perfectly good commercial sense for media companies for whom such sensationalism is their lifeblood. So, again we see the narrative about, well, even if the virus poses no real threat to healthy people under 60, and particularly to children, if lots of people get infected they will risk passing it on to grandparents, who might become sick. True, but only if you do not protect the grandparents and other elderly people from the risk of such infection! It is surely not rocket science to realise that if the only people really at risk are those grandparents, and elderly people in general, then it is they that should be the focus of any rational strategy. It is they who should be enabled to safely isolate from contact with the virus, in the same way that we enable people with serious nut allergies to stay away from nuts, without banning nuts for the majority of the population!
Indeed, if we had followed such a course of action back in March, the majority of the population, not actually at serious risk from the virus, would, by now have developed a sufficient degree of herd immunity that it would find it impossible to spread, and would, thereby die out, removing the need for any such further isolation and shielding. The failure to do so, and the implementation instead of the stupid lockdown, has simply made things worse. It slowed the development of the required herd immunity, it imposed restrictions on the lives of the vast majority of the population to a degree whereby, even those who need to be isolated, i.e. the elderly and sick, are now fed up of it. And, the idea that the inadequate measures of test and trace are going to have any impact, now are completely forlorn.
The reason that the number of deaths and serious illnesses has declined sharply, whilst the number of infections has increased sharply is quite obvious. At the start of the pandemic, large numbers of elderly people, particularly in hospitals and care homes (and people who had become infected in hospitals and sent back to care homes) were infected, and as this is the group most likely to suffer death or serious illness, the mortality rate (against infections) was necessarily high, because it was only a small number of people who were ill who were tested. The much larger number of people in the general population who had been infected, but who were asymptomatic were not tested, and so this distorted completely the mortality rate. Now, a large portion of those at risk in care homes, and hospitals, and amongst the elderly in general, who were going to die, or be seriously ill, have already succumbed. At the same time, belatedly, measures were introduced in hospitals and care homes to try to prevent further spread of the virus in these locations. The large number of deaths early on was always a large number of deaths of elderly people.
By contrast, today, as lockdown has been eased, large numbers of younger people have again begun to congregate in large numbers – in reality, in many places they continued to do so illegally anyway – and as the government has again belatedly increased the amount of testing, the number of these younger people identified as having become infected is shown up in the official data. But, these younger people, now, as has always been the case, are in virtually no risk of serious illness or death from the virus, so that as the number of reported infections rises, the number of deaths and serious illnesses continues to decline. Indeed, as the data now demonstrates, if you are younger, you are at far greater risk (ten times as much) of dying from flu or pneumonia than you are from COVID19, which is why the government should immediately begin providing free flu and pneumonia jabs (pneumonia jabs last for ten years, unless you are immuno-suppressed) for everyone.
As Prof Ioaniddis said back in March, what we were witnessing was a once in a century data fiasco, as decisions were made rashly on inadequate data that had been wrongly interpreted, and turned into a moral panic. The lockdown was nonsensical, and has proved disastrous. Its suggested the Tories might want to use the catastrophe their lockdown has caused as cover for the catastrophe their No Deal Brexit would cause. Possibly, but they should not be allowed to get away with that, because both are catastrophes of their own making. A No Deal Brexit would be even worse than the disaster they have created by the lockdown, and would also compound it. Ultimately, they are unlikely to push ahead with a No Deal, precisely because of it being so disastrous, but the disaster caused by their lockdown is already a fact, and they should face the full consequences from having created it. Labour should not let the Tories get away with the consequences of the lockdown, and should oppose Brexit along with it.
Shouldn't lockdowns, social distancing and face masks have caused a decrease in infection rates not just for COVID19, but for all respiratory viruses including colds and flu?
ReplyDeleteIf there was no appreciable reduction in those infections, doesn't that suggest they were also ineffective vis-a-vis COVID?
Quite possibly, which, again, is an indication that the lockdown was both stupid, as it caused disastrous economic damage, and ineffective. However, we don't actually know whether the rate of infections during the lockdown etc. was reduced, evidence would suggest it was. What we do know, however, is whether infections increased, fell or remained the same, the daily deaths from flu and pneumonia, which affects younger people, and particularly children, increased way above the deaths from COVID19, which does not affect healthy young people and children, but does affect old people.
ReplyDeleteEither way, it shows the lockdown was both idiotic, economically catastrophic, and ineffective!
In NZ and Australia - I've not checked the stats, but there does appear to be a drastic reduction in influenza in those countries. Presumably it's related to their stringent lockdowns? If this is the case, the take home message is lockdowns only work if they are imposed quickly and ruthlessly (as in, police state ruthlessly as I get the impression from Australia) - or not at all.
ReplyDeleteClearly covid is not anything like Ebola, and -with this in mind- the approach you suggest, adopted by Sweden -I would add combined with effective antiviral therapies which were/are shunned I think for political reasons- is the one that strikes the correct balance between the rights of any citizen to live, and the required duty we have to protect the vulnerable.
I mentioned in my prior comment antiviral therapies.
ReplyDeleteWhat has angered me about this situation was a rather disgraceful attitude on the part of medical authorities (not all, but in this country and in the US in particular) to subvert any attempt on the part of medical scientists and doctors ("front line" in the US) to use anything that might show effective treatment possible for the short to medium term.
Three cases in point.
There's the well known controversy over the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and the dubious studies published to undermine it (they used lethal doses in the studies - the articles were later retracted from prestigious journals like the Lancet in which they were published). On the proponent side of the argument, in sane (non lethal!) doses of HCQ, one can also add zinc as a supplement, and HCQ will help the uptake of the zinc into the lungs, at which point the latter -zinc- can aid in suppressing the multiplication of covid (so obviously were it to work as claimed it would only be effective in early, not late, stage infections.)
I also saw reports in the US of the use of hydrogen peroxide (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7308628/) as an effective therapy being shut down by medical authorities, with no attempt to appraise the efficacy of its treatment in the published studies those providing the therapy had given (the authorities didn't like the fact they didn't use randomized trials for their studies - but to do that would have meant breaking a Hippocratic oath in providing some patients with a placebo when their lives may have been on the line during the critical period earlier this year in which they were administering the therapy. The authorities surely should have had their backs and performed those trials in separate studies, had they been in any way concerned with handling this issue responsibly.)
Finally, when officialdom (in the US at least) did pull something out of the hat - "Remdesivir" - it was based on something that from day one never looked good, never showing more than borderline efficacy.
To be clear, I would not have given any of these controversies a second thought -as I am not a medical scientist- were it not for this situation that has affected all our lives in a grave way, behoving I think all of us to try to understand issues a bit deeper, and hope for a way out of the madness.
Its interesting to note that 71% of the people of Sweden think their government has dealt with COVID19 well, as against a clear majority in Britain, and other countries that imposed lockdowns who think their governments have dealt with COVID badly.
ReplyDeleteWas the moral panic that led to the lockdowns in most Western countries whipped up by social media trolls working for the Chinese Communist Party?
ReplyDeleteChina’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign
I very much doubt it. I suspect it was whipped up by the same kind of people who continually have been predicting global economic catastrophe, or some kind of environmental catastrophe. They are the people, Malthisians/Sismondists who have completely failed to make their case for Socialism, or to build any sizeable movement for Socialism, and who, thereby see the route to Socialism being some kind of collapse of the capitalist system. Marx had to deal with such people, and so did Lenin and Trotsky. They are crude, subjectivists.
ReplyDeleteA pandemic that could be whipped up into an existential crisis, fitted their bill perfectly to argue that it was both an environmental crisis caused by capitalism, and evidence of their annual predictions of economic crisis caused by the Law of the Tendency for the Rate of profit to Fall, was correct all along, even though its clear that neither of those things are true.
It was also whipped up by a mass media that is in increasing competition with social media for audiences, and which is now dependent upon commercial success driven by ratings, which means they always have to sensationalise every story, no matter how mundane. Every event is described as "unprecendented", by which they really mean it hasn't happened in the last 5-10 years. A bit like Trump, they have to describe everything in superlatives, it is always the "biggest", "smallest, or whatever, even though, again usually none of those things are true. As the socialist epidemiologist I referred to a couple of weeks ago said, COVID is being described in apocalyptic terms, but in actual fact, more people died from flu in 1968, let alone in 1957, never mind in 1918.
And, as the mass theorists describe, when an elite is able to get access to a mass, and then a mass has direct access to elites, which is what we now have as a result of technological developments, which has meant that we have social media, and a much wider, commercialised mass media, via satellite TV etc., then those masses when mobilised can also exert there own influence on elites, including the mass media itself. In a week or so, I have some blog posts on that in relation to my critique of Paul Mason's recent article on strategy for the Left.
The mobilisation of a mass panicked by hyperbola in relation to COVID exerts a feedback loop. (In the 1930's, Left parties in Germany competed with the Nazis under pressure form a mass to demonstrate their own nationalism, thereby validating the nationalist message of the Nazis, for example.) The mass media cannot say anything other than the myth about an existential threat and need to take drastic measures, no matter how idiotic and counterproductive those measures might be. That Emperor's new Clothes mentality also impacts on the government scientists put in the spotlight, and those scientists who put forward the facts like Gupta et al get victimised and pilloried, an extension of "cancel culture".
And, that also means that Labour politicians who need no excuse to act in a totally opportunist manner fall into line. Their only criticism of the government is that they are not illiberal enough, and so on.