More Lockdown Idiocy

So, days after denying that they would impose another national lockdown, Boris Johnson has imposed another national lockdown. Why would anyone be surprised, as they seem to average one big U-Turn per week. Of four senior Ministers in the meeting that discussed it, one of them leaked it to the media, thereby, forcing Johnson's hand to announce it, before he had time to change his mind once again. That's an indication of divisions in the government's inner circle, but they are nothing compared to the divisions within the Tories' parliamentary party, or the party in the country. No wonder, because the lockdown strategy is bonkers.

The government imposed a lockdown in March that, like this one, was supposed to only last three weeks, but which was continually extended, and then essentially continued by the imposition of regional lockdowns, particularly in the North, as Tory areas, in the South, began to baulk. The national lockdown, despite continuing for months, was a complete failure. It supposedly reduced infections, but, as the recent Edinburgh University study showed, its not infections per se that are the problem, but infections of the elderly, who are the ones actually at risk from it. Infections of the young and healthy are actually a good thing, as they create herd immunity amongst the population, which is the only realistic means of totally stopping its spread, and killing it off. But, of course, as soon as the lockdowns were relaxed, the true situation emerged, as reported infections increased rapidly, once again. As I'd said months ago, that is like a forest fire where no firebreaks have been created, so that any remaining embers, just set the forest alight again.

The government needed to end the lockdown, because although it was a lockdown of social activity rather than of employment, the former impacted some of the latter, and the costs of that were enormous and unsustainable. Bribing people with furlough payments not to work, not to produce the goods and services that society requires is insane, and unsustainable. It will completely wreck the economy for years to come in a way that will cause far more deaths and ill-health than COVID is ever likely to achieve. Now, it has the worst of all worlds as it has been forced to impose another lockdown, and to reintroduce the bribes to people not to work and produce, which will create an economic and financial crisis on an unprecedented scale.

It has been forced to do that, because it never developed an alternative strategy to such lockdowns, and the only strategy that has any chance of working – that proposed in the Great Brarrington Declaration, which is the strategy I basically proposed back in March – would mean accepting that its original lockdown strategy had been a mistake, and one that had caused the deaths of tens of thousands of old people. In part its been forced into that position, because all of those others that had called for that lockdown strategy, some of the government scientific advisors, as well as the Labour opposition, themselves had a vested interest in not admitting they got it terribly wrong.

Many of them have looked for a way out in the hope that a vaccine or an effective test and trace system would come to their rescue. But a vaccine is at least six months away, and there is no chance of test and trace ever working, because 90% of infected people show no or few symptoms, and so are never tested. Germany which did have an effective and efficient test and trace system has still seen a massive rise in new infections. Test and trace is a diversion, whose purpose is only to get people to go along with further lockdowns in the interim, just as the continued talk of a vaccine on the horizon is intended to do. But, its almost certain that most countries will develop herd immunity naturally before they ever get an effective vaccine rolled out on a wide scale.

As with the first national lockdown, and as with the regional lockdowns the new lockdown is absurd. On the one hand, we have people old they can't go into local shops selling non-essential items, despite the fact they might be in there for less than ten minutes, could wear masks, and physical distancing could be employed, yet, they can continue to go to supermarkets. The experience of that previously, and recently in Wales, shows how absurd that is. Not only did it mean some products were denied to shoppers who were already in the shop, but contact with others in a supermarket is far more likely than in a local small shop.

Again people can't go to the pub or restaurant, where the data suggests infection rates are in any case low, but, unless they are one of the tens of thousands of people that work in such places, who are likely to be soon joining the dole queue, they are expected to continue to go to work, where they will sit for eight hours, in a confined environment with dozens or hundreds of others workers. And to get to and from those places of work, they will have to cram together for half an hour or more on public transport, breathing in other peoples germs. There is absolutely no logic to the lockdown.  It is idiotic.

Labour's continued opportunistic response is even more idiotic. Brigitte Phillipson put forward Labour's standard line that if only the government had listened to them and imposed lockdowns harder and faster everything would by now have been hunky-dory. Slimey Starmer repeated the argument on Andrew Marr. But, of course, its nonsense. If the first national lockdown lasting months didn't work, why on Earth would any sensible person think that a lockdown lasting just three weeks would work? At the same time, Labour seems to think that you can simply have no one working and producing anything, and yet you can just print money from the Magic Money Tree, and hand it to people to buy all of the things that no one is producing!

The only rational solution was to accept that the virus almost exclusively targets the elderly, with the mean average age of death from it now being 82. Had the government, from the beginning, told everyone living in a household with someone over 60, or with underlying medical conditions, to self isolate, or risk death, then all resources could have been focused on enabling them to do that, and avoiding contact with the virus. That would have prevented 45,000 older people being infected and dying from the virus. It would have prevented them and many more becoming ill and placing additional burdens on the NHS. Had the NHS itself, from the start, established isolation wards, so that those with the virus never came into contact with other patients, its spread in hospitals, and subsequently into care homes, could have been avoided. If all care workers, whether in care homes or visiting people in their homes, had been provided with adequate PPE, and contact protocols, then there is no reason why they would have spread the virus to the old and the sick either.

Mark Walport argued this morning that the idea of shielding the elderly was not possible, because young people also care for older people. That is no argument. If these younger people are care workers then they should have PPE and contact protocols to prevent them infecting those they care for. That care homes did not do that, and became killing fields for the virus is a disgrace. That they still are not doing that, is an even bigger disgrace. The same applies in hospitals. If what he means is younger people who are carers for their own parents etc., then the solution is clear that either they must self isolate as well as their parents, so as to avoid contracting the virus, or they have to relocate, and their role be taken over by professionals, and the function of the state, in all these cases, should have been to have focused its resources on enabling people to achieve that, including adequate financial support where young carers needed to stay home from work to self isolate.

But, the reality is, in how many cases does that actually apply? The vast majority of people over 60 do not live with younger members of their households. My wife and I do live with my eldest son, but as we have been isolating since March, he has had to do the same. Of those elderly people who need care, a large proportion are in care homes, or else get care in the home from the NHS or Social Services, and there it is a simple question of those carers being properly trained and equipped to prevent them spreading the virus. This is not rocket science.

Yet, the fact that such objections are continually raised as though they represent a significant problem begs the question why?