Today’s FT leads with Andrew Bailey’s corroboration of the OBR’s forecast that the UK’s GDP will decline by 35% in Q2 compared to the start of the year. “I don’t think there is anything implausible about a second quarter number of that nature,” he said yesterday. But the Governor of the Bank of England was even more pessimistic than the OBR, questioning whether the economy would return to its pre-lockdown output by the end of the year. The BoE is planning to publish its own forecast in early May and is looking at real-time indicators showing big falls in output for many sectors, soaring universal credit claims and higher-than-expected use of the Government’s furlough scheme in the private sector.
Several of the papers have covered Professor Anthony Costello’s claim, when giving evidence to the House of Commons Health Select Committee yesterday, that the COVID-19 death toll could be as high as 40,000 – and that is just in the first wave of infections. In an interview in the Telegraph, he said that if the Government is still pursuing a “herd immunity” strategy (if only!) it won’t be able to achieve that without eight to 10 more waves of infections, which will mean tens of thousands more deaths. He based this, in part, on a recent serological study carried out in the Netherlands which suggested that only 3% of the Dutch people had acquired immunity by the end of the first week of April.
However, that Dutch study shouldn’t be treated as a reliable guide to the level of immunity in the UK. The serological study carried out by Hendrik Streeck, director of Institut für Virologie at Bonn University, is a better guide. He tested a representative sample of 1,000 people in the north-western town of Gangelt, found that 15% of the town had been infected by the virus, with 14% of them testing positive for antibodies. By looking at the number of fatalities in the town, Streek estimated that the infection fatality rate is 0.37%, about ten times lower than the original WHO estimate. You can read a summary of his findings by Ross Clark in the Spectator here.
In addition, a paper was published recently by John P.A. Ioannidis and others that showed the number of people infected in Santa Clara County in California is between 50 and 85 times greater than the number of confirmed cases. The authors recommend that policy makers use this data to calibrate epidemic and mortality predictions, estimating that the infection fatality rate is between 0.12 and 0.2. If we apply that to the number of confirmed cases in the UK – 108,692 as of 9am yesterday – that suggests between 5,434,600 and 9,238,820 people have been infected, or between 8% and 14% of the population. Around 14% is consistent with the findings of the rate of infection on naval ships, as Caswell Bligh, a commentator on this site, pointed out yesterday. Ninety-four per ent of USS Theodore Roosevelt crew-members were tested for COVID-19, with 655 positive and 3,919 negative results, which is 14.3%. According to the BBC, a Dutch navy submarine, MS Dolfijn, has returned to its Den Helder base two weeks early because of a coronavirus outbreak on board. Eight of the 58 crew tested positive, which is 13.7%. A similar percentage of the passengers on the Diamond Princess were infected.
Does this mean we’re still a long way from herd immunity, albeit not as far as Professor Costello thinks? Not necessarily. Caswell Bligh believes that a majority of people have a kind of natural immunity to COVID-19, which would explain why there are so many studies showing a majority of those infected remain asymptomatic. There’s also some evidence that some of those who experience a mild bout of the disease don’t develop antibodies in sufficient quantities for them to test positive on a serological test. One study found that of 175 recovered Covid patients with mild symptoms, 10 were found not to have developed antibodies that could be detected later. Bligh speculates that populations exposed to the virus might end up with two tiers of immunity – about 15% with the strong kind, testing positive for antibodies, and between 50% and 60% with the weak kind, in which they’ve either been asymptomatic or had mild symptoms and then flushed the virus out of their systems. If this hypothesis is true, it would explain why some people who’ve had the virus have been reinfected – they’re the people with the weaker form of immunity. Bligh, a computer scientist, has modelled a population with two tier immunity, using official figures where possible, and the model converges on stable herd immunity when ~15% of the population have full immunity, i.e. test positive for antibodies, and ~50% have the lower form of immunity. (You can read the comment in full here.) One of the attractive things about Bligh’s hypothesis is that it would explain the findings of Israeli scientists Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, who has crunched the data and concluded that the rise and fall of infections is pretty much the same in every country, regardless of whether they’ve imposed lockdowns or how severe those restrictions are, with the epidemic burning itself out after eight weeks.
More grist to the sceptics’ mill was provided yesterday by Professor Johan Giesecke, one of the world’s leading epidemiologists and an advisor to the Swedish Government. He was interviewed by Freddie Sayers, the editor of UnHerd, and among his claims are:
- UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based
- The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only
- This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”
- The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better
- The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact
- The paper was very much too pessimistic
- Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway
- The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown
- The results will eventually be similar for all countries
- Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.
- The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%
- At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available
If you’re persuaded by the analysis of Professor Giesecke and others, please sign this petition, started by Robert Kok, a reader of this website, calling for the lockdown to be ended. Once he has enough signatures, it will be published on the UK Government’s petition website. If you’re still not convinced, Richard Smith, an Australian writer and academic living in Paris who teaches law at the Sorbonne, has written a good blog post this morning arguing that Australia should adopt the Swedish approach.
I’ve written a comment piece for the Telegraph today, marvelling at how supine the response of the British people has been to being placed under virtual house arrest. According to popular mythology, the Germans are pinched and hidebound rule-followers, whereas the British are Rabelaisian freedom lovers, but if you look at the public support for the lockdown in the two countries that turns out not to be true. According to an opinion poll published earlier this week, only six per cent of British people think the current restrictions are “too severe”, while 44 per cent think they’re “not severe enough”. By contrast, 44% of Germans are opposed to more severe measures, while 32 per cent think the existing ones should be scaled back. As if to underline how much more spirited the German people are than us, hundreds of Berliners took to the streets earlier this week to protest about their freedoms being taken away.
In the article, I point out how disappointing the reaction of my journalistic colleagues has been to the unprecedented curtailment of our liberties. With a few honourable exceptions, most have become zealous lockdown enthusiasts, only criticising the Government for not having placed the British people under house arrest sooner. With supreme irony, the National Union of Journalists has launched a campaign to persuade the Government to bail out newspapers, all of which have suffered steep falls in revenue since the lockdown was imposed. Among the NUJ’s suggestions is a “windfall tax” on tech giants. I’ve got a better idea, comrades. Why not encourage your members to scrutinise the Government’s management of the coronavirus crisis more carefully and question the policy of locking down the country with no end in sight? Incidentally, if you feel like subsidising Lockdown Sceptics, click here. Constantly updating this site, moderating your comments and writing this daily update is proving very time-consuming!
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If Caswell is right then antibodies would not show up in 50% of the population even though they have been exposed to the virus. Is there any chance of finding an epidemiologist or three to comment on his hypothesis and conjectures? They seem very promising in explaining emerging data but do any epidemiologists think they’re plausible? I hope yes.
Different types of immune response. See my full comment.
Awesome work. Thank you Toby. Please keep going.
Unfortunately the Charles de Gaulle ship saw nearly a 60% infection rate: https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/coronavirus-bilan-definitif-de-1046-cas-sur-le-charles-de-gaulle-20200418
So the Caswell theory is out
“Près de 50% des cas sont asymptomatiques. Entre 20 et 30 marins sont actuellement hospitalisés, selon les jours, et un major d’une cinquantaine d’années est en réanimation.” Quoting from said article.
His model does allow for higher infection rate in some contexts eg high population density with high interaction, such as on a naval vessel. He includes weaker forms of resistance than antibody immunity that will be overcome in certain conditions. So it’s not invalidated by this data, but it obviously needs to account for it. In my view the model needs to be looked at by an epidemiologist or two to give an idea whether from their point of view its assumptions are plausible.
At last – someone has noticed – and has been brave enough to publish – the observation that many counties on the infamous exponential death curve graph are following almost identical trajectories – regardless of the domestic measures taken.
Further, the possibility that the virus might actually burn itself out after eight or so weeks is something we should be paying close attention to.
The idea that we are all going to live in a world of semi-permanent distancing until a vaccine is ready is fanciful. By that time those that haven’t starved to death or been killed by previously very treatable medical conditions, will have lost the will to live anyway.
My argument for a while has been the only way to “protect the NHS” is a dead population – from starvation, suicide or dying at home from heart attacks or strokes.
Well said.
When the economy crashes will those affected be able to sue the experts who have been advising the government?
Thank you – this website is a godsend.
It’s horrifying and I wonder who answered the poll. On twitter there’s a heavy cohort of indefinite stay-at-homers who want to live isolated ‘until a vaccine’. Elsewhere there’s growing dissent (e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism which has gone from a few hundred to over 3k subscribers in just over a week).
Re: the petition: “We’re checking this petition.
5 people have already supported Robert Kok’s petition.
We need to check it meets the petition standards before we publish it.
Please try again in a few days.”
I’m pretty sure other similar petitions have got as far as 5 signatures and then been denied. Hopefully this one goes through. Please link to it again here and/or on Twitter if it goes live!
I don’t want to appear overly sceptical or cynical but I wondered about the petition too and why I couldn’t sign it.
Interestingly the petition has been removed from the Parliament website…
I’ve never considered protesting once in my life. I’ve always dismissed it as a component in the illusion of freedom, giving those who partake the illusion of choice.
But even that illusion has been forcibly removed, and now I feel compelled to engage in some kind of protest. I’m so ashamed of my countrymen. I simply cannot associate with them anymore. What an earth can be done? Where is everybody?
Totally agree. Seems to have been a collective loss of backbone and rationality!
Anyone read this. Thoughts?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/16/sweden-has-shown-not-tackle-coronavirus-fights-now-save-face/
Locked down Denmark is easing restrictions, moving towards the Swedish regime rather than vice versa. Illuminating:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-denmark/denmark-to-ease-restrictions-next-week-after-coronavirus-lockdown-idUKKBN21O2LD
I read your article in the Telegraph today and agree. I don’t wish ill on anyone but am shocked at how the government could impose on us what amounts to a police state overnight with little or no opposition. These measures, and the complete lack of focus on more usual (but just as serious) health issues will cause us all more problems in the long run than Covid19. Glad to have finally found a place where people are dissenting from the official madness.
It’s not really correct to speak of weaker immunity. The first response of the immune system to an invading pathogen is mediated by what’s called innate immunity. Innate immunity is not pathogen-specific. It is a range of bodily defences that include local inflammation, fever and the engagement of cells called Natural Killer Cells to literally consume the pathogen – as well as others I won’t go into. It’s complex!
Healthy young people and adults under ~40 seem to be able to see off the virus with just their innate immunity. This is good, it means the virus didn’t present much of a threat to them. They don’t have antibodies only because they didn’t need to produce them. They are not “immune” in the antibody sense, but they aren’t particularly vulnerable either.
If the innate immune system doesn’t defeat the pathogen, that’s when the adaptive immune system kicks in and the chain of events that leads to antibody production is kicked off.
Hope that helps.
Thanks that’s very helpful (do you have a medical background? You seem very knowledgeable). If a large proportion of the population are fending off the virus in this way (in most contexts, clearly not on the Charles de Gaulle) then it would explain the low infection rates and antibody rates we are seeing in most of the surveys. It would also mean aiming for herd immunity defined in terms 60% having antibodies is completely the wrong aim and government policy needs to be urgently recalibrated to reflect this, recognising the large role played by innate immunity.
I’m a healthcare professional in general practice, I have medical training but I’m not an expert.
Commend your website and work Toby. The Dutch figures though may actually support aspects of the points being made in the other studies cited. If 3% of the Dutch population has antibodies and is presumed to be have been infected, that adds approximately 514,000 to the total infections. And the fatality rate plummets considerably with 3601 deaths for 545,000 infections (adding the 3% to today’s count of total cases in the Netherlands, not quite right due to the time lag, but serves as an approximation) rather than 3601 deaths for 31,589 cases. Am in Sri Lanka under “curfew”, and a Dutch mate was cheering this finding on the above basis.
Good work Toby – really appreciated. Hope that petition goes through very soon.
My problem with the lockdown is that what we are told to do is actually wrong and is making the situation worse. Stay at home and stay indoors simply spreads the disease as it transmits by attaching itself to surfaces to be picked up by us. Unlike other diseases like malaria, it is not transmitting through the air. Surely, therefore, we should be encouraged to be outside in the fresh air where the chances of picking it up, if social distancing is maintained, is tiny. The message should be ‘stay near home, get in the fresh air as much as possible, with social distancing, and if you have to be indoors, open the windows to let fresh air circulate’. Did we learn nothing from the cruise ships? Confining people to air-conditioned cabins simply spread the virus like wildfire, yet ships who encouraged passengers to be out on deck or on their balconies avoided the disease! And now we are making the same mistake with care homes – is it any surprise that our infection and death rates are so high?
The Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine has now officially revised it’s estimation of the Covid infection fatality rate to 0.1 – 0.36%
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
The petition is ‘not available’….
I seriously doubt that NHS workers are healthier than the rest of the population. NHS doctors are known to have higher rates of alcohol consumption.