Before the vaccines arrived, lockdown proponents argued that the only way to prevent large numbers of Covid deaths was by completely suppressing viral transmission. A focused protection strategy, they maintained, was just not workable.
The basic argument is as follows. Because the virus is so transmissible, and society is so interconnected, it would have been impossible to protect vulnerable people if we’d allowed community transmission to proceed unchecked. Without a lockdown, the virus would inevitably have found its way into hospitals and care homes, leading to lots of deaths.
It’s not an unreasonable argument, but I don’t buy it. (And let’s put aside the fact that even if lockdown does prevent more Covid deaths than focused protection, the total costs almost certainly outweigh the benefits.)
We already know that places like Utah, Sweden and South Dakota, which refused to lock down last year, did not do substantially worse than places that did lock down. We can argue about exactly how to do the comparison; the fact is that none of the dire predictions made for these locations actually came to pass.
But is there an example of a country that achieved focused protection? Denmark might well be the closest. If we zoom-in on the second wave, and compare the country’s infection rate to that of the U.K., it isn’t dramatically lower:
Assuming the numbers are indeed comparable (which I’ll admit is a big assumption), Denmark saw 30% fewer infections between August of 2020 and May of 2021. Denmark did do more testing over this time period, but the U.K. had a higher share of positive tests.
If the lockdowners’ argument against focused protection is right, we’d expect Denmark to have had only 30% fewer deaths than the U.K. during the second wave; or at most, perhaps 50% fewer. After all, the country’s infection rate peaked at over 600 per million.
But this isn’t what we find. According to Karlinsky and Kobak, Denmark has had only 1% excess mortality since the pandemic began; the U.K.’s figure, by contrast, is 20%.
Now, more than half of Britain’s excess mortality was sustained in the first wave (which Denmark managed to avoid). But suppose that eight percentage points of the 20% were sustained in the second wave.
This would mean that Denmark’s deaths were not 30% or 50% lower than the U.K.’s, but almost 90% lower. Despite experiencing a moderately high infection rate in the winter, Denmark managed to keep deaths to a minimum.
Note: I’m not suggesting the country didn’t lock down; it did. (Though there was never a stay-at-home order, and the average stringency index was much lower than in Britain). My point is that some degree of focused protection apparently is achievable. There’s no necessary relationship between the infection rate and the death toll.
It doesn’t follow that Britain could have done as well as Denmark, which tends to finish at the top of every international league table. But with a bit of ingenuity, we could have done better than we did – in terms of both lives saved and collateral damage avoided.
The recent House of Commons report described the U.K.’s initial approach as “fatalistic”. But what was really fatalistic was assuming the only way to stop people dying of Covid was shuttering the economy and throwing civil liberties out the window.
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Why no article on Trieste? Or Italy for that matter? Very significant things happening there!
infection rates based on cases (test false positives anyone?)……… nuff said.
“But with a bit of ingenuity, we could have done better than we did”
A bowl of mashed potato in 10 Downing Street could have done better than we did.
The point is that doing fuck all would have been better. Besides which, we don’t actually know how ‘we did’ in terms of SARS-CoV-2. We do, however, know about the incidental chaos and damage, because 18 months of our lives were stolen in pursuit of a chimera.
100% agree
I think if we’d have told older people that avoiding crowds might be an idea for a few weeks and carried on then this would have been over in April and hardly anyone would have died
it was the panic that made us send infected people to care homes, build hospitals that would never be used and spend the entire NHS budget on testing healthy people who are at no risk
I very much suspect the same number of deaths would have occurred whatever we did or didn’t do but of course it is impossible to know. The difference is that lockdowns are now lauded as the reason they weren’t higher but if the exact same numbers had occurred without lockdown then Johnson and the Conservatives would have been toast. The likes of Ferguson would have regularly wheeled out ‘models’ demonstrating how many lives would have been ‘saved’ with a lockdown.
I guess the downtick comes from the bowl of mashed potato?
H/she just can’t leave it alone. I have this image in my mind. Anyone else?
Maybe the HIGNFY ‘Tub of Lard’ can make a comeback?
Isn’t that what is in 10 Downing Street?
We’re still talking about this as though lockdowns were intended to save lives.
That gets an eye roll emoji from me.
I love the way lockdown enthusiasts like to think that transmission is broken despite all the things that we need to at least survuve still happening, which mostly rely on interraction between people.
Yes as though we were all hermetically sealed inside plastic bubbles as soon as Boris Johnson decreed it.
I knew this had been written by Noah as soon as I got to this :
“It’s not an unreasonable argument”
Oh dear! No it’s not! By all reasonable assessment of the evidence, this is precisely what it is. Bluntly – it’s a barmy idea in the context of this non-pandemic.
Then we have an argument based on PCR+ results.
Of course, the conclusion is right – but only at the end of hat-doffing to loony-toons ideas. This tentative semi-conceding ramble really does not cut the mustard when it comes to demolishing ideas that only exist by virtue of mass-hypnosis and psychosis.
“Concede the language and you concede the argument”
The problem with articles such as this is that it concedes the notion that we were facing a pandemic when in actual fact, as all cause mortality figures have proven, we weren’t even facing a rough “flu type season.
At the time the criminal WHO announced a pandemic there were only a few hundred deaths allocated to covid
Thereafter the whole fraud took off. We need to be discussing the numerous frauds not the do’s and don’ts of lockdown.
Such a shame that we haven’t moved beyond arguing whether or not ‘the virus’ is as deadly as they want us to believe. This has gone on for almost 2 frickin years now – how many more charts and graphs are we going to analyse while our freedoms are stolen?
Does anyone on this site know of a person who died because of covid 19? And can they be sure it was covid-19 and not the flu>pneumonia? Just because the doctor put it on their death certificate, doesn’t mean it was so. There are too many instances of relatives challenging this and finding it was put there ‘by mistake’.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘covid-19’ is code for the transition to authoritarian rule. There is no proof covid-19 as a virus exists.
Covid-19 is the illness caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2.
SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to exist over 4 million times by laborious “whole gene sequencing” of human cells infected with the virus (not PCR samples) and in scientific terms (not the dictionary definition) has been “isolated” many times.
The criticism of the Corman-Drosten et al PCR Test has been totally rejected by the scientific community point by point.
Some healthy people have died from Covid-19 caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 but nowhere near the numbers they are suggesting.
The notion that the virus doesn’t exist is ridiculous.
You are correct to suggest that Covid has been blown out of all proportion for the transition to authoritarian rule.
You clearly didn’t pay attention to the gust of my comment. I’m beyond sick and tired of arguing with people like you. Normally I’d ask for evidence and sources for your quotations but I really don’t give a fuck.
And I’m sick and tired of giving evidence to people like you that viruses exist.
I’ve paid money to Toby Young to run this site and ever since it’s inception there has never been one article that suggests the virus doesn’t exist.
Why don’t you take your ridiculous theory to the David Icke site where you will find many like minded people.
Of course viruses exist. However, this one has not been proven. It has never been isolated. Here is a well argued blog on the subject.
…..
I spend most of my time these days avoiding fraudsters. I’m not going to run to one of the worst of them whenever a normy demands it.
“Well argued blog”?
Jon Rappaport is almost as bad as David Icke.
Viruses are complex entities smaller than the wavelength of visible light (400-700nm) which are only evident when they attach to another cell and therefore virologists have always known they cannot be “isolated” in the dictionary sense of the word.
Partial computer generated sequencing was done early on but since then the full 30,000 bases of SARS-CoV-2 have been laboriously “whole gene sequenced” many times around the world. To date virologists have taken over 4 million human samples of the virus (not from PCR Tests), gene sequenced them in labs using different types of machines and uploaded the results, which are the same gene sequence as the original computer enhanced ones (apart from the variants) to the GISAID Initiative. https://www.gisaid.org/
If you have a million human cells without a virus and one human cell with a virus then Virologists are happy that they have “isolated” the virus. It may not satisfy the dictionary sense of the word and satisfy people with little understanding of virology but the virus in scientific terms has been isolated.
When the “whole” gene sequence of the healthy cell is known and the “whole” gene sequence of the virus is known they are again two separate entities.
The question asked to certain institutions was worded in a particular way asking for proof that viruses have been purified and isolated without any other particles. Viruses do not work that way, they are only active when attacking another cell so it is impossible to “isolate” a virus without another cell being present. Virologists know this but it doesn’t stop them agreeing that viruses exist. The people who worded the question are using semantics to try to prove that viruses don’t exist and it is not science. That is why the institutions said they do not have “purified and isolated viral samples”.
You do know that the creator of the PCR test categorically stated it was never intended to be used to detect infectious diseases and should not be used thus…therefore rejection of criticism of it is meaningless even though it suits your own argument…
Of course I know that.
He also said it was incredibly accurate at detecting viruses but not if they were infectious or not.
This doesn’t detract from the fact that his PCR test is very specific in detecting SARS-CoV-2.
The problem, especially when amplified in MSM circles, has always been an extreme Plan A or Plan B, most of time at opposite ends of the spectrum. No nuance, well, because it doesn’t create controversy – i.e. it, to them anyway, does make headlines and thus sell newspapers/achieve high viewing figures.
The problem is that this sort of ‘extreme’ think drouns out the often rational thought and questioning that mostly gets to the best result – not necessarily a ‘happy medium’, but, after close scrutiny of the situation and all options, selecting the best bits and forming a coherent, and more importantly, a flexible plan that can cope with (often) an emerging situation.
Unfortunately governments/civil servants and the media are poor at this. As we also see, many academics now are used based on their celebrity status and political power they wield rather than their (democnstrated) technical expertise, sound judgement under pressure and ability to effectively work with others in different fields to come to a balanced policy to advise ministers of.
The other problem, especially in the UK is that many people – myself included, just don’t trust the authorities to produce reliable/accurate/genuine figures, and the supposed organisations who ‘review’ said figures are just other civil service/Quango colleagues, most of whom appear to share similar world and geopolicial views, hence they too cannot be trusted, especially as they have, IMHO, ‘form’ for producing bogus data, as already demonstrated on numerous occasions during the last 18 months.
Speaking from a personal perspective, after all this time, you’d think I would know someone personally (not just read about someone in the news) who even has contracted COVID, let alone been hospitalised or died from it, given ‘how many’ have had it (nearly 8.5M people according to ‘the figures’) and died?
I suspect the high proportion of fattys in UK (and USA) is still the major issue in driving high levels of covid deaths compared to places like Denmark.
Although why the rest of us who look after ourselves with appropriate diet and exercise should be restricted because of all the lazy fat f**kers is beyond me.
I’d go further, such people we now understand, are susceptible to many diseases and health conditions requiring expensive and time consuming healthcare….that everyone else has to fund…I cant help thinking that if some kind of self funding system was in place these people would suddenly take better care of themselves.
Fully agree. It is a massive paradox that the people who exercise regularly, consume a good diet and work hard at those things now get punished both in normal times (your point) and now by having their freedom withdrawn under covid restrictions. Shouldn’t the onus be on the unhealthy minority to stay out of the way if they feel genuinely vulnerable?