If there was ever a time that ‘Zero Covid’ – the goal of eliminating Covid altogether – made sense, it was when the virus first appeared in Wuhan. Had the Chinese authorities raised the alarm sooner, and scrambled to contain the virus, perhaps there never would have been a pandemic.
But there was one. Covid has now been with us for two full years (perhaps longer). Hundreds of millions have been infected, and even greater numbers have received the vaccine. At this point, you might say, ‘Zero Covid’ is a non-starter.
Yet people are still pushing the idea. A recent article in the Daily Kos – a left-wing news site in the U.S. – argues that “COVID-19 must be eliminated, not become endemic, if America is to survive”.
Is this just a case where the headline is much more radical than the article itself? No – the one thing of which the author can’t be accused is attempting to downplay his position. “We cannot live with endemic COVID-19,” he writes, “Hang on, let me say that again: We. Cannot. Live. With. Endemic. COVID-19.”
Let’s consider his arguments, one by one. The author begins by comparing Covid to the flu, noting that the former is much more contagious. Whereas seasonal influenza has a basic reproduction number of 1.4, he notes, “COVID-19 has a R0 that is over five. Maybe as high as 10.”
I don’t know where he got the figure of ‘10’ from, but even if you take the higher estimates of Covid’s R0 at face value, they correspond to circumstances in which the population was immunologically naïve.
Once enough people have caught the virus at least once, the number still susceptible to infection will be substantially reduced. Not to zero, of course, as even natural immunity wanes – but enough to forestall the kind of transmission levels we saw in the spring of 2020.
Note: this is evident not just from the protective effect of natural immunity, but also from the declining transmission advantage of new variants. As immunity to each new variant rises (particularly among the subset of individuals who’re most likely to infect others), the effective reproductive number correspondingly declines.
The author then claims that a world with endemic Covid will be one where health care is much more expensive, due to demands placed on the system by constant surges of new Covid patients. Here again, however, he ignores the impact of natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
“Endemic COVID-19,” he writes, “would behave exactly the same as epidemic COVID-19: in surges, waves, or spikes.” Would it? What seems far more likely is that endemic Covid would not behave in this way. At the very least, any “surges, waves, or spikes” will be smaller and less deadly than those observed during the epidemic phase of the disease.
The author’s next argument is that, even once Covid becomes endemic, we’ll still see a lot of deaths. But as before, he fails to take account of immunity. “If the level of COVID-19 fatalities could be dropped to just 0.5%,” he writes, “then the rate of deaths would be “just” 160,000 people a year.”
Yet ‘0.5%’ is an implausibly high estimate of the IFR for a world where Covid is endemic. In a recent Twitter thread, Professor Francois Balloux used the figure of 0.1%, adding that even this was “probably far too pessimistic”.
The author then invokes the spectre of long Covid, noting that persistent symptoms “are not rare”. However, if he’d referred to the latest estimates from the ONS, he’d know that only 2–3% of patients still report symptoms after 12 weeks, and this is before you factor in widespread immunity.
Even if ‘Zero Covid’ were achievable, which it almost certainly is not, the costs of getting there would be enormous. We’d not only need a massive annual re-vaccination program, but also constant vigilance at the border, as well as large-scale testing in perpetuity.
“Whatever the price of defeating COVID-19 may be,” the Daily Kos article concludes, “it must be paid.” And that more or less sums up the case for, and against, ‘Zero Covid’. For you can’t take a proposal seriously if there’s no estimate of costs.
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The Home Secretary does not decide what the police do. That is decided by a quango called the College of Policing and a trade guild called the Association of Chief Police Officers, or names something like that. Both have been fully taken over by the wokery and Blairism of the past 25 years.
Freemasons might have something to do with senior officers. They have been established for a long time.
I reckon the coppers were better when the freemasons were in charge, at least they were patriots.
I see Enoch Burke has been arrested again in Ireland because he refuses to conform and turn his back on his principles. Much admiration for him because he’s defiant in refusing to be bullied, threatened or to bow down to the wretched gender ideology which is polluting our societies and poses a serious threat to our kids. What a hero this man is, who just happens to expose the unethical and corrupt state of the law at the same time. Ireland’s police and judiciary, much like the UK, are a total disgrace, to put it mildly;
”BREAKING: Teacher Enoch Burke arrested at Wilson’s Hospital School after refusing to endorse and affirm transgender ideology.
Judge Barry O’Donnell, who made almost €400,000 from 2016-2018 representing TUSLA as a barrister, ordered his arrest.
TUSLA is the Irish State ‘Child Protection’ agency, an organisation saturated with LGBT ideology, urging staff recently to learn about cross-dressers and drag performers, and making acceptance of LGBT and transgender ideology a condition for fostering children.
What a mockery to expect Enoch Burke, a Christian teacher, to sit before this man and expect justice.”
https://x.com/EnochBurke/status/1830622162362745233
They would probably make it mandatory to have the jab before adoption. That is what seemed to happen to a mate who was in the adoption process. But I remember his partner was a Carer is that might have played a part. I remember him saying that he had to show that he had the jab — and me being outraged that he found entertaining more than anything.
I suppose Killing 80 year olds in the park is the new scumping or knock a door run is it?
All seems to be accepted as normal these days!
BUT, don’t you dare tweet about it!
https://www.gbnews.com/news/five-children-arrested-dog-walker-park-leicestershire
Are there any Non, Non-crime Hate incidents we can ‘commit’?
Or is it non-crime -hate- non-crimes?
It’s getting confusing.
I can image a principled officer saying, ‘get back to me when you have an actual crime to report because we are rather busy’. and then getting the sack by the Woke paramilitary wing of the Police.
Isn’t theft under £100 now legal by default. Just give the crime number and forget about it!
I remember being astonished to read a book called “The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” by Richard Feynman. —-I discovered that light can be in two places at once.
But I never knew Police Officers had this same remarkable quality. They can be apprehending someone who just wrote a naughty sentence on social media while at the same time arresting someone for carrying a knife or for actually having just plunged a knife into someone. —-Quite remarkable. ——But actually Police Officers are not light beams at all are they? And since they cannot be in two places at once perhaps it is best to be in just the once place and forget all about the naughty sentences.
You can’t use a word like ‘hate’ in this way because it doesn’t take a genius to see that to configure this word thus is essentially an attempt to pretenend to do one thing whilst actually doing another. And there is no place for black magic in our society. Kennedy talked about the perniciousness of secrecy and cited Athens where it was a punishable crime to shy away from difficult controversies. And hatred isn’t an anti-spritual state if properly applied. Perhaps hate the sin but not the sinner is the best formulation.
Peak Orwell Non-Crimes Are Crimes