[Apologies for the very long post. I wanted to get this off my chest, so to speak. It’s rather self-indulgent but I hope a few might find a useful train of thought here]

Whilst I hate the dreadful qualifier “speaking as” in general, it’s quite relevant here because, despite speaking as a scientist (theoretical physicist), I don’t want to suggest I have any particular expertise on medical matters. I am quite likely to be wrong on some things, but I wanted to outline the reasons why I think our approach to the global pandemic has been misguided. I don’t think I’m going to be saying anything new here, but I do hope my train of thinking through this pandemic will be useful, or provoke some new thought.

I always encourage my students to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Of course, that’s a rather hackneyed instruction but it’s important, nevertheless. Drilling down to the detail, looking at how the pixels vary, can be a fine thing, but it’s so very important to put that detailed understanding into a wider context. So, what’s the bigger picture with covid19?

The first thing we absolutely must do is to place this new virus strain into its proper context. It is not some radically new out-of-nowhere plague, but rather a close relative of viruses we already know about and have harboured and sniffled with for thousands of years. This is important because it would be plausible to suggest, based on this, that a certain percentage of the population will be naturally immune at least partly because of humanity’s previous exposure to this virus’ cousins. And this is indeed the case.

How dangerous is it? In asking that question we come to the first issue; that of category error. If you get your information from the media, or government spokespersons, you could be forgiven for thinking the world is facing some global catastrophe approaching the pant-staining terror of an Ebola outbreak. Every object must be sanitized. God forbid you pay with cash – you might kill someone. Every person is a walking biohazard who could destroy you if a single molecule of their stray breath manages to find its way to your nostril. Worse still, if you don’t wear a mask you might wipe out an entire city!

Forgive the rhetorical exaggeration above, but the point I’m making is that we’ve been largely conditioned to accept a disproportionate response and I believe this is due to the fundamental category error we’ve been encouraged to make. We’ve been subtly, and non-too subtly, encouraged to place this virus closer to the “Ebola” category in our thinking than the “Flu” category. The virus is clearly much, much closer to the flu end of the spectrum of threat than the Ebola end. Yet if you’re anything like me, there’s still that residual, and ridiculous, pernicious thought of danger that creeps in when you pass someone not wearing a mask. And that’s even with me not wearing a mask outside.

Consider the following. In the 2017/2018 Winter season there were 50,100 excess Winter deaths in the UK mostly attributed to a flu outbreak. This is according to the Office of National Statistics (ONS). We didn’t lock down. We didn’t socially distance. We didn’t wear masks. We didn’t restrict travel. We didn’t give fines to people sitting on a park bench by themselves. We didn’t treat other people, or objects, as bio-weapons. We didn’t close our borders, or close businesses. We didn’t drastically restrict the movements of healthy people. We didn’t implement a program of mass testing, or spend billions on tracking and tracing people. We didn’t close the schools and colleges.

Fast forward to 2020. We’ve had more deaths this year from covid19 so far. About 27% more, at least if we go with deaths listing covid19 as a primary or secondary factor on the death certificate. We’ve been told that all of the restrictive measures I listed above are absolutely necessary to combat this new virus, but they clearly are not considered necessary when there is an outbreak of flu. Are extra measures for covid19 necessary? Possibly. Are such widespread and restrictive measures necessary? This I very much doubt. It is the sheer magnitude of the difference in response to covid19 and flu that I question. It seems neither proportionate, nor entirely rational.

I see this as the consequence of the fundamental category error we’ve been bamboozled into. Instead of “if you’re ill, stay at home” we’ve moved to a model more like “if you’re alive, stay at home”. Does the actual threat posed by covid19 really warrant such a massively different response to the way we’ve treated any previous outbreak of a respiratory virus? Even people who might be described as within the lockdown skeptic community will argue for measures such as social distancing (irrespective of whether one is actually ill or not). Maybe I’m just an obnoxious Let-it-Ripper who wants to exterminate granny, but I would even question this tacit assumption that social distancing of overwhelmingly healthy people is necessary.

And this brings me neatly to my next concern. Here is where my medical ignorance will shine through most clearly. I’ve never heard anyone say something like “I have the flu, but I have no symptoms”. Yet with covid19 we are facing a virus in which there would appear to be zillions of asymptomatic spreaders all over the place. Forgive my skepticism here, but I’m just not buying it – certainly not on the scale that is alleged. I might be very wrong here. I will admit that.

But 2020 has flipped so many things 180 degrees as far as I can see. We now have a deadly virus that most people get no symptoms from. It’s also a rather clever virus that will affect protestors differently based on the political content of a protest. It’s pretty damned good at timekeeping too; it has a siesta until 10pm and activates again after this. But only in pubs. More seriously, perhaps, is our new sense of what to do when a disease outbreak occurs. The new “normal” being to put everyone under house arrest (or simply weld their doors shut).

The bigger picture here does indicate, to me at least, that our response to this virus is somewhere on the broad spectrum between somewhat unbalanced and outright deranged. But what about some of the details? What do we see when we focus a little more closely on some of the key features?

I’m going to run with the ONS figures for England and Wales up to 10th July. That’s when I stopped doing my statistical analyses because there was no point continuing. I already had enough data to draw firm conclusions and the pandemic was largely over by then. The figures are before the government adjusted them downwards to account for all those people struck by a bus dying of covid19.

Of the very nearly 14 million people in England and Wales who are below the age of 20, fifteen had died with covid19 on the death certificate up to 10th July. Yes, you read that right; fifteen. 15 out of 14 million. That’s about 23% of the population who we could describe as barely susceptible. Of course, if you subscribe to the theory of the overabundance of asymptomatic spreaders, or maybe those rare mythical beasts known as super-spreaders, you will see these young folk as mini bio-weapons factories spreading clouds of deadly virus wherever they have the temerity to breathe – like in schools.

As you get older and crankier, like me, the situation does become a little more gloomy. I’m in the 50 to 60 age range. Are my kids going to reap the benefit of my life insurance policies because of covid19? I hate to disappoint my children, but they’ll probably have to extract money from me in other ways. In this age range up to the 10th of July there were 2302 deaths with covid19 on the certificate out of nearly 8 million people in this age range. At the time I estimated that 10% of the UK population had been infected. I now believe that to be an underestimate, but let’s stick with that figure. With this percentage of infections my chances of becoming a covid fatality, if I caught the disease, work out to be about 0.29%, or about 3 deaths in every 1,000 infections.

Even back in July it was abundantly clear we had massively overreacted.

As we get older still, and bits and pieces stop working quite so well, things do get a little more scary. In my mum’s age bracket of 80 to 90 there are about 2.4 million people. In this age range (and assuming a 10% infection rate as before) the chance of succumbing to the virus if you catch it are around 8% based on the published data up to 10th July. This means that for every 100 octogenarians who contract covid19 around 92 of them will survive.

But 8% of 2.4 million people is still not far off two hundred thousand – and that’s definitely not a figure we can ignore or make light of. The notion that we need to protect granny becomes quite stark when faced with these kinds of numbers. What do we do about that?

Ever since the first lockdown began I’ve been arguing that we need to protect the vulnerable as much as possible whilst letting those with orders of magnitude less vulnerability carry on as before. About 83% of the population of England and Wales is below the age of 70. Even on the ONS figures I’ve been using and accepting my underestimate of a 10% infection rate those in the 60 to 70 age bracket will experience about 8 deaths for every 1,000 infections based on the data up to 10th July. So why couldn’t we have protected the much more vulnerable 17% and let the majority protect jobs, livelihoods and the economy?

It goes without saying that nobody should be forced to accept a risk we might deem to be acceptable should they not wish to do so. If you’re in your sixties even a 0.8% risk might seem too much. But doesn’t this work the other way round too? Did we ask granny whether it was ok to be forced to be protected against a risk we deemed unacceptable? Did we ask granny whether they wished us to assume this role of protector?

I’m using old data purely to emphasize that even 5 or 6 months ago it could be established that the rationale for a nationwide lockdown of mostly healthy people was a palace of problematic protection built on suspect sands. I knew this back in March and April of this year, and was only more and more convinced by July. So why did the experts not? Was I missing something? What were they seeing that I wasn’t?

Back then world governments and a majority of the population jumped on the lockdown bandwagon. We must protect our health services from being overwhelmed, they said. It’s a plausible argument, but did the lockdown strategy really do what was claimed? Many people look at the mortality curve and claim it shows the efficacy of lockdowns. After all, deaths peaked and fell and so, clearly, lockdowns achieved their goal? It’s a lovely plausible present all wrapped up in the ribbon of reasonableness. Unfortunately, it’s not actually backed up by the evidence – and we should have known it back in April.

The clue is in the dynamics. Go to the government’s coronavirus pages and take a look at the mortality curve by date of death. The solid line is the 7-day rolling average. It’s not at all obvious from the figure but the dynamics drastically changed just around 31st March/1st April. That’s only a week after lockdown; far too early for it to have had any noticeable effect on the curve. What you need to be looking at here is the second derivative, the acceleration if you will. In terms of a car we started off with our foot fully on the gas, around the 26th March we started to ease off on the gas, and by the 1st April we had started to apply the brakes. The 2nd derivative goes negative at this point. Deaths are increasing but the rate at which deaths are increasing is starting to decline. At this point it was inevitable that the mortality curve would peak and come back down. Once again, this is before any lockdown could possibly have had an effect.

Here it is useful to remark on the shape of the mortality curve. The shapes are remarkably similar for the same climate regions. In our climate we saw a very rapid rise in mortality followed by a slower decline and a long period over the Summer months with very little mortality. The closest thing we have to a control experiment is Sweden – and they saw the same shape of curve with perhaps a slightly longer period of decline. The similarity of shape, independent of lockdown severity, suggests that the shape itself is baked in to the biology rather than any result of policy.

The principal benefit of lockdowns is that they slow the rate of infection – and this must be true. After all, if we really did lock everyone in their houses for 2 months with sufficient food and water it has to be true that the infection rate would drop to zero, or as close to zero as makes no difference. The question is really by how much they slow the rate. Just because at one extreme a lockdown is effective it does not follow that doing a kind of 50% version of an extreme lockdown will be 50% effective. The effectiveness could be a highly non-linear function of lockdown severity and could drop very rapidly with only a slight or moderate shift from an extreme lockdown. This I do not know, but I suspect it must be true.

We’ve all heard the argument that lockdowns save lives, but that was really never their intended purpose at the outset. Their purpose was to change the infection rate, to slow things down, so as not to overwhelm the NHS. What we actually saw during the 1st lockdown was the NHS transformed into something more closely resembling the National Covid Service. Routine and not-so-routine procedures and investigations were cancelled, people stayed at home instead of getting things like chest pains, or suspicious lumps checked out. Right there, without considering any other effect of the lockdown, we have a cost in terms of extra loss of life caused directly by the lockdown. This isn’t covered by the facile “putting a price on granny’s life” argument that is often trotted out when considering lockdown costs – it is a real cost in terms of human lives.

That’s not the only important cost, as we all well know, but no matter how many times we raise the issue of lockdown costs the government seems curiously muted. We’re drenched in covid19 statistics and projections, but official statistics on lockdown impacts are somewhat rarer. I understand that the government, seemingly grudgingly, admitted their projection for lockdown loss of life was about 200,000. It’s hard to trust any government projection any more, but we can at least see why the scientific advisors were so keen to push the ludicrous modelling that suggested covid19 deaths would reach 4,000 deaths per day this Winter. You have to make your projected impacts of covid worse than the projected impact of lockdown.

I haven’t even begun to talk about economic impacts; business closures, livelihoods destroyed, massive debt and likely years of future extra taxation. Even before we get to these impacts, just in terms of costs in lives, we’re seeing plenty of holes in the case for lockdown. And what about other costs? The disruption to education, the degradation of mental health, the elevation of stress and worry caused by financial impacts, the loss of personal liberties, the disruption and degradation of everyday, normal human interaction.

Even if we fully accept the premise that lockdowns work and save lives from covid, and I do not, it’s clear that lockdowns carry a significant cost. There are no cost-free options here. But why haven’t we been presented with the options and an analysis of the pros and cons? It’s like we were all captured in some mass psychosis. I feel like we’re in that scene from “The Mummy” where the controlled zombie-like followers are chanting “Imhotep”, except we’re all shuffling forward mindlessly chanting “lockdown”. When did we decide that lockdowns were an entirely reasonable, proportionate, and rational response to a virus that, on current estimates, looks like it has a survivability rate of over 99.7%?

The case for lockdowns is far from clear. This is before we’ve even had a chance to examine the question of models, masks, mass testing, PCR tests, vaccines, the so-called 2nd wave, community protection, longcovid, mutations, or the credibility of objects and surfaces being a significant source of infection.

There are just so many things about the narrative surrounding this pandemic that simply don’t properly stack up when viewed coolly and rationally. The case for the first lockdown, as I hope I’ve convinced you, was a long way from being iron-clad. The case for a 2nd lockdown is almost non-existent.