What an outstanding contribution.
Your point about typical weekly mortality rates struck a chord with me.
I have family members who speak disbelievingly about the number of people dying in hospitals. It's as if they never realised that people died in larger numbers in the winter. To some, it's as if death was invented in 2020.
The conclusion? Lockdowns do work.
Define "work"
What metrics are you using to determine success?
Lockdowns certainly have "worked" to increase deaths due to cancers and heart problems that went undetected. They've worked to disrupt our children's education. They've worked to put the country into massive debt. They've worked to increase unemployment and to close small businesses. They've worked to make us fearful of our fellow human beings; to view them as potential biohazards. They've worked to make us obsessed with cleanliness. And there are many other examples of just how much lockdowns have "worked".
But I'm guessing you don't have any of these things in mind. You're just focusing on a very narrow definition, a very simple metric, to adjudicate success; achieving zero cases.
Big deal. That's easy to do if your government is authoritarian enough. Zero cases could be achieved if you simply shot everyone - but I don't think anyone would think "success" in this case.
The point here is not so much that the virus has been temporarily controlled (and it is only temporary) - the point is at what cost? Has it been worth it?
Even if lockdowns "worked" beautifully (and they don't) - even if they were the best thing in disease prevention since mouldy sliced bread - we still have to ask this question and others. Has it been worth it? Why don't we do this for flu? Is covid so very much worse than flu that we needed to go from doing nothing to full-on lockdown crazy?
RR we keep saying it..some people want to hear it some dont..a good post that needs to he said over and over..
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In the spirit of Newton's Third Law, please allow me to offer an alternative opinion, one based on facts and irrefutable evidence.
This is an article that appears on the website of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners describing in detail the actions and effects of a strict and well-applied lockdown in the state of Victoria in Australia.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/ending-the-second-wave-how-did-victoria-get-to-zer
Victoria is a state comparable in size to the UK, with a population of 6.4 million, a million or so more than Scotland. It also happens to be the state that I live in, so I have first-hand experience of the lockdown in question and can therefore attest to the assertions made in the piece.
The conclusion? Lockdowns do work.
I read the article and my first reaction was the person writing it has absolutely zero understanding of even basic epidemiology, the basic physics of infectious agents spread, or the very well documented history of the last century and a half of epidemics.
The lockdown in Victoria "worked" in exactly the same way the Collectivization of Agriculture worked in the Soviet Union in the 1920's and 1930's. The official statistics looked great, they said by all the official measures everything had improved enormously, meanwhile the nation starved to death by the million.
Unless the State Premier has discovered a therapeutic treatment for viral infections that actually cures SARs CoV 2 infections, has warehouses full of safe effective SARs CoV 2 vaccines that have twice the field efficacy rate in the general population of the very best Influenza vaccines, has a clinical active infection test for SARs CoV 2 that gives 95% plus positive rates, 5% false positive rates, the actual science is and always has been that in 5 years time the city of Melbourne will have exactly the same current general population infection rate for SARs CoV 2 (around 0.3%) as every other equivalent city in the world. And in the previous five years the city will have had almost exactly the same morality rate for SARs 2 viral pneumonia as every other equivalent city.
That is the actual science.
Epidemics of novel viruses last years so a few months short term impedance of its spread has zero effect ion on the final outcome. Zero.
To be perfectly blunt anyone who writes about "success" when it is purely a short term effect on a very long term process that lasts many years has absolutely no idea what they are writing about. The article was written by a general features / lifestyles journalist with no substantive by-lines to her credit who has no background in science. Basically a junior level stringer.
I think the difficulty with this whole issue of lockdown/no lockdown - does it work or doesn't it, is difficult to discuss meaningfully as it polarises opinion. Anyone who argues against lockdown is assumed to be a covid-denier, a heartless advocate of the herd immunity model who thinks that because they are currently fit and well, we should let the 'weak' die....
Looking at the problem in this way is unhelpful but I do understand why, on the face of it, lockdown could appear to be the best and only solution in the absence of a readily available vaccine. Until you consider the bigger picture....
Using a back-of-the-fag-packet calculation and (yes I admit it) lots of assumptions, I would have to conclude that around 50% of the quoted deaths 'due to covid' have actually been deaths in someone who incidentally has tested positive for covid during the same episode of ill-health (a very different scenario). Of those who have actually died of covid or due to complications of covid, I would expect at least 50% are patients who due to old age and/or previously existing chronic ill-health would have died within the same 12 month period anyway (this appears to be borne out by the relatively small increase in the annual death rate despite the 'pandemic'). Being generous, therefore, we are probably talking about 15-20 thousand excess deaths at most in the UK related to covid 19 since the first case was detected.
It is possible, but by no means certain, that every one of these deaths could have been prevented by insisting from day one that every single person in the UK self-isolated (no work, no meeting, no going to hospital, no shopping even for food, no home deliveries, no care at home) until the virus was undetectable in the population. Eventually covid would be wiped out and there would have been no covid related deaths. There would, however, have been millions of deaths due to not eating, not receiving medical treatment, suicide due to loneliness etc. etc. etc. This is an extreme and unrealistic example, I accept.... It is, however, very similar in many ways to the current, unspoken, trade-off which we are committing to by enacting lockdown.
Is it right to try to prevent a few thousand deaths due to covid at the expense of (probably) hundreds of thousands of early deaths in the coming months/years due to preventable causes, a national debt which will last decades, a breakdown of many societal norms, a loss of many hundreds of businesses, a massive increase in levels of anxiety and fear of our fellow citizens and the relinquishing of basic freedoms which have been fought for over hundreds of years. In my opinion, it is not.....
