The Times leads with Nicola Sturgeon’s exit plan for Scotland. “The First Minister published a 26-page ‘framework’ for easing the lockdown and discussed plans for reopening schools, businesses and allowing small gatherings,” it reports. Sturgeon didn’t say when this might happen, but argued there should be a “better balance” between tackling the disease and protecting the economy. In addition, Arlene Foster, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, suggested that lockdown restrictions could be eased at a faster pace there than in the rest of the UK. Guernsey has already put an exit strategy in place, with gardeners, mechanics, estate agents and builders returning to work tomorrow. And in an encouraging sign, various senior Tories praised Sturgeon’s initiative, including Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis and former Chancellor George Osborne who said we need to start talking about “the hard trade-offs”.

According to the Telegraph, Boris will return to work next week (as predicted on this site on Tuesday). Will he make an appearance at the Downing Street press conference on Monday and unveil an exit plan? Sturgeon apparently thinks so. After all, why start talking about her own exit strategy yesterday unless she thinks Boris is about to do likewise? She evidently thinks a big announcement is imminent and wants to make it look as though she bounced the dithering Prime Minster into making a decision. She may be wrong of course, but Boris will have to do something to make it clear he’s back in charge. The holding line – that it’s premature to talk about an exit strategy while deaths are still peaking – won’t survive his return to Downing Street. Once Biggles has recovered from his injuries and is back in the cockpit, people will expect action.

But is the general public ready for a phased exit? One of the things I’ve been puzzling over during this crisis is the willingness of freeborn Englishmen to acquiesce to the greatest suspension of their liberties since the Second World War. And not merely acquiesce – most of them think the Government should go even further. According to an opinion poll published last week, only 6% of people think the current restrictions are “too severe”, while 44% think they’re “not severe enough”. James Kirkup, Director of the Social Market Foundation, has tried to unravel this mystery in UnHerd. One of the points he makes is that the 35% of the English electorate who identity as “very strongly English” are also the most authoritarian, according to research done by Paula Sturridge at Bristol University. “The more English you feel, the more likely you are to say that the state and society should tell people what to do, to make them conform and, when they disobey, to punish them harshly,” he writes. You can read his article here.

Thankfully, not everyone has fallen into lockstep with the new orthodoxy. A letter in today’s Telegraph is a reminder of how unimpressed many older people are by the official response to the crisis. Worth quoting in full:

SIR – Russell Lynch (Business, April 22) is right to warn the Government that to prolong lockdown for the over-70s would be “suicidal politics”.

There is widespread “elderly” contempt for the woke-driven pandemic policy: the craven subservience to discredited scientists; insulting war comparisons; deification of the heroic but ill-managed NHS; totalitarian hand-clapping; arrogant directives; officious policing; closing houses of worship; the brute ignorance of Christianity.

If lockdown is not speedily lifted, we 8.8 million “elderly” voters will take our revenge at the general election.

John McEwen
London SW1

There are some encouraging signs that attitudes are beginning to shift more widely. On Monday I noted that my local park in Acton was more crowded than it had been at any time since March 23rd and readers have been reporting similar experiences all week. For instance, one writes: “My eldest son, who lives in Thamesmead, goes out every early evening with his daughter for a walk. He assures me that in the last seven days or so there has been a dramatic increase in cars on the roads, more and more people about – often in groups that are quite clearly made up of children and adults from more than one household, and some evidently visiting other people. Prior to that it was silent with virtually no traffic.”

The Mail picked up on this new mood yesterday, noting that it was the hottest day of the year so far: “Britons all over the UK have ignored lockdown rules today to flock to parks, beaches and promenades as temperatures hit 75F.” The Mail reports that there were long queues outside B&Q stores across the country, as well as the Five Guys hamburger chain, and the AA says journeys were up 10% this week compared to last. If the public are tiring of lockdown it will be hard for the Government to keep it in place, particularly without an exit strategy. And the hot weather looks set to continue:

One sceptical website I’ve neglected to mention until now – and should have flagged up earlier – is COVID-19 In Proportion. It’s full of great graphs such as the one below showing that the the number of deaths in Week 15 of 2020 were lower than they were in some previous flu seasons:

The Media section is also worth looking at, particularly the bit comparing the hysterical alarmism of the BBC News website this week, when the ONS announced that 3,760 had died of COVID-19 in the week ending 10th April, with the home page of the same site on the 13th January 2018 when 3,075 died of respiratory disease. Needless to say, the latter contained nerry a mention of the unusually high death toll. As COVID-19 In Proportion reminds us, the cumulative death toll by the end of Week 15 in 2018 (187, 720) was higher than it was this year (184,960).

And here’s my favourite graph so far. If you take the assumptions that Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College used to predict the death tolls in the UK absent a lockdown (510,000 if we carried on as normal, 250,000 if we continued with mitigation) and use them to model what should have happened in Sweden absent a lockdown, you get the following:

In case you can’t read the small print, the blue area is the daily deaths per 100,000 the Imperial model would have predicted in the “do nothing” scenario, the yellow area is what would have happened if Sweden had stuck with mitigation – which is what it did, obviously – and the red area is the actual number of Swedes who’ve died.

One of the reasons Professor Ferguson estimated such a high death toll in the UK absent a lockdown is because he assumed that <5% of the population had been infected and the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) is ~0.9%. As each day passes, those assumptions look more and more shaky. Yesterday, the results of an antibody study done in New York were published in which 3,000 people were randomly tested at grocery stores and shopping locations across 19 counties in 40 localities. The result? 13.9% tested positive, indicating 2.7 million New Yorkers have already been infected. In New York City the number is 21.2%. (In Stockholm it’s 25%.) And, of course, the higher the number of people infected, the lower the IFR, which is the number of infected divided by the number who’ve died. Mario Cuomo, the Governor of New York, puts the IFR at 0.5%, but in all likelihood it will turn out to be lower.

We’ve heard about the five tests our Government has set before lockdown can be lifted. Arch-sceptic Heather Mac Donald has devised five tests US state governors should set themselves before extending lockdowns. They are:

• How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
• What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
• How many workers will have lost their jobs?
• How many businesses will have closed for good?
• How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?

When I made my original sceptical argument in the Critic last month, I pointed out that an extended lockdown would likely result in a greater loss of life than lifting it. But I was just talking about the UK. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the people who’ll pay the heaviest price for decision of Western governments to sacrifice their economies to keep the virus at bay will be those in the developing world. In this week’s Spectator, Aidan Hartley spells it out:

Starkest of all will be Africa’s economic collapse, wiping out jobs for many of the continent’s 1.2 billion people. Tourism, vital to the conservation of wildlife, forests and monuments, has fallen apart. Mining, oil and gas are close behind. Exports of tea, coffee and cocoa are also being hit hard. Until recently Africa served as a giant nursery, raising migrants to supply cheap labour for rich countries. Every month these workers send money home to their families, and remittances are now the largest source of foreign exchange in many countries. As diaspora Africans fall out of work, these funds are evaporating. In the high-density slums, each breadwinner might feed ten mouths. Nairobi city governor Mike Sonko promised mass distributions of Hennessy cognac because ‘alcohol plays a major role in killing the coronavirus’ — but such clowning aside, slum-dwellers have no cash reserves, nor a welfare state to rescue them. As global supply chains collapse, it becomes horribly clear that out of 54 African states, only Zambia is a net food exporter. Many Africans routinely rely on food aid. For oil-dependent Nigeria’s nearly 200 million people, life is about to get tough.

Another piece worth reading in this week’s Spectator – the 10,000th issue, no less – is Matt Ridley’s. Forget about finding a vaccine, he says, and focus on the treatments: “Within a month or two, one of the 30 or more therapies currently being tested is likely to prove effective and safe.” And there’s my column of course, although it’s not about the virus this week. (I also appeared the Last Orders podcast yesterday with Christopher Snowdon and Tom Slater.)

A bizarre article appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday arguing that it would be a shame if Oxford University wins the race to develop a vaccine because that could be used by knuckle-dragging nationalists as way to belittle the universities of other countries. Written by Emily Cousins, who teaches women’s studies at Oxford, it argues that any triumph for the ancient university “will be used as it has been in the past, to fulfil its political, patriotic function as proof of British excellence”. But as Andrew Neil pointed out on Twitter, if Oxford does develop a vaccine, won’t that in fact be proof of British excellence? After all, Oxford is consistently ranked in the top five universities in the world, often it he top two. You can read her bonkers argument here.

Thanks to all those readers who made a donation yesterday. If you’d like to make a donation to pay for the maintenance of Lockdown Sceptics, please click here. We’re now up to 165,000 page views, which has to be higher than the nightly viewing figures for Channel 4 News. Help me get this to 250,000 by telling your friends about the site. Let’s keep the pressure on Boris.

The Telegraph leads on Chris Whitty’s depressing announcement at yesterday the Downing Street press conference that social distancing measures will have to remain in place until a vaccine or “highly effective drugs” are available to avoid a second wave of infections, which could mean well into next year. This bombshell came just moments after Dominic Raab had said there was now a “glimmer of hope”. He didn’t spell out what he was referring to – and he used the same phrase almost two weeks ago, so the glimmer hasn’t got any brighter. But in his speech he referred to “the peak of this virus” three times and implied we’re in the midst of that right now. The Government’s position is that no social distancing restrictions can be lifted until we’re past the peak and there is no risk of a second wave that will necessitate reimposing those restrictions.

I have good news for Mr Raab in that case. There’s growing evidence that the daily death toll peaked on April 8th, as can be seen on the NHS England graph below:

That’s the view of Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. Two days ago he said: “From an epidemiological perspective we can say that the numbers are consistent with the peak happening on April 8th.” As Prof Heneghan has pointed out, if the peak was indeed on April 8th and deaths have begun to decline since, that suggests the more modest social distancing measures the Government introduced on March 16th flattened the infection peak, without the lockdown being necessary. After all, there’s a three-week lag time between infection and death and April 8th is three weeks after March 18th, two days after the mitigation measures were introduced but five days before the lockdown.

More evidence that extreme social distancing measures aren’t necessary to flatten the peak is the analysis done by numerous researchers – including three I flagged up in yesterday’s update – showing that the rate of infections and deaths rise and fall according to the same pattern in every country the virus has struck, regardless of varying population densities, testing rates, case levels, mortality rates, etc. and in spite of the severity of the lockdowns they’ve imposed and when they imposed them in the lifecycle of the outbreak. This is nicely illustrated in the graph below, created by a sceptic on Twitter, which maps the rise and fall of daily deaths in England and Sweden, having adjusted for the fact that Sweden’s are about 10 times lower than England’s. As you can see, the pattern is almost identical, even though Sweden hasn’t imposed a lockdown:

So what are you waiting for, Mr Raab? The doves in the Cabinet will argue that these analyses are all very well but we still don’t know enough about the virus yet to be sufficiently confident that if we start to relax social distancing measures we won’t be overwhelmed by a second peak. But even though that may be true (depending on how you define “sufficiently confident”) it’s not a good argument for delaying announcing a phased exit, as the leaders of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, the United States, etc. have already done. No Government can eliminate the risks posed by the virus completely, but keeping lockdowns in place is hardly the risk-free option, given how much economic damage they’re doing. It’s a question of balancing the risks against each other, and in order to do that in a properly informed way our Government needs to listen to sceptical epidemiologists and virologists, not just the most alarmist, as well as economists and business experts. (And educationalists. Only five per cent of Britain’s most vulnerable children are taking up the offer to attend school, according to the BBC, and only 8% of children in the most disadvantaged schools are turning up for online lessons.)

The editor of the Washington Examiner, Hugo Gordon, makes this point eloquently in an op ed published yesterday. Talking about the reluctance of some state governors to end lockdowns, he writes:

It is time to resume commercial activity, at first gradually, and then as quickly as reasonably possible. If we allow ourselves to be frightened into an innumerate expectation of complete safety before life is allowed to return nearer to normal, we will bring on an economic, social, and national catastrophe involving the destruction of America’s wealth, happiness, and place in the world. We must take sensible precautions so the public knows the balance of risk has switched toward activity away from inertia. But a balance still means risk on each side.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that the lockdown itself may be causing more deaths than it’s preventing – and that’s just in terms of its immediate impact on public health, not the long-term consequences of the economic harm. Consultant oncologist Karol Sikora has a piece in the Mail today warning of the catastrophic impact the lockdown is having on non-COVID-19 patients. “Some stroke and heart attack patients are routinely waiting more than two hours for an ambulance, while 2,300 cancer diagnoses are being missed each week because patients are not going to see their GP or because they are not being referred for urgent tests and scans at hospital,” he writes. “Another 400 cancers a week are, it is estimated, being missed because breast, cervical and bowel cancer screening has been suspended. For any of these patients, delay can be a death sentence.” Since the virus struck, the number of patients who are being referred for cancer treatment has dropped by 75%. By Sikora’s estimation, the combined effect of all these delays will be 50,000 excess cancer deaths. (TalkRadio’s Dan Wootton makes a similar argument in today’s Sun.)

The odd thing about the neglect of non-COVID-19 patients is that the hospitals are hardly full of COVID-19 patients. Health Service Journal reports that a new Nightingale hospital in Harrogate isn’t going to be needed after all, so low is the demand, and the flagship Nightingale hospital in London, which has the capacity to treat 4,000 patients, is still largely empty. As if to underline just how underwhelmed the NHS is by the current crisis, doctors and nurses have been posting videos of themselves on YouTube dancing on their wards.

Some people were outraged by the opening paragraph of Monday’s daily update, in which I tried to assess whether NHS workers are more likely to die from COVID-19 by crunching some numbers with the help of Guy de la Bédoyère, a reader who’s well-versed in statistics. On the face of it, NHS workers don’t seem to be dying from the virus in greater numbers than other people of working age. The NHS employs roughly 1.5 million people across the UK, which is about 1/43 of the UK population and about 1/25 of the working population (people aged 20-65). But the number of NHS workers succumbing to the virus is a bit lower than 1/25 of the number of people of working age who’ve died of COVID-19. Of course, if you adjust for the fact that a majority of NHS workers are less likely to be suffering from underlying health conditions than the general working population, it may well be that they are dying in greater numbers. But when Guy and I looked at the data that calculation hadn’t been done. Was that a callous and unfeeling point to make, given that NHS workers are placing themselves in harm’s way every day? The producers of Radio 4’s More or Less don’t think so because yesterday the programme posed exactly the same question and came to a similar conclusion. It calculated that if NHS workers are dying from COVID-19 at the same rate as the rest of the working population, you’d expect between 70 and 85 of them to have died so far. In fact, according to More or Less, 77 have died (or had when they last looked), which is in line with expectations rather than higher. Like us, however, the presenter Tim Harford and his producer added the caveat that NHS workers are likely to be healthier than the average 20-65 year-old, which means you’d expect fewer to be dying if their risk isn’t elevated. You can listen to the item here. It starts at 17m and 23s.

The South African authorities have banned the sale of alcohol and tobacco in the hope of persuading people to remain in their homes, prompting looting to break out in the Western Cape. That’s a particularly brain-dead bit of state over-reach because according to a study carried out in a French hospital nicotine may be both a prophylactic against coronavirus and an effective treatment. It found that of those admitted to hospital with COVID-19, whose median age was 65, only 4.4% were regular smokers, compared with 11% of 65-75 year-olds in the general population. The Guardian has the story.

Bad news for those lockdown sceptic who upload content to YouTube. Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO, told CNN’s Reliable Sources yesterday that during the pandemic the social media platform will be “removing information that is problematic”, such as advising people to “take Vitamin C” or “anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations”. Not sure when YouTube put this policy in place, but if it was at the beginning of the year then presumably any content suggesting COVID-19 was a transmissible disease before the end of January would have been removed because up until that point the WHO was maintaining that there was no “clear evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus”.

Thanks to all those people who donated to Lockdown Sceptics yesterday – it’s those donations that enable me to devote so much time to this site. If you’d like to donate, you can do so here. I’ll leave you with this table. It was originally produced by the Babylon Bee in a different form, but I’ve adapted it slightly (with help from Ian Rons).

Why is there a furious row about the Government’s failure to secure more ventilators when the evidence is clear that ventilators are largely ineffective at treating COVID-19? According to this letter published in the Lancet, 86% of patients put on mechanical ventilation in a Wuhan hospital died. An earlier study put the figure at 97%. For patients facing certain death without ventilation, there’s an argument for intubation, although it may just speed their demise when palliative care would be more appropriate. But for those not facing certain death, there’s mounting evidence that mechanical ventilation does more harm than good. This is the kind of gotcha journalism that has seen the public’s estimation of my profession plummet during the crisis. Don’t mean to single out the FT, by the way. Nearly all the papers have the story.

The Telegraph leads with the shortcomings of the PCR test given to almost 100,000 NHS and social care workers and raises the possibility that some could have been given the green light to return to work when they were still infected, thanks to the high incidence of false negatives. Another risk is that those who tested positive – but didn’t, in fact, have the virus – may now be going back to work, convinced they’ve developed immunity. (My 11 year-old son Charlie was tested in February after returning from a school ski trip to Northern Italy with all the classic symptoms of COVID-19 – cough, fever, loss of taste and smell. The result came back negative, but I think he had it.) Dr Kevin Corbett, an independent research consultant, has done some digging into the reliability of the PCR tests being used in America and posted a comment under ‘Testing: Do You Have the Disease’ that you can read here. He’s not impressed.

A reader has forwarded a link to an interesting blog post by someone called Phil Nuttridge. He now works as a masseur and nutritionist but his previous career was in science and he has a masters degree in statistics. His motivation for blogging about coronavirus is, in part, to alleviate the stress caused by the hysterical coverage in the mainstream media. In this post he creates a series of graphs, based on information about six different countries obtained from Our World in Data, that seem to show infections peak between 31 and 33 days after cases first start appearing. This is true of all six countries, regardless of their varying population densities, testing rates, case levels and mortality rates and – crucially – in spite of the severity of the lockdowns they’ve imposed and when they imposed them in the lifecycle of the epidemic. You can read it here or watch it on YouTube here. Phil’s analysis complements that of Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, who maintains that infections rise and fall in each country according to the same timeline, irrespective of local conditions.

Wilfried Reilly, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University, has come to a similar conclusion in Spiked. He’s analysed data from Worldometer’s Coronavirus Project (a great source of data, btw) to compare the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in US states that have adopted lockdowns or ‘shelter in place’ orders with those that have pursued a social-distancing strategy without a formal lockdown. He’s also performed the same exercise for different countries. He ran a regression analysis, controlling for all the factors that could account for discrepancies between different places: population, population density, median income, median age, diversity (measured as the percentage of minorities in a population), etc. The result? Lockdowns are no more effective when it comes to suppressing infections and deaths than well-done social-distancing measures. You can read the article here. (And if you’re interested, you can listen to a podcast in which I interviewed Professor Reilly for Quillette last month here.)

Several think tanks have come up with exit strategies. Guido Fawkes has a summary here. He also flags up a new report by the Centre for Policy Studies showing that Government borrowing this year will rise from £55 billion to approximately £300 billion, representing 15% of GDP. That’s money that will have to be paid back in the form of higher taxes and spending cuts. As Fawkes says, we need to end the lockdown before this climbs even higher.

Two economists presented their proposals for lifting the lockdown to the Treasury Select Committee yesterday: Dr Gerard Lyons and Ian Mulheirn. (You can read their proposals here and here.) One reader has read them and reported back:

• They both claim that lockdowns have been proved to work to control the virus. How can they be so sure as economists?
• They are both fully signed up to the doomsday predictions of mass death without a lockdown and that saving the lives of people who would otherwise die of COVID-19 is far more important than getting the economy restarted.
• There’s talk of a tracing app being essential as we go forward with zero mention of the impact (from what I can see) on civil liberties.
• Further lockdowns can’t be ruled out, according to them.
• No diversity of opinion or critical thought.
• Overall rather depressing stuff.

Not surprisingly, I prefer the exit strategy of Chris Hope, Emeritus Reader in Policy Modelling at Cambridge Judge Business School. His idea is that the young should volunteer to get infected, then isolate until no longer infectious, after which they can go about their normal lives. In that way, herd immunity is gradually built up. You can read Professor Hope’s proposal here. A similar strategy has been suggested by a team of researchers at Princeton University and the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, a public health advocacy group based in New Delhi and Washington. They recommend the best hope for poorer countries like India is herd immunity. You can read a summary here.

After yesterday’s story, sent to me by a reader, about a woman being stopped by the police on Hungerford bypass and given a dressing down for no apparent reason I thought it would be useful to reproduce the Crown Prosecution Service’s guidance about what does and doesn’t constitute a “reasonable excuse” for not being at home, as set out in the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020. There are several interesting loopholes. For instance, the rule that you need a “reasonable excuse” to leave the place you live does not apply to homeless people. So if you want to “remain seated for a much longer period” on a park bench than it takes you to walk there – not reasonable, apparently – just make sure you’re carrying 10 copies of the Big Issue. Another rule is you’re allowed to drive to the countryside to go for a walk, but only if you spend more time walking than you do driving. As one reader asked, does this mean he can make the nine-hour round-trip to Scotland provided he goes for a 10-hour walk in the Highlands? The guidance only applies to England, so I asked an Irish barrister – Ciarán McCollum – to expand it for the other nations in the United Kingdom. I’ve published both the guidance and Ciarán’s piece in an Appendix accessible at the bottom of the right-hand menu. (Scroll down.) Feel free to print them out and wave them in the face of any officious martinet who tries to prevent you going about your lawful business.

Incidentally, some of the official guidance may be illegal. Francis Hoar, one of the barristers who represented Darren Grimes in his battle with the Electoral Commission, has written a guest post for UK Human Rights Blog arguing that some of the powers the state has arrogated to itself to enforce the lockdown may be unlawful. He points out that if this was tested in court by a judicial review the judge would have to consider whether the restrictions on our age-old liberties are a proportionate response to the scientific evidence about how best to manage the virus and that, in turn, would mean assessing the quality of the scientific advice the Government has been relying on. If Francis Hoar ever has the opportunity to cross-examine Professor Neil Ferguson, I’d like a seat in the gallery.

Quick global round-up of sceptical news. A study in India found that 69% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 were asymptomatic. In New Zealand a group of lockdown sceptics have set up a website called ‘Covid Plan B‘ that’s worth a look. And the latest news from Sweden is that Stockholm could have herd immunity by the end of the month according to Dr Anders Tegnell. (Give that man the Nobel Prize for Medicine.) And this video by a frustrated New Yorker who’s fed up with being locked down is a thing of beauty. (Warning: Contains profanity. Lots of profanity.)

A few days ago I passed on a reader’s book recommendation: Mandrake, a dystopian novel written in 1964 by Susan Cooper that anticipates the current moment with spooky accuracy. Another reader has found it on sale for £25.00, a bit less than on Amazon.co.uk. I should say that I now have a copy, generously donated by Stephen Ryan, and I will read it and report back.

As ever, thanks to all those readers who made a donation yesterday to pay for the upkeep of this site. It’s hugely appreciated. If you’d like to make a donation to Lockdown Sceptics, please click here. And ignore the dollar symbol. It all comes out in the wash.

The Express leads with the number of healthcare workers who’ve lost their lives to the virus, a story that’s been getting a fair amount of attention over the last few days because it seems to show the price they’re paying for the PPE shortage. On BBC Breakfast yesterday it was claimed that 43 NHS workers have died, and the presenter took if for granted that these deaths came about because of their exposure to patients infected with COVID-19. But tragic though any death is, it is worth pausing to consider whether NHS workers really are more likely to die from COVID-19 than other members of the working population. One of the commentators on this site, Guy de la Bédoyère, has crunched the numbers. The NHS employs roughly 1.5 million people across the UK, which is about 1/43 of the UK population. That figure is also about 1/25 of the population of working age (20-65). To date 1,272 people aged 20-59 have died of COVID-19 in the UK, 1/25th of which is 50 – or slightly more than the actual number of NHS workers who have died, at least according to BBC Breakfast. In other words, just as a function of the general risk to which the whole UK population is subject we would expect at least 50 NHS workers to have died anyway this year, regardless of any higher risk they might face from their jobs. Having said that, 53% of NHS employee are 44 or younger – under-45s are at a lower risk of dying from coronavirus than over-45s – and it’s a safe bet the majority don’t have underlying health conditions. So in all likelihood NHS workers are more vulnerable. Nonetheless, taken by themselves, the raw figures suggest they are less likely to die of coronavirus than the general population. To mean anything, the headline figures need to be put into context, something few journalists seem willing to do.

In other news, the ONS released some data this morning about the number of deaths in Week 15 (April 4th to April 10th). The total number in England and Wales in the week ending April 10th was 18,516, an increase of 2,129 compared to the previous week and 7,996 higher than the five-year average for Week 15. It’s also the highest weekly total since Week 1 in 2000. But let’s contextualise these figures. The most important comparison is not between the total number of deaths in Week 15 this year with the five-year average for Week 15, but the cumulative total compared with the five-year average. That gives us 184,960 deaths up to the end of Week 15, compared to a five-year average of 174,693. Admittedly, that’s an excess of 10,267, but as Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at Cambridge University, has pointed out: “Many people who die of COVID would have died anyway within a short period.” Incidentally, the total by the end of Week 15 in 2018 was 187, 720, higher than it is this year. The truth is, we won’t know how many more deaths there have been in 2020 compared to the previous five years until the end of Week 52. (There’s a good analysis of the latest ONS data here.)

Another point about these figures. Yesterday’s COVID-19 death toll was 449, which amounts to a 47% decrease in the 12 days since April 8th, according to the Telegraph. If April 8th was the peak, given the three-week lag time between infection and death, that suggests infection peaked before the lockdown was introduced on March 23rd. (If April 8th was the peak, the ONS data should show fewer people dying from COVID-19 in Week 16 than in Week 15.) That’s the conclusion of Carl Heneghan, Oxford Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine, who says infection rates halved as a result of hand-washing and keeping two metres apart, which were urged on the British public on March 16th, a week before the lockdown. Maintaining the severe restrictions isn’t necessary, according to Professor Heneghan. “In fact, the damaging effect now of lockdown is going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus,” he told the Today programme yesterday.

According to this morning’s Guardian, the Government has been warned by its advisors on the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that any relaxation of lockdown measures could trigger an exponential rise in coronavirus cases, and it notes that two of the Cabinet hawks – Gavin Williamson and Alok Sharma – have begun to wobble since the news leaked that Boris is leaning towards the doves. Has BoJo lost his mojo? That’s the question James Delingpole and I discuss on our weekly London Calling podcast that you can listen to here.

But it’s possible his aides are briefing the papers that he won’t ease the lockdown until he’s satisfied there’s no risk of a second wave overwhelming the NHS so that when he returns to Downing Street – rumoured to be next week – he can announce he’s now assured of this and, like Moses, lead us out of Egypt into the Promised Land. The rationale would be there’s no point in ending the lockdown if the British public still think the virus is stalking the land because they won’t then send their children back to school or return to work. But if Boris, the great communicator, is able to tell them he’s looked into it and now thinks it’s safe to leave their homes, they’ll begin to venture outside again. Is that the plan? James Delingpole thinks I’m clutching at straws and another person who isn’t optimistic is Stephen Hazell-Smith (otherwise known as the City Grump). You can read his blog post about why he thinks politicians are being led by the nose by crystal-ball-gazing scientific experts here.

One reason to think there won’t be a second wave when the lockdown is lifted is the work of Isaac Ben-Israel, Chairman of the Israeli Space Agency and the National Council for Research and Development. As I reported a couple of days ago, he’s crunched the numbers and concluded infections decline to almost zero 70 days after the first outbreak in each country, regardless of the measures imposed to try to thwart it. You can read a transcript of his talk on the subject here.

In case you haven’t been lectured enough about just how important it is to stay home and protect the NHS, Apple’s digital assistant has now joined the ranks of the finger waggers. If you say to Siri, “Where are you?” you get the following reply: “I’m wherever you need me to be. And I hope you’re staying in as much as you can.” Are liberal democracies on the cusp of becoming totalitarian states, aided by the tech giants? Yes, according to a piece by Jim Fedako published by the Mises Institute. And one worrying sign is this story in the Independent. It says NHS staff have been ordered by their bureaucratic overlords not to tweet about “political issues”, including lack of PPE. Sounds like a case for the Free Speech Union. (For those readers who don’t know, I helped set up the FSU at the end of February.) If any NHS workers have been sanctioned for exercising their lawful right to free speech on social media – or are being put through a disciplinary process – please email the FSU’s Case Management Director Peter Ainsworth and he’ll look into it.

I get daily messages from readers telling me about the heavy-handed behaviour of the police, but this one stood out:

My sister (50 years old, works full time) was pulled over tonight by the police on her way home from shopping for groceries. The police pulled over every car on the A4 between Newbury and Hungerford to ask where they were going/where they had been. She was driving alone so could not be accused of breaching the lockdown rule with regard to congregating with more than one other person. She advised she had been shopping for food (after working all day at home), asked the officer why she had been stopped given she was not committing any crime and inquired whether the police had any real crimes to investigate. (FYI she has been mugged at knifepoint and burgled twice in London and there was no response from the police.) The officer then accused her of “not being very polite”, called over her superior and informed my sister they were taking a note of her number plate. Clearly this was supposed to intimidate her. She has since received a call from the police telling her they have the right to stop motorists and they are enforcing the law. She is now concerned she could lose her job.

Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative and UKIP MP, tells me he never leaves his home in West London without a copy of the Coronavirus Act in his back pocket. If he’s ever button-holed by our boys in blue, his plan is to whip it out and draw their attention to which rules the police are expected to enforce and which they aren’t.

A big thank you to all those readers who made a donation yesterday to pay for the upkeep of this website. If you’d like to make a donation to Lockdown Sceptics, please click here. Incidentally, we passed 100,000 page views yesterday. Help me grow this to 250,000 by the end of the week by spreading the word. Let’s keep the pressure up on the Government.

Terrible news in this morning’s Sun: pubs won’t re-open until Christmas. More bad news elsewhere: according to the Times, Boris is cautious about easing the lockdown, with his “overriding concern” being to avoid a second wave of infections. (The Mail has its version of the story here.) Does this mean Professor Neil Ferguson’s proposal for “intermittent social distancing”, whereby we relax some of the restrictions in short time windows, then reimpose them when case numbers rebound, has been rejected? That was put forward in Ferguson’s March 16th paper as the only viable alternative to leaving the lockdown in place until a vaccine becomes available. Bad news on that front, too. On Saturday all the papers got excited about the fact that a vaccine might be available by September – Sarah Gilbert, Oxford’s Professor of Vaccinology, announced she was “80% confident” it would be work – and trials are about to get underway. But yesterday Sir Patrick Vallance poured cold water on that idea, pointing out that no vaccine can be approved until we know it’s completely safe. In an article for the Guardian he writes: “A vaccine has to work, but it also has to be safe. If a vaccine is to be given to billions of people, many of whom may be at a low risk from COVID-19, the vaccine must have a good safety profile.” Professor Gilbert has acknowledged that accelerating the approvals process to make the vaccine available by September might require emergency legislation so it can be given to high-risk groups before it’s fully licensed.

Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, gave the Government’s daily briefing yesterday, and refused to be drawn on the Sunday Times‘s claim that schools would reopen on May 11th. According to several papers today, the earliest they will re-open is after the summer half term, which is June 1st. That’s bad news for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that two-thirds of schoolchildren aren’t logging on for online lessons according to a report by the Sutton Trust and Public First. Here’s the killer finding, as reported by Camilla Turner in the Telegraph: “Half of teachers in private schools said they are receiving more than three quarters of work back, compared with 27% in the best state schools, and just 8% in the least advantaged state schools.” More evidence that the lockdown is harming the most disadvantaged.

Several readers have sent me links to articles casting doubt on the reliability of the computer models that epidemiologists, virologists and mathematicians have been using to predict the impact of the virus. This one by Michael Fumento, which is sceptical about statistical modelling in general, is particularly good. He makes the following points:

• The CDC’s model predicted that 1.4 million people would die from Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone five years ago. The final death toll was less than 8,000.
• The US Public Health Service predicted that at least 450,000 Americans would be diagnosed with AIDS by the end of 1993. In fact, the number was 17,325.
• In 2005, Neil Ferguson told the Guardian that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. “Around 40 million people died in 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” he explained. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.” The final death toll from avian flu strain A/H5N1 was 440. (That’s 440 people, not 440 million.)
• In 2002, the same Professor Ferguson predicted that mad cow disease could kill up to 50,000 people. It ended up killing less than 200.

One reader – David Campbell, a law professor at Lancaster University – has given me permission to republish his paper, first published in 2003, analysing the Labour Government’s response to the foot and mouth disease epidemic in 2001. That, too, was informed by the work of Professor Ferguson. Needless to say, it’s very critical. You can read that paper here.

Some of you may recall the gloomy prognosis that Professor Anthony Costello gave to the House of Commons Health Select Committee on Friday, claiming we wouldn’t achieve herd immunity until after eight to ten waves of infection, with a death toll exceeding 40,000 in the first wave alone. This prediction was based on a Dutch survey of blood donors which showed that only 3% of them had developed antibodies to the virus. One reader has got in touch to point out that blood donors are unlikely to be a representative sample. He writes:

By definition, a blood donor has no known infections, has not had a recent illness, even a cold or flu, and I presume the blood banks are being particularly careful at present. Even if the tests are done from the initial samples rather than the blood collected (i.e. includes rejected donors), someone who is aware that they had a cough recently would either not have volunteered or been rejected at questionnaire stage before giving a sample.

Knowing how many people have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 is important because without that number we can’t calculate the infection fatality rate (IFR). But we can be pretty confident it’s lower than the case fatality rate (CFR), which is worked out by dividing the number of people who’ve tested positive by the number of deaths. The CFR of H1N1 influenza (swine flu) varied from 0.1% to 5.1%, depending on the country. Its IFR turned out to be 0.02% according to the WHO. The IFR of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be higher than that, but not nearly as high as the CFR in countries like Italy, Spain, Belgium, the UK and the US. Oxford’s Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) has updated its estimate of the IFR, which it now puts at between 0.1% and 0.36%, i.e. in the same ballpark as seasonal flu. That estimate is still heavily contested, but as we do more serological testing and continue to revise upwards our estimates of the number of people who’ve been infected the IFR keeps falling. Dr Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine at Stanford and one of the architects of the serological survey in Santa Clara that showed the number of people who’ve been infected is between 50 and 85 times greater than the number of confirmed cases, has given an interview to Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institute that you can watch on YouTube here. The preprint detailing those findings estimated the IFR at between 0.1% and 0.2%. “It’s probably about as deadly as the flu, or a little bit worse,” Professor Bhattacharya tells Robinson. (If you want to read a detailed critique of that paper, see this comment in a Columbia University forum.)

Mike Hearn, a reader, has an interesting hypothesis about why deaths-per-million in Sweden (150) are higher than in Norway (30) or Denmark (60). He points out that darker-skinned people are over-represented in America’s death statistics. For instance, in Illinois 43% of people who’ve died from the disease and 28% of those who’ve tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15% of the state’s population. Why should this be so? The most popular theory is that it’s due to America’s “systemic racism” – African-Americans have below-average incomes and less access to healthcare, they’re more likely to be discriminated against by healthcare professionals, they have less living space than Americans of European ancestry and are therefore less likely to self-isolate, etc. But what if it’s because people with darker skins produce lower amounts of vitamin D? A recent letter in the BMJ flagged up this possibility. The writer of the letter, Robert Brown, has co-authored a paper on this you can read here. If it turns out that darker-skinned people are more susceptible to the virus than light-skinned people, that would explain why there are a higher number of deaths-per-million in Sweden than its neighbours – because it has a higher immigrant population. Twenty-five per cent of Sweden’s population – 2.6 million of a total population of 10.2 million – is of recent non-Swedish descent, whereas only 14% of Norway’s population is of non-Norwegian descent. (There are ~70,000 Somalians in Sweden and only ~11,000 in Denmark.) Incidentally, the latest daily death toll in Sweden is 29.

A reader drew my attention to an interesting critique of the Government’s handling of the crisis by a couple of vets entitled ‘Vets would not manage the Covid-19 crisis this way‘. I wonder if any vets are members of SAGE? Judging from this paper, which draws on the experience of vets managing respiratory diseases in livestock, they should be.

I took the dog for a walk in Gunnersbury Park in Acton yesterday and it was more crowded than it has been at any time before in the last month. Other walkers seemed to be less circumspect about observing the two-metre rule, too. (Why metres and not feet, by the way?) My impression is that people are growing tired of social distancing, or perhaps they were just reacting to yesterday’s front pages saying that the Government is considering a phased exit.

There was one bit of good news yesterday: the latest daily death toll is 596, the lowest it’s been in a fortnight. It looks as though deaths have peaked in the UK, something that’s borne out if you compare the last seven-day average to the previous seven-day average.

Finally, thanks to all those readers who made a donation to pay for the upkeep of this website yesterday. If you’d like to make a donation to Lockdown Sceptics, please click here.

Today’s Sunday Times leads with the story that senior ministers have drawn up a three-phase exit plan that would see schools reopened on May 11th. (If you can’t get past the Sunday Times‘s paywall, you can read about the plan in the Mail here.) Under the “traffic light” plan, which has yet to be approved by Boris, schools would reopen on May 11th during the “green” phase, along with clothes shops, garden centres and hairdressers, and rail and bus services would return to normal. This would be followed by a second “amber” stage, starting in late May or early June, which would see more shops and businesses reopen, all employees urged to return to work and some small social gatherings permitted. Pubs and restaurants and larger events such as sport and concerts would be phased in later in the summer. However, the over-70s and those with underlying health conditions will be stuck on a “red” light and have to wait until a vaccine is available before they’re allowed to resume normal life. (Note to Boris: a vaccine probably won’t be available for several years, so why not just let older people decide for themselves whether to leave their homes and see their grandchildren?)

This, or something like it, is the exit strategy the Government should have unveiled on Thursday when it announced the lockdown would be extended for three weeks. It looks like the “hawks” in the Cabinet – those who want to end the lockdown – have triumphed over the “doves”. (Michael Gove, who was a leading dove, has “changed his position”, according to the Sunday Times.) One reason the hawks have gained the upper hand, the paper says, is because the Treasury has produced an “apocalyptic” report – soon to be leaked, no doubt – warning that failure to ease restrictions in “the next few weeks” will mean 60% of businesses running out of cash within three months. Did the Cabinet really need to wait for this report, given that the British Chamber of Commerce flagged up exactly the same risk nearly three weeks ago? And why did the doves – or former doves – not heed the warnings of the Resolution Foundation, the Centre for Economic and Business Research, the OBR, the OECD, the IMF, the Governor of the Bank of England, Uncle Tom Cobley and all? I suppose we should be grateful that they’ve finally woken up and smelt the coffee.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that the epidemiologists and virologists on NERVTAG and SAGE who spooked the Government into imposing a lockdown underestimated the percentage of the population that’s already been exposed to the virus and overestimated the infection fatality rate. For instance, all 397 residents in a Boston homeless shelter were given a swab test a couple of weeks ago and 146 tested positive, an infection rate of 37%. And not a single one of them had any symptoms. You can read more about that here. A reader flagged up a story in yesterday’s Le Figaro that points to a similar conclusion. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle experienced a Covid outbreak and all the crew were tested (1760) of whom 1046 (60%) were positive. 50% of those were asymptomatic. 20-30 of them were hospitalised, but only one required critical care – an officer in his 50s. And here’s another story out of Boston: a researcher from Massachusetts General Hospital gave antibody tests to 200 random passers-by street and a third tested positive. The Boston Globe has the story.

Mikko Paunio, the epidemiologist who’s been advising the Finnish Government, has written an addendum to his paper, ‘Has SARS-CoV-2 fooled the whole world?’, that I published on this site on Friday. In the update he refers to a number of surveys that have been published since he wrote the paper that seem to corroborate his hypothesis, namely, that many more people have been exposed to the virus than the WHO originally estimated, that at least 50% of people infected are asymptomatic and that large cities like New York are close to herd immunity. You can read the addendum here (scroll down).

Lockdown zealots got very excited over the mid-week figures showing the Swedish death toll was beginning to climb again, citing this as incontrovertible proof that the Swedish Government’ approach to managing the crisis is flat out wrong. Unfortunately for them, the daily death toll in Sweden has started to fall again – 67 on April 17th, down from 130 on April 16th and 170 the day before. As of April 17th, the total number of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden was 1,511, less than 10% of the total deaths in the UK (15,464). Sweden’s population is smaller than the UK’s – 10.23 million compared to 66.65 – but not 10 times smaller. Deaths per million in Sweden are 150, compared to 228 in the UK. Admittedly, that’s a higher number than in Denmark (60 per million) or Norway (30), which have imposed lockdowns, but you’d expect it to be far higher if lockdowns are as effective as the zealots claim. Meanwhile, Belgium, which has roughly the same population as Sweden and has just announced an extension of its lockdown, is recording 471 deaths per million. When this is over and the post-mortem begins, I wonder if lockdowns will be shown to have had any effect on slowing the rate of infection and reducing the total number of fatalities? Certainly doesn’t look that way based on current evidence.

One subject I’ve neglected in these daily updates so far is the source of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, but there’s been an interesting development on that front seeming to show that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and not the Huanan Seafood Market. For those unversed in this conspiracy theory – at least, I used to think it was a conspiracy theory – this YouTube video is a good primer. This investigation by the Washington Post is also good. The latest person to endorse the theory is Dr Luc Montagnier, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine. He’s not suggesting SARS-CoV-2 was developed as a bioweapon, or released deliberately to wreck the economies of China’s competitors. But having analysed the genome of the virus, he and a colleague have concluded that it contains sequences from the HIV virus. The only explanation, according to Dr Montagnier, is that molecular tools were used to insert the HIV virus in the genome of SARS-CoV-2 and that could only be done in a laboratory. There’s a summary of his argument in the Jewish Voice and a podcast in which he’s interviewed about it by Dr Jean-François Lemoine (in French).

A reader has tipped me off about an out-of-print dystopian novel that seems to have anticipated this moment. She writes:

In this horribly topical tale, the Brits are gradually herded into walled cities like medieval castles, life is pared back to the minimum, with rationing and state-ordered work, because of some unnamed external threat, presumed to be the superpowers lobbing nuclear bombs at each other. (China is one of the superpowers). It’s all done over several years, by harmless sounding but increasingly authoritarian ministerial pronouncements. Society ends up in total lockdown, with everyone spying on each other, travel bans, thought police, 24-hour passes into cities, and even murders of passing strangers condoned by the courts, purely because they’re strangers. The hero, an academic who seems untouched by the brainwashing, says to his girlfriend’s parents: “But how can you accept all this so easily? Don’t you remember the way you were living a year ago? Don’t you ever ask who’s responsible for all this happening? Or why? Don’t you care?” There is a pause, and then the old man leans forward and pats him on the knee. “We’re safe, lad,” he says. “No one cares how much they pay for that.”

The novel, called Mandrake, is by Susan Cooper, author of the Dark is Rising Sequence, a series of five fantasy novels written for older children and young adults. You can buy it second-hand on Amazon.co.uk, but the cheapest paperback edition appears to be £29.70! Let me know if you see it on sale for less. You can email me here.

Several readers got in touch to say they tried to sign the petition I flagged up yesterday but were unable to. The reason is because once a proposed UK Government and Parliament petition has received a sufficient number of signatures it is then checked to make sure it meets the relevant standards and, in the meantime, no one else can sign it. On the website it says, “This usually takes a week or less, however we have a very large number to check at the moment so it is likely to take longer.” I will keep an eye on it and let you know when it’s approved (if ever), but in the meantime here is an ‘End the Lockdown’ petition on Change.org you can sign.

Finally, I’d like to say a big thanks to all those readers who donated yesterday. If you’d like to make a donation to Lockdown Sceptics, please click here. Constantly adding to the links on this site, moderating your comments and writing the daily update is proving quite time-consuming!

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!

All the broadsheets lead this morning with yesterday’s announcement from Dominic Raab that the lockdown will be extended for at least another three weeks and, in all likelihood, will last for three months from the date it was first imposed (March 23rd), which takes us into June. Raab also set out five “tests” that will have to be met before the lockdown will be lifted: that the NHS is able to provide sufficient critical care to meet demand; “a sustained and consistent fall in the daily death rates from coronavirus so we are confident that we have moved beyond the peak”; “reliable data from SAGE showing that the rate of infection is decreasing to manageable levels across the board”; that the supply of tests and PPE is sufficient to meet demand; and, finally, that any “adjustments to the current measures” won’t risk a second peak of infections that overwhelms the NHS.

The first thing to be said about these five “tests” is that the first, third, fourth and fifth all relate to the capacity of the NHS and its suppliers and could have been combined into a single “test”; only the second is non-NHS related. Would two “tests” have sounded as if the Government wasn’t taking the crisis seriously enough? They’re also frustratingly vague. How is “a sustained and consistent fall in the daily death rates” defined? We’ve seen a “sustained and consistent fall” over the last five days (April 12th – 16th) compared to the previous five days (April 7th – 11th). Does that provide us with sufficient confidence that “we have moved beyond the peak”? Presumably not, but we haven’t been told what will.

As far as assessing the capacity of the NHS is concerned, it would be helpful to know if the Government is still using the March 16th Imperial College model which assumed the NHS’s ICU capacity would remain constant throughout the lockdown period at eight beds per 100,000 of the population. This assumption is represented by the red line below – Fig 3(b) in the Imperial College paper. However, the NHS has significantly increased its critical care capacity since the lockdown began, not least by building new hospitals. Last weekend, we learnt that 37,500 general acute hospital beds were unoccupied, that only 19 patients were being treated at the new 4,000-capacity Nightingale Hospital in the ExCeL, and at least one of the new Nightingales won’t be needed. One reason for that is existing hospitals have been able to double their ICU capacity, according to the Health Service Journal. If you factor all this in, the red line in the diagram below moves above the orange line, which represents the estimated demand for critical care in a less extreme lockdown scenario, with schools and universities remaining open. Based on this, Dominic Raab could have announced yesterday that schools would reopen after the Easter holidays, i.e. on Monday, without any risk of the NHS being overwhelmed. (I’m indebted to a reader, Mike Hearn, for pointing this out.)

The other critical assumptions in the Imperial College model are that <5% of the UK population has been infected and the infection fatality rate (IFR) is 0.9%, both of which are looking increasingly shaky. New data from Robbio in Lombardy reveals that 10 times more people have been infected than was originally thought, with 22% of the population testing positive for antibodies, and a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments.

One key piece of evidence cited by lockdown zealots is the latest ONS data that show a steep increase in the number of deaths in Week 14 compared to the five-year average. But according to the Times, only half the excess deaths in the week of March 28th – April 3rd were attributable to COVID-19, with the rest due to other causes. The likely reasons for this are delayed referrals for patients with serious conditions (because non-Covid patients have been de-prioritised) and a reluctance on the part of seriously ill people to go to hospital, partly because they’re worried about catching the virus and partly because they don’t want to be an additional burden on the NHS. In other words, the lockdown itself is responsible for about the same number of excess deaths as COVID-19.

There’s also mounting evidence that the lockdown is damaging people’s mental health. An article in Lancet Psychiatry says it’s likely to have a “profound and pervasive” impact on mental health, with two surveys showing many British people had experienced heightened anxiety and fear of becoming mentally unwell since the pandemic struck and are struggling to cope in isolation.

What’s particularly disappointing about the Government’s decision to extend the lockdown – and not announce any scaling back of the extreme social distancing measures – is that it’s increasingly at odds with the approach of other countries. Yesterday, Donald Trump announced guidelines for “Opening up America again”, and Italy and Spain are dialling back their own lockdowns. More generally, those countries that have avoided hard lockdowns have recorded fewer deaths per million – Japan (1.2 coronavirus deaths per million), South Korea (4.3), Singapore (1.8) and Taiwan (0.3) – than those that have effectively placed their citizens under house arrest – Spain (397.6), Italy (358.2), France (256.3) and UK (193.5). For this last bit of data, I’m indebted to Professor Ramesh Thakur, who has written an excellent sceptical essay on the “global lockdown”.

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The Times leads this morning with Chris Whitty’s comment at yesterday’s Government press conference that the trend in new infections is beginning to “flatten out”, with the death toll remaining below 800 for the fourth day in a row. Does this mean that when Dominic Raab announces later today that the the lockdown restrictions will remain in place for at least another three weeks – that’s the expectation, anyway – he will encourage some workers to return to work straight away? In Spain, people in manufacturing, construction and some services were allowed to return to work on Tuesday.

One reason to be pessimistic about the announcement is that if we are flattening the curve that’s not necessarily an argument for easing up on extreme social distancing measures. After all, won’t new infections start to climb again as soon as they’re relaxed? Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College scientist whose modelling has influenced the Government’s decision-making, said on the Today programme this morning that we shouldn’t ease back on the lockdown until an extensive programme of testing and contact tracing is in place. He called for the creation of a “command and control centre” to oversee this and other aspects of managing the virus – something like the Department for Existing the European Union.

In Professor Ferguson’s March 16th paper – the one that frightened the Government into imposing the lockdown a week later – he and his team recommend keeping social distancing measures in place until a vaccine is available, which they warn will take “18 months or more”, and suggest that in the interim the most we can hope for is the “intermittent” lifting of some of the more extreme measures:

We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound.

Neil Ferguson et al, ‘Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID- 19 mortality and healthcare demand‘, Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, March 16th 2020

However, it may be that a scaling back of the lockdown doesn’t result in a resurgence of cases, meaning no need to do a reverse ferret. According to Major General (Res) Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, chairman of the Israeli Space Agency and the National Council for Research and Development, the head of the Security Studies program at Tel Aviv University, the epidemic in each country will last no longer than eight weeks, peaking in the sixth week. He has crunched the data across a number of countries and found that the rise and fall of new infections is the same in each one, provided you adjust for the different start times. “This is happening both in countries that have closed down like us and in those that have not closed until today like Sweden, every country no matter its response,” he told Arutz Sheva 7, the Israeli television news service. “The decline and rise occur according to the same timeline.”

Professor Ben-Israel, who has a PhD in Philosophy and a BSc in Physics and Mathematics from Tel Aviv University, said it was clear how the epidemic starts in each country and why infections begin to climb, but not clear why new infections always peak after six weeks and then start to decline. Nonetheless, he has enough confidence in his analysis to recommend that Israel abandon its lockdown and get everyone back to work within two weeks.

For what it’s worth, there’s an interesting comment from Caswell Bligh, a computer scientist, below ‘What percentage of the UK population has been infected?’ on this blog. His theory is that recent findings in parts of Germany and elsewhere that ~15% of the population has antibodies may not mean the remaining 85% of the population hasn’t been exposed to the virus. He speculates that some people may have a natural immunity and can therefore resist SARS-CoV-2 without having to develop antibodies, which might explain why so many people exposed to the virus are asymptomatic. It would also explain why some people, having been exposed once and not fallen ill, could then become re-infected. Bligh has created a model, based on this theory, that shows a population can reach stable herd immunity if just 15% test positive for the antibodies.

One of yesterday’s big stories was that Keir Starmer has demanded the publication of an exit strategy. This is an interesting intervention from the new Labour leader, suggesting his attack line from now on will be that the Government isn’t doing enough to help the economy, not that it’s done too little to suppress the spread of the virus. For the hawks in the Government who want to end the lockdown sooner rather than later – and for lockdown sceptics more generally – that’s helpful since it will give the Government the political cover it needs to start easing off on some of the extreme social distancing measures. Until now, there’s been a risk that Labour would attack the Government if it did that on the grounds that it was prioritising the economy over people’s lives. But it looks as though Keir Starmer, at least, isn’t planning to do that.

If you’re looking for scientific evidence to support the case for ending the lockdown, the ‘Facts about COVID-19‘ site is as invaluable as ever. Among the stories in its April 15th update is one from a Luxembourg paper reporting that Sweden’s mitigation strategy is working, with the new infection curve beginning to flatten. That’s also true of the number of daily deaths in Sweden, or was yesterday anyway. I’ll leave you with a graph showing the daily death toll in Sweden.

The Telegraph, like all the other broadsheets, leads with the OBR’s grim forecast – that the economy could shrink by 35% this spring if the lockdown continues for another two months. You can read the OBR’s analysis here.

We also learnt yesterday that two high street fashion chains are going into administration, Oasis and Warehouse. That follows last week’s news that Debenhams, with 22,000 employees, has filed for administration, as has Cath Kidson, putting 950 jobs at risk. The collapse of these employers – not to mention the third of small businesses likely to go bankrupt if the lockdown continues – will have a cost in terms of loss of life. Yesterday, a reader alerted me to an interesting 2009 paper estimating the impact of mass redundancies on mortality by looking at job losses in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 80s and then tracking those workers via Social Security Administration death records. The authors’ concluded that being made redundant at the age of 40 results in a reduction in life expectancy of 1 to 1.5 years. You can read that paper here.

Another reader sent me a link to an excellent source of data for lockdown sceptics called ‘Facts about COVID-19’. If you click here, you’ll be taken to the latest update. Among the new studies it mentions is a pre-print by John Ioannidis and colleagues at Stanford estimating that your chances of dying from COVID-19 if you’re <65 is about the same as the risk of being killed in a road traffic accident. They point out that people <65 years who don’t have any underlying predisposing conditions account for only 0.3%, 0.7%, and 1.8% of all COVID-19 deaths in Netherlands, Italy, and New York City. You can read that paper here. Another interesting paper the site links to is the serological study carried out by Hendrik Streeck, director of Institut für Virologie at Bonn University, in which he tested a representative sample of 1,000 people in the north-western town of Gangelt, one of the epicentres of the outbreak in Germany. He found that 2% of the population currently has the virus and 14% were carrying antibodies and concluded that 15% of the town had been infected. 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 German write-up of that study here, and a summary by Ross Clark in the Spectator here. I’ve added a link to ‘Facts about COVID-19’ on the Introduction page.

The other big news yesterday was Donald Trump’s announcement that the US would stop funding the WHO because it has “failed in its basic duty” in response to the coronavirus crisis. (The US gave the WHO $400 million in 2019.) The WHO has not covered itself in glory since the beginning of the outbreak, in part because it has shown itself too willing to toe the Chinese Communist party’s line. I’m thinking in particular of its infamous tweet on January 14th:

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of January, the WHO declared that travel restrictions were not necessary to contain the spread of the virus – and it’s worth recalling that China imposed a travel ban on air travel from Hubei to other parts of China on January 23rd but not from Hubei to the rest of the world. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, effusively praised the Chinese authorities for their response to the virus, even though that included locking up those doctors who first raised the alarm, and, once they admitted they had a problem, forcibly detaining in hospitals all those who’d tested positive for the virus in Wuhan, whether they required hospital care or not, and imprisoning in their homes all those who’d tested negative. The WHO also issued inconsistent advice about face masks, which likely led to public confusion. And then there was the interview a Hong Kong broadcaster did on March 28th with Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s assistant-director general, in which he was refused to answer questions about why the WHO has locked Taiwan out of the membership:

Bruce Aylward @WHO did an interview with HK's @rthk_news When asked about #Taiwan he pretended not to hear the question. The journalist asked again & he even hung up! Woo can't believe how corrupted @WHO is. pic.twitter.com/uyBytfO3LP

— Studio Incendo (@studioincendo) March 28, 2020

This crisis has inevitably led to calls for the transfer of even more power from independent sovereign states to unelected international organisations, like the EU, the UN, etc., such as this piece by Yuval Noah Harari in the FT. But if the behaviour of the WHO is anything to go by – not to mention the failures of the EU – this experience has taught us precisely the opposite lesson.

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