We live in factional times, so scientists and commentators are dividing into COVID camps, though allying with the smaller skeptics crowd can be dangerous. (Some contrarians are getting death threats.) Yet even the establishment Imperial College London has reduced its projections of COVID-19’s UK mortality from 500,000 to under 20,000 — roughly the annual deaths from seasonal flu. No one knows yet for sure, but evidence abounds that the lethality of this virus may be in line with flu’s 0.1 percent, and possibly as low as 0.01 percent. The disease overwhelmingly fells the elderly with often-multiple co-morbidities. I don’t mean old people don’t matter. But absent this pandemic, a large portion of this ailing cohort would have been sadly slain by other illnesses in short order. As Dr John Lee noted last week, too, fatality figures fail to distinguish dying from COVID and merely dying with it.
Friday, April 03, 2020
Cause for worry …
… The longer lockdown continues, the more imperiled we become | Spectator USA. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Which contrarians? Those like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who appear to display discomfort with the president's statements?
ReplyDeleteMore nonsense about the current situation, this time from the keyboard of a fourth-rate novelist. She comes to us today in her other role, that of professional blowhard, a greedy mercenary grasping for her thirty pieces of silver from the backs of those facing real risk and suffering.
ReplyDeleteJust one example of her profound ignorance: Imperial College did not reduce their estimate of deaths from 500,000 to 20,000. If she had bothered to read the original paper, she would have seen that THE MODEL OFFERED A RANGE OF ESTIMATES, FROM 5,600 TO 550,000 deaths, DEPENDING ON THE MITIGATION MEASURES ADOPTED AND HOW EARLY THEY WERE PUT IN PLACE. The specific prediction of 20,000 came after schools were closed, social distancing was implemented, and case quarantine was strictly observed. The original model predictions are on page 13 of the March 16 paper, available to anyone not too lazy to look.
Well George, Dr. Fauci has gone out of his way to say the media has misrepresented his relationship with the President. Who are we to believe, him or the media?
ReplyDeleteI know Lionel, and she is one of my favorite people. She did win the Orange Prize, but maybe you think that is a fourth-rate literary award (be careful saying that among feminists). Perhaps enough people will obligingly die to prove you correct. I hope not, and continue to think not. If I am right, maybe the love affair with authoritarianism that many seem to have at present will fade.
ReplyDeleteI don't love authoritarianism and I do admire Lionel Shriver. However, I think a little caution and patience is in order while we scramble to understand this virus and what to do about it . It's not a stark choice of forever in lockdown or go back to normal. What we need is to buy a little time - two to three months - while a strategy is devised. The economic consequences will be very extreme and yet a limited hiatus still seems sensible and reasonable to me. As things stand many people are encountering new and considerable danger from an extremely infectious illness, and we have nothing in the armoury to deal with that. The argument that we should just live with the threat is neither borne out by the history of the Spanish flu (some places imposed quite strict measures and lives were saved; some didn't and there was immense loss of life) nor tenable in any society that wishes to keep the trust of its citizens. I think our real problem arises from the fact that, because they were afraid of the kind of outrage now being shown by the likes of Shriver, Toby Young etcetera, many governments didn't move quickly enough to control the spread of the virus. A 6-week shutdown right at the beginning would have been much more effective than this long drawn out ramping up of measures, each time chasing the infection rather than getting on top of it. I also believe the dying “from” or “with” argument is particularly smoke and mirrors stuff – if someone was in hospital with heart failure and then got the virus, who will ever know whether they might have recovered from the heart failure had the virus not intervened? Most importantly, I don't want to live in a society where the rulers shout “These numbers are ridiculously low.”at the TV as the scenes in hospitals in Italy are screened and the rate of fatalities reported. There is an underlying eugenics at work in some of the arguments put forward by those who just want it all to go away. And I don't doubt that when a system of living with the virus is devised that involves testing for immunity and infection – allowing those with immunity to go back to normal life and those with no infection or immunity to go cautiously back to normal life, with further testing needed; and requiring those infected to remain outside of normal life – Shriver and others will argue that this kind of bio-surveillance is an infringement of liberty, to which my reply is the same as it is to those who don't believe in compulsory vaccination of children – in a society there is an individual good and a greater good; when your right to an individual good will cause harm to a large number of people then the greater good must trump the individual good.
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