“I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by Covid-19.”I think we’re going to hear more like this in the coming months. Some, of course, are bound to disagree.
Monday, August 24, 2020
Hmm …
… UK lockdown was a ‘monumental mistake’ and must not happen again – Boris scientist says | Express.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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Notice the "I believe" that precedes the quote you are featuring. It means that he does not know this. He's an epidemiologist, not a child psychologist. We do not want our kids coming home from school and killing grandma. That wuold be quite harmful to everyone involved. Keep her cause of death secret from the child, sure, but children mature and find out family secrets, that they were the conduit that cause her death.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem here, is the view that everything the way it was, is better than anything we could devise. Not so. If done well, kids could thrive more with remote schooling. The task we have is not to ask epidemiologists if kids would be harmed by something other than a communicable disease, and get a stupid answer, but to ask educators to get creative with how to teach remotely. They are working on it.
Furthermore, back on Woodhouse's expertise, he must know that lockdowns have been working all over the globe. You do not have to be an epidemiologist to understand that if you do not encounter other people, you cannot spread the virus to them.
A preprint came out today called, The unintended consequences of inconsistent pandemic control policies
A quote from the abstract: "Strikingly, our mathematical model reveals that, across a broad range of model parameters, partial measures can often be worse than no measures at all. In the most severe cases, individuals not complying with policies by traveling to neighboring jurisdictions can create epidemics when the outbreak would otherwise have been controlled."
The only way to spread this deadly virus, which is killing US Americans at a faster pace than any event in American history, including the 1918-1920 influenza, at least 28,000 per month, is for there to be poor public health controls, poor tracking, and/or at the very crux of the matter, people who insist on being killer covidiots, and spreading the virus no matter what. The only thing that can give people the excuses for being covidiots is the poor information, such as in this article. It creates argument and debate where there should be none. We are trying to save lives.
Given that many highly qualified observers have suggested that the Covid mortality rate is inflated, we should perhaps not make our extrapolations from them too grand. And to suggest that this pandemic is worse than the 1918 flu pandemic is fatuous. Here is what the CDC has to say on the matter:
ReplyDeleteThe 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. ... It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older. The high mortality in healthy people, including those in the 20-40 year age group, was a unique feature of this pandemic.
Covid-19 has not especially affected the young or the healthy. Nor has it infected a third of the world's population.
To have our lives and livelihoods adversely affected because of fear is at least as awful as Covid-19 itself. In just a few weeks I enter my 80th year. I pray I do not spend what time remains to me pathetically governed by fear. I pray as well that if I am alert when I die I face with matter with dignity and grace.
I have not read nor heard of any qualified observer who has suggested that the Covid mortality rate is inflated -- and I have been looking, especially because you have been advertising this. It always turns out that anyone saying this is unqualified -- similar to this article, where an epidemiologist is spouting off foolishly about child psychology. It's more a talking point for TV shows and impossible conspiracy theories, people who must believe that what's happening must not be real.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot argue against the rate of infection being higher for Covid-19 than for any other event, war, virus, whatever, in USA history. I'm not talking the world here, nor has Covid-19 had the time to infect all that could be infected. It could turn out that Covid-19 is the Roger Maris, getting a huge grouping of deaths in one year, and the 1918-20 influenza is the Hank Aaron, a lifetime of the most ever. We'll have to wait and see.
Already yesterday, there is a patient in Hong Kong who apparently got the virus twice, with 3 months in between. That means any vaccine based on the antibodies that his body created anyway, will only be good for 3 months, in at least some people -- all this if the report checks out. Fauci is estimating that this Covid-19 coronavirus will be with us for 1 or 2 years. And if people don;t stop being covidiots, it will be longer than that.
Let's look at the number.s With the 1918-20 virus (26,000 dead per month), the epidemiologists could not count all the dead either. The figure of 675,000 dead in 26 months, is estimated upwards, because of this. We fudge up, knowing we have not counted all.
For Covid-19 (28,000 per month), the number of dead as of August 24, was 179,495, not estimated up . . . yet. It's a body count, a count that actually started February 7, 6.5 month earlier than August 24, not in March as is often stated. From February into March there were few deaths, not thousands, not the massive rate of slaughter of US Americans that ramped up in March. What happens when we adjust for this? . . .
If saying that Covid-19 has been slaughtering us for 6.5 months is an overstatement, let's instead say it has been 5.5 months, or fudge into the middle and call it 6 months. That would be 30,000 dead per month. 30,000 dead per month means 1000/day, a number that we try so hard to get under nowadays. Indeed, for too long, over 2,000 people per day were being killed.
We in the USA have gotten used to being proud of life-saving achievements. Now, we are plainly among the bottom dwellers of failures. By definition, this is an abject failure. Therefore, there may be a psychological pull to disbelief, both in the systemic failure, but also in the magnitude of the threat, something you'd have to be over 100 to recall. The fact is, that by measure of deaths, we are the world's worst at approaching this virus.