Is the American lockdown necessary?

The data for the virus are all over the place and very misleading. People who are susceptible to other types of pneumonia are also at a higher risk of the Wuhan virus pneumonia and they end up dying of the virus instead, or if not at least with the virus. You can't die twice.

Fox News mocked the seriousness of the virus until suddenly they turned on a coin and started liking the lockdown. Now they seem to have changed again, but then the story is very fast moving. 

Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and understandably many hate him for his enthusiasm for Donald Trump, three days ago he made some very interesting points. They suggest that the worst is over in New York. Let's all hope so.

'For many years, the CDC has tracked the total number of Americans who die every week from pneumonia. For the last few weeks, that number has come in far lower than at the same moment in previous years. How could that be?

'Well, it seems entirely possible that doctors are classifying conventional pneumonia deaths as COVID-19 deaths. That would mean this epidemic is being credited for thousands of deaths that would have occurred if the virus never appeared here.

'We don't know that for certain, but it's certainly worth considering. Something is skewing those numbers. Nor do we know exactly why the model predicted so many more hospitalizations than we have actually had.

'Now, you will hear people say -- you're hearing them say now -- but this is evidence that the shutdowns and social distancing must be working. But not so fast -- those measures were built into the model in the first place. They've already been taken into account, and we are still doing far better than what epidemiologists believe was the best-case scenario.

'So the question is -- and it's a central question as we move forward -- how did this happen? Well, it is possible the virus is just less deadly than we feared it was, or it's less likely to send people to the hospital. Maybe it spreads less easily than we thought it did. Maybe it spreads more easily than we thought it did, and the number of asymptomatic carriers is higher than we knew.

'All of those are reasonable theories. We have no idea which one could be true. Then there's this: In a new draft paper, MIT economist Jeffrey Harris suggests that Americans are following social distancing guidelines more effectively than authorities ever imagined they would, and that's another potential explanation.

'Whatever is happening, this epidemic appears to be doing less damage than anticipated, and it's receding more quickly. Not so long ago, some of our leaders seemed on the verge of panic.'

Inevitably the virus is becoming politicised in all sorts of odd ways. 

It seems to me that in the USA the Democrats, and especially the almost entirely anti-Trump media, want badly to use the pandemic to replace Trump with Biden. 

In England the FT's Gideon Rachman and ITN's Robert Peston would like to use it to replace Boris with a coalition government led by people who campaigned for Remain in the Brexit referendum, now that Corbyn has been replaced by a man the media like. Sir Keir Starmer. they will not succeed, of course, because the Tories have a big majority but in the USA a presidential election campaign is taking place.

Roger Kimball, writing in the U.S. edition of The Spectator (not to be confused with The American Spectator), strongly approves of what Tucker Carlson has said, in an article headlined

The case for reopening the country now

Public health experts are well and good in their place. Their place is not running the country

'President Trump began by soft-pedalling the danger posed by the coronavirus. This is not to say he downplayed the danger. He didn’t. He simply noted that the seasonal flu killed tens of thousands each year and that the way to deal with this new virus was to take reasonable precautions while also going about the business of everyday life. At the same time, he took concrete steps to protect the country, the most important of which was probably banning air travel from China on January 31. In response to this action action, Congress looked up briefly from its impeachment effort to condemn his decision as an overreaction that was ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’.

'Sensing a mounting hysteria, and noting the media and the Democrats busy behind the scenes manning the bellows to fan the flames, the president convened a ‘coronavirus task force’ full of experts, medical and otherwise. For about a month now the nation has been subjected to near daily press conferences at which said experts discuss various models and projections of the course the disease might take. The numbers on offer have varied from millions dead in the US alone down to, just yesterday, tens of thousands. When this is all over, there are many people who will echo Tucker Carlson’s question: how did the experts screw up the coronavirus models so badly?

'Meanwhile, hospitals across the land, having turned themselves almost overnight into factories bent on dealing almost exclusively with victims of the virus, found their wards empty and their coffers hemorrhaging cash, as nearly all non-emergency procedures were postponed in order to deal with the floods of COVID-19 patients that, in many places, never arrived.

'Let me pause to acknowledge that COVID-19 is a dangerous virus, especially for the elderly and infirm. One of my best friends — now recovering, I am happy to say — had a nasty bout. But this observation by a former New York Times writer is to the point:

'‘Nobody says COVID-19 is not real, that it can’t tax hospitals or kill people, esp. if they are over 75 or have co-morbidities. But right now the best CURRENT projection is for 61,000 US deaths. That was the 2017 flu season. Why have we shut the country?’

‘Why have we shut the country?’ That question is now being repeated with increasing urgency across America. I should also note that that 61,000 figure is probably too high, since the CDC is now recommending that everyone who dies who can plausibly be thought to have been exposed to the disease be declared a victim of it. Julie Kelly cites a typical case: ‘an 86-year-old female non-ambulatory stroke victim who developed a fever and cough days after being exposed to a sick family member later diagnosed with COVID-19. Even though the decedent wasn’t tested, the coroner nonetheless determined that the woman’s underlying cause of death was COVID-19’.

Roger Kimbell certainly politicises the crisis in his closing lines.

'The political philosopher James Burnham once observed that civilizations die more often from suicide, not invasion. He was thinking of the rot of progressive politics, which is the politics of fecklessness and surrender. Our response to the coronavirus has been a version of that spiritual inanition. We must reopen the country. We must start today.'