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An article in the Daily Telegraph yesterday by Philip Johnston, summarising the views of Prof Carl Heneghan, is the best thing I have yet read about Coronavirus. Prof Heneghan was talking about Great Britain but what he says applies, mutatis mutandis, to other countries.
I have to say that I was not aware of pictures out and about in England on Mothers' Day. I thought the lockdown was introduced because of what was happening in Italy. The crisis there had very specific causes, especially mistakes by doctors.
Figures from the ONS yesterday showed that, in the week to April 10, there were 18,500 deaths in the UK which is 7,000 more than average because of Covid-19 but about the same as in the first week of January 2000, a bad flu year.
According to Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University and a clinical epidemiologist, we passed the peak of deaths on April 8, which suggests that the mortality from Covid-19 is not much worse than it was 20 years ago. Indeed, with a much higher and older population, it is statistically less so. Arguably, it has been suppressed by the lockdown and yet two countries that have not had one, Sweden and South Korea, have fared better than the UK.
Prof Heneghan says infection rates halved after the Government urged people to wash their hands and distance themselves from others on March 16. But ministers “lost sight” of the evidence and rushed into an unnecessary lockdown.
....For coronavirus, the Government was following this framework almost to the letter while preparing the country for what would be a difficult period. But that all changed on Mother’s Day when pictures of people out and about led to a clamour for a lockdown that was never planned for. Prof Heneghan says the Government lost its nerve. Concerned that it would be seen to be putting the economy ahead of the NHS, it is now inflicting worse damage on the country than the virus itself.
....Nor is there any sign of an end. Five benchmarks were announced for relaxing the measures, the fifth of which is to prevent a second wave of infections in the autumn. But this will not be possible without continuing the lockdown until then and further wrecking the economy.
I have to say that I was not aware of pictures out and about in England on Mothers' Day. I thought the lockdown was introduced because of what was happening in Italy. The crisis there had very specific causes, especially mistakes by doctors.
"Prof Heneghan says the Government lost its nerve."
ReplyDeleteThe really intractable problem we have to face is that in western liberal democracies governments will always lose their nerve. They respond to opinion polls and the media rather than evidence or logic and they will always do this.
If in five years' time another new virus appears I am confident that western governments will respond with exactly the same mixture of incompetence, indecisiveness, cowardice, blundering, cynicism and blind panic that they have demonstrated in this outbreak.
We are seeing clear evidence that our political systems are simply not capable of dealing with crises.
Free countries are usually more efficient and usually respond better to crises than dictatorships in the medium or long term, but in the short term not necessarily. Worth watching Belarus. According to the country's health ministry yesterday, Belarus had reported 8,773 cases, 1,120 patients who have recovered and 63 deaths. All the dead deceased were suffering from chronic diseases. President Lukashenko, more or less a dictator, has not imposed a lockdown though, unlike in Sweden, parents have the choice about whether to send their children to school and less than 40 per cent of children do.
DeleteFree countries are usually more efficient and usually respond better to crises than dictatorships in the medium or long term, but in the short term not necessarily. Worth watching Belarus. According to the country's health ministry yesterday, Belarus had reported 8,773 cases, 1,120 patients who have recovered and 63 deaths. All the dead were suffering from chronic diseases. President Lukashenko, more or less a dictator, has not imposed a lockdown though, unlike in Sweden, parents have the choice about whether to send their children to school and less than 40 per cent of children do.
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