Lockdowns seem not to work

The best thing I read recently about the pandemic is this article about Sweden from Spiked. It seems to me pretty much to prove that Sweden did not lose by not having a lockdown.

When Sweden decided not to lockdown in March, we were told it would lead to nearly 100,000 deaths by 1 July. The actual total ended up being 5,490. Infections and deaths were falling from mid-April, pretty much at the same time as in most other European countries with strict lockdowns.

If you click on the link above, you see the estimate of nearly 100,000 Swedish Covid deaths comes from Yale University. Modelling by Professor Neil Ferguson's team at Imperial College, London predicted 85,000 Covid deaths.

Then in the winter Covid came back in Sweden and now is ebbing away again, again without a lockdown.

We have to assume that this illness is to some extent seasonal, which Professor Ferguson assumes it isn't.

By now, eleven months after lockdowns started, there should be proof that they work. There isn't.

A lot of people have died, but most were frail and over 80. 80 year-olds can expect to live eight or nine years, but not if they are frail and have serious health problems, as is the case with most people who die with or of Covid. 

In Stockholm old people's homes, where most of the city's Covid-related fatalities happened in the first half of last year, residents have an average life expectancy somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months.

I recommend Lockdown Sceptics, a site and daily email run by Toby Young.

From today's edition, I quote from a contribution by Glen Bishop (he also wrote the piece I linked to above about seasonality). He's not a professor but a lowly mathematics undergraduate at Nottingham University, but what he writes makes sense.

Imagine if you lived in a village with 500 people and had to make a choice:

Option 1: All 500 of you spend the next 12 months living just as you have for the last 12 months. Constant lockdowns and restrictions on your lives and liberties and all the consequences that brings to businesses, jobs, schooling, current and future quality of life. Locking children in houses, exposing some to abuse. The burdening of children and grandchildren who aren’t born yet with debt. The serious harm to the vulnerable in the developing world.

Or Option 2: One or two out of the 500 of you dies four years earlier than you otherwise would have and many of you get a rather unpleasant illness, but from which most of you recover easily and all else stays normal, with your civil liberties remaining.

This, in a nutshell, is the question of lockdowns put into perspective without big numbers our brains are not built to comprehend. Professor Ferguson might protest that it should be a room with 200 people, or another SAGE member might say it needs to be five years not four years to represent the average length of life lost to Covid. But essentially this is the question of the day in layman’s terms. I would personally pick the four years if I were alone in the village let alone with 500 people. I am fairly sure one year in my 20s is worth four years in my 80s or 90s. I think practically everyone would agree on Option 2. The best points in my life have been when on a motorbike or in the mountains so maybe I’m just not risk averse, but do we really want to turn into a society that engages in massive sacrifices to quality of life for hundreds in the (vain) hope of slightly increasing the longevity of one? Certain catastrophic long-term harm to society in return for an uncertain benefit.

This is how SAGE should lay out these problems to ministers who are largely innumerate. If Boris had been given this question, put like this, would he seriously have made the decisions he has?