Read on Twitter
lots of understandably frustrated people on the timeline wrt corona
unfortunately a lot of you are in danger of being taken in by snake oil merchants
on average, the people who die of this virus in Western countries are having over 10 years knocked off of lifespan
assuming even spread through a Western demographic population, about 1% of infected people will die
… and that’s with decent medical care, if the health care system falls over then the death rate will more than double
even with the 50,000 deaths earlier in the year, we could easily see another 400,000 deaths before herd immunity is reached, and remember, each person on average will lose over a decade of life each
that’s similar levels of death to the Spanish flu pandemic, taking into account the population increase over the last century, despite all the subsequent advances in medical science
so … here’s the choices you have
Plan A - try and get back to normal to tough things out, whilst accepting that 1 in 200 people will die, not to mention many more with nasty long-term complications, including young people
but in reality, this doesn’t actually work, as demonstrated by Sweden
herd immunity seems a great idea if *everyone else* gets the virus, so you are protected by their immunity, so those pesky real people change their behaviour and start being more cautious as the deaths mount up
unfortunately as we saw in March and April, by the time people “naturally” realise they need to change their behaviour, 50,000 people will die because the virus has already seeded itself so well into households and institutions
so you get all the panic, fear and economic damage you’d get anyway, but with tens of thousands of extra deaths, and still no herd immunity. I think this is what we are currently on course for this winter.
so, Plan B: you can restrict opportunities for infection to get disease transmission below the magic R=1 number, and as part of the process, economically compensate the sectors and regions that have been temporarily shut down for the common good
that will give “gifted orators” like this chap an opportunity to point out that death rates from coronavirus are low now, so all these restrictive measures are “obviously” disproportionate
to which the answer (remember Plan A) is another question: just how many deaths do you want? because corona will quite happily kill 400,000 before it “gets tired” …
if you’re cool with that level of avoidable population death (and accompanying long term illness) then okay, you “win” this argument
if not, you have to reckon with 1) the fact that the R number needs to be held at or below one (or we end up with Plan A anyway) and then 2) there’s no point in having a high level of community infection whilst these restrictive measures are in place
because you just end up with a steady run of hundreds of deaths a day, when you could have had a steady run of tens of deaths a day, or fewer
bottom line: we can either have relaxation followed by tens of thousands of avoidable deaths, panic and loads of economic damage anyway, or we can have a controlled bad situation with high levels of state support for affected groups, until a safe vaccine is mass-produced
… and that vaccine is looking like it will be ready in 2021, depending on whether we are lucky with the safety studies and whether the government gets the medical logistics chain gets organised in time
this country could totally afford to furlough universities and big chunks of the hospitality sector for a year. if you want to help, demand this kind of action from government, not cod libertarian policies based on fallacies that will lead to more avoidable panic and death.
personally, I’m going back to taking my own independent actions to protect those around me as best I can, being honest and consistent about the risks, on the basis that I don’t trust how this dangerous dynamic will play out over the next few months
/ends
/ends
