In March I supported lockdown and I was rather
dismissive of lockdown sceptics. I thought Covid was probably the worst pandemic
for one hundred years. Shutting everything down for a few weeks seemed a
reasonable response. I still think Covid is probably the worst pandemic for one
hundred years. The number of people who die after catching it is somewhere between
0.5% and 1%. This is not trivial. 0.5% of the British population is over
300,000 people. But I have changed my mind about lockdown. Locking down the
whole population for a few weeks is one thing, locking them down for months and
perhaps years is something else.
If you get locked down now how are you going to get
released from your prison in a month? If cases continue to rise, this will be
taken as evidence that lockdown needs to continue or become even stricter. If
cases begin to fall a little, this will be evidence that lockdown is working
and that it would be folly to ease restrictions. Just a few more weeks you will
be told. It is the mentality of First World War battle tactics. Just one more
push and we will be through.
But this is winter. Colds and flu get worse in winter.
What got you out of lockdown last March? It was warm weather in May. So, if you
get locked down in November you can expect to continue to be locked down until
May 2021. You will then get the summer off only to potentially have the same
problem a year from now.
How long will Covid last? Unless there is a vaccine or
a treatment that cuts the death rate to next to nothing, then history tells us
Covid will last for a number of years.
For instance, Russian flu, which may in fact have been
a Coronavirus, lasted from October 1889 to December 1890 with recurrences until
1895. What stopped it was neither lockdowns nor handwashing. It eventually was
caught by enough people that it mutated into something milder and became either
ordinary flu or the common cold.
Throughout human history this has been our method of
stopping pandemics. It was what we did in 1918, 1957 and 1968. We accepted that
there was a new nasty disease, but there was no cure and there wasn’t in the
end that much we could do to stop it infecting us. We got on with our lives and
a small percentage of us died.
We have made progress in the decades since. Much of
the economy can be carried out online. It is this that has enabled the
Government to contemplate a policy of locking people down.
Medicine has become ever more powerful and the cult of
the NHS has become Britain’s substitute for Christian acceptance of the
inevitability of death with a sure and certain hope that death is not terminal.
We expect medicine to be able to cure everything and medics are used to be
treated like little gods telling us what to do. Medicine has become
authoritarian. We cannot smoke in pubs. We drink too much. We must lower the
sugar in fizzy drinks. Our sins must become ever more expensive.
And for what? If we do all that we are told we end up
in a care home aged ninety and those same medics infect us with Covid by
sending home from hospital Covid sufferers in order to protect the NHS.
The SAGE committee is the equivalent of King Canute
trying to stop the tide coming in. It is mere hubris and arrogance to suppose
that we can control nature. If they had read more literature rather than
fiddling with their ever more inaccurate computer models, they would realise what
follows after hubris. You get nemesis. Or rather the British population gets
it.
I am quite certain that Covid is an unpleasant and
sometimes deadly disease. To suppose otherwise is to succumb to conspiracy
theories that are quite mad. But I am also quite certain that locking down the
British people for months if not years will kill far more than it saves and
will merely delay the point at which Covid ceases to kill because it will only
delay the spread of the disease in the British population.
For each of us even for the oldest members of society
the chances of dying from Covid are small in comparison with other causes of
death. For young people and children,
the chances of dying approach zero.
There are lots of things that can kill us. We can get
cancer, we can get heart disease, we can have a road accident, or we can fall
over in the bath. People poorly understand risk. We are scared of things that
are unlikely to kill us such as plane crashes and terrorist attacks, but don’t
worry at all about being overweight. Covid is in the news like a plane crash,
so we all worry about it, but you are much more likely to die of a heart attack
than a respiratory disease.
The odds of someone who is ninety dying if he catches Covid
are high, but the odds of this same person dying from a heart attack or cancer
are even higher. Someone who is ninety accepts that his risk of dying from any
cause are high in any particular year. What matters to that person most is
quality of life, not necessarily more years?
The folly of lockdown is this. It will wreck the
British economy which will mean that all of us will have to work longer and
retire later. Public spending eventually will have to be cut the Treasury will
have to raise more money in taxes. Each of us will be able to afford fewer
holidays and more of us will be unemployed and poor.
Lockdown will mean that a few less people will die
from Covid, but more will die from something else. They will die because they
didn’t go to the doctor, didn’t have their check-up or found that their
treatment for heart disease or cancer was cancelled. People will die because
they drank more in lockdown, didn’t exercise, got depression or simply gave up
because they were stuck in a care home with no one to visit them.
We are only concerned at the moment with one type of death.
Death from Covid. The number of deaths is rising, but many if not most of the
people dying from Covid would soon die of something else. An elderly person
with cancer and a poor heart may be killed by Covid, but keeping that person
locked up is no more saving their life than it is saving someone waiting to be hanged.
What should we have done? We should have done what we
have always done before. We should have kept working in March. We should have
reflected that Covid can only be brought into our house from outside. So, every
time you go outside wash your hands excessively. We should have done everything
we could to prevent Covid reaching our old people, while treating them like
human beings who have the right to company and a normal pleasant life.
Covid deaths would have increased if we had done this,
but other lives would have been saved. In the long run lockdown will kill more
than it saves, because the economic damage from lockdown will in the decades to
come mean that we can spend less on healthcare and because recession costs
lives. It does so invisibly, but inevitably and no one will notice.
Lockdown will not work, because most people correctly have
concluded that they are at minimal risk from dying. The chances of anyone under
sixty-five dying from Covid are less than the chances each of us face from dying
from a heart attack or cancer. It is for this reason that ordinary people are
voting with their feet. They are quietly meeting their friends and their lovers,
buying booze in supermarkets and having parties in each other’s houses. Short
of imposing a curfew and having the army patrolling the streets there is not
one thing Governments can do to stop this. For this reason, Covid will continue
to spread in our large cities. Having sex and meeting friends is a human instinct.
Trying to stop it is once again like Canute and his tide.
History will judge the SAGE committee poorly. They
will not be thought of as very sage, not so much because their ability to
predict resembles a loser on the racetrack, but because they think they control
things that they cannot. Canute was making a point about his lack of power to
turn back the tide. Our scientists think they really can. They think they can
stop death itself.
