(China) is a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London speaking to the Times newspaper
Since the beginning of time, humans, like all other life forms, have lived alongside viruses. Some of them have beneficial effects, others can be harmful, for example causing respiratory infections.
The family of viruses called coronaviruses lie behind between 10 and 20% of respiratory infections, including the ‘common cold’. They are not normally very harmful except when a person is already extremely weak from other causes such as heart disease or cancer. Therefore in a nursing home a common cold coronavirus can cause a number of fatalities.
The first famous coronavirus was the SARS virus in 2003 (officially named SARS-CoV). This seemed to have a very high fatality rate but fortunately was not very contagious. 774 deaths were registered worldwide.
In 2012 a new variant MERS-CoV appeared in the Middle East and seemed to have a high fatality rate. Fortunately again it was not very contagious and the outbreak was quickly brought under control.
In December 2019 a new coronavirus, later named SARS-CoV-2, was identified in Wuhan, China. It spread quickly in one area of China, and then in northern Italy (where many Chinese work in the fashion industries), and then around the world.
The fear was that the virus was as deadly as the original SARS-CoV-1 while being as contagious as the common cold.
For a short time China enforced drastic lockdowns measures, preventing inhabitants of Wuhan from traveling elsewhere in China (although, they were allowed to travel overseas) and even physically locking people in their houses by bolting down the doors.
From January 2020 onwards, international news media and social media channels broadcast pictures of Wuhan residents being forcibly locked in their homes and overwhelmed hospitals in northern Italy with exhausted, desperate medical staff and reports of overflowing morgues.
Governments were repeatedly asked by the media why they were not following China’s example of locking everything down and were accused of putting their own peoples’ lives at risk. In most countries opposition politicians piled in to demand that ‘something be done’ and frequently accuse the governing parties of callously putting lives at risk.
Then in March a team at Imperial College London published a report predicting 500 000 deaths in the UK from SARS-CoV-2 unless severe measures were taken, alongside 40 million deaths worldwide.
(The fact that the same team had predicted 136 000 deaths from BSE or ‘mad cow disease’ (actual number 178) and 200 million deaths from avian flu (actual number 243), was given little coverage).
In the face of overwhelming television and social media pressure the UK government, along with a majority of governments throughout the world, caved in, and started to enforce the new policies recommended by their public health officials, however draconian.
It is worth noting that many of these new policies were a 180° turnaround from what had existed previously. For example, before March 2020 the advice of both the UK’s PHE and the WHO was that wearing face masks caused more harm than good and that lockdowns were not an effective long term way to deal with a new virus.
Public health officials, and their mathematical modelling colleagues, have a legitimate point of view. However many practising doctors, biochemists, epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, pathologists and others argued for a different way of managing the outbreak.
The ‘focused protection’ approach, which was the mainstream approach advocated by PHE, the WHO etc until March 2020, involves offering protection to those most at risk while letting everyone else take personal responsibility as to how much life can continue as normal.
Over time the majority of the population develops immunity either from effective T cell protection or by developing antibodies to the infection and recovering that way.
My interest here is NOT to make a judgement call as to who is right. The issues are complicated and our knowledge base is weak, though growing rapidly. How best to deal with SARS-Cov-2 is a complex, real world challenge with literally life and death consequences.
It is exactly the sort of challenge that needs the very best of our communal resources of objective thinking. Short-circuiting that approach by emotion-driven Collectivist thinking risks great real world harm.
Three professors from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard outlined the ‘focused protection approach’ in the ‘Great Barrington Declaration.’ This was quickly signed by over 12 000 medical and public health scientists, including one Nobel prize winner, and over 35 000 medical practitioners.
Governments and Media organisations committed to objective thinking would publicise both points of view and encourage debates between their main protagonists. But that is not what happened. Instead, supporters of the declaration began to be treated in the same way that climate scientists who are sceptical about the CO2 model are treated, i.e. by being ignored or dismissed with smears.
For about two weeks, if you searched for ‘Great Barrington Declaration’ on Google you could not see the declaration itself but mainly articles attacking it. It is possible that the Google algorithms are set to take two weeks for a declaration with 600 000 signatures to feature on its search engine but there is at the least a suspicion that certain kinds of information are promoted at the expense of other kinds.
Vocal supporters of lockdown urged their followers to sign the declaration using obviously false names, so that its credibility could be further undermined.
Clearly SARS-CoV-2 is dangerous. Using the only totally reliable data available in the UK, the number of deaths, it is looking like about 73 000 ‘excess’ deaths for 2020, i.e. about 13% more than the five year average of about 600 000. Most of these deaths occurred in April and May while the UK was under a severe lockdown.
Working out for how many people SARS-CoV-2 was the main cause of death is difficult. Official figures record deaths ‘with SARS-CoV-2’ but it is known that in many cases people were already dying of cancer, heart disease or other causes. Conversely, some people may have died from SARS-CoV-2 without it being diagnosed.
A number of the excess deaths may have been from the effects of lockdown, and in particular from the decision by the Health service to stop screening and treating most non-covid health conditions.
At the time of writing it is probably too early to say whether enforced lockdowns and public mask wearing has done more good than harm: the full picture is not yet available and the data that is available can be argued in different ways. For example, Sweden, whose constitution does not allow enforced lockdowns, has had a lower death rate than the UK but a higher one than its Scandanavian neighbours.
But it is surely irrefutable that this calls for objective thinking, in which both points of view need to be aired and for which the answer is not predetermined. It is possible that some government policies have caused more harm than good and the only way we can find out is by a free, objective investigation.