COVID-19: 30/05/2020
Not long before COVID-19 officially registered in my local city of Newcastle, a wealth of antipathy, generational prejudice, and destructive behaviour engulfed the land. Many people considered it no big deal. Some relentlessly shared memes at the expense of older citizens, about their increased chances of dying from it. An analogy with the Brexit vote was often made; i.e, older people voted for Brexit at the expense of younger people, now they are about to get shafted while young people enjoy the benefits of life. This was their sentiment. These people were celebrating and making light of this situation. The very same people now hammer the point of saving lives and how more stringent measures are necessary to save lives. Naturally, the opposite is also true. People overestimated the effects of the disease and uttered tautologies that can only be compared to the end of the world. Yet here we are. After prognostications of bliss and doom, you would think the uniform mood would have shown more variety. No. That has not been the case, at least not publicly. Measures are being lessened worldwide. In the UK, all non-essential shops are scheduled to re-open next month. It was noted a few months ago, that realistically, a vaccine would take at least 12–18 months. A long-term lockdown until a workable vaccination was never a realistic solution for too many reasons to name in this parable.
During the earlier stages of the UK’s outbreak, it should be distinctly remembered that Oxford University scientists study concluded that COVID-19 might have infected half of the UK. In response to this and the general situation, many people within my social circle adopted a position of balance (remember that Tony Stark meme which was routinely circulated telling people not to panic and wash their hands). Two points to keep in mind here: (1) when a virus is a novel phenomenon and a country is in its infancy in dealing with it, a form of caution is prudent-perhaps even necessary (2) even back then it was concluded that the elderly and people with certain health conditions were at a higher risk. Like many, I am of the position that the government acted disastrously slow in their enactment of the initial lockdown. It is better to have overreacted than underreacted to a virus that we knew little about and had even less experience with dealing. The initial lockdown was necessary all things considered. However, a quick examination of the architect behind the government’s policy (Neil Ferguson) quickly shows us that he and the Imperial team had been fatally wrong with their modelling of foot and mouth disease in 2001. This is not the only concerning methodological problem he was implicated in. There is also the issue of him doing the opposite of what his very own model proposed. One of his most prominent critics is John Ioannidis, a professor in disease prevention at Stanford University. Other leading scientists such as Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, one of Germany’s most esteemed epidemiologists would also contend the prognosis given his opposition to government policies in Germany. While I disagree with his view that there should have been no lockdown in the first place, he makes a basic, yet vital point about the difference between dying with coronavirus, and dying primarily because of it: ‘when patients concurrently have other diseases, an infectious disease must not be held solely responsible for a lethal outcome’ says the professor-but this is exactly what has been happening with the language employed for the last few months. Until we have a better understanding of the primary cause of death, statistical readings pose a huge challenge. Further, there are now more media and health outlets attempting to make this public.
When Sweden announced its policy of tackling the virus, the entire world berated them for their approach. Within the last month, however, many major outlets have praised them for their approach. Yet whenever their death rate increases, there seems to be a ‘ha, I told you so’ mentality which is devastatingly pernicious. The statistical methods applied by our very own UK when applied to Sweden-does not hold up very well. Is this surprising? It should not be. It doesn’t even hold up well within the UK itself. Norway’s health chief came out recently and claimed that they could have handled the virus without the lockdown. A bold claim. But who am I to denigrate a country’s policy so sharply, when our death rate is so appalling? Is she wrong? Maybe. Maybe not. The truth is that no one knows what the best approach is to deal with this situation right now. There is also the case in Japan. Their policy has been vastly different to ours, but why, I ask, is their death rate much lower than ours? It is a complicated puzzle with no straight answer. It may well be true that lessening measures turns out to be a mess for us. I certainly hope not. No one knows for certain, though there is one thing I am certain about; it is how little we know.
My final points are more on the social side. Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, made an alarming observation during the infancy of the UK outbreak when he stated that police are enforcing punishments on the whims of ministers. As it turned out, every person prosecuted under the Coronavirus Act was wrongly charged according to the Crown Prosecution Service. The article detailing this was released on May the 15th. Yet I have some people telling me that the lockdown measures need to be stricter. In what way, I ask? By giving the authorities more power to unjustly violate our basic human rights? Some people I know are sharply anti-police, yet now, their faith in them to rightly regulate our social movements and behaviours is strangely Orwellian. Some of this might seem illogical or paradoxical. But when we consider the human condition to collectively survive, maybe the contradictions are more understandable. Public internet displays are also deceptive tools. A person may propose a hard-line stance on something, but when confronted in isolation about it, an air of authenticity and honesty emerges. Try it. Talk to any person one on one instead of a stage and your conversation is likely to be more honest. The virus is a disaster and its implications have been wide-reaching. We should not, however, ignore the fact, that because of the government’s lockdown policy, thousands of people’s cancer treatments have been delayed, emergency medical referrals drastically reduced, people’s incomes taking a drastic hit, the lives of thousands endangered by domestic violence, severe mental illness in first-time patients emerging: the list of collateral damage, ergo, lives being lost, cannot be understated. But it is. People have become so one-dimensional in their analysis that they have grossly neglected issues that are now deemed subsidiary. When did human lives become a side issue?
Supplementary ramblings:
Some people are saying they want a far longer and stricter lockdown, but they are also saying that they are going to get ‘wrecked’ as soon as the first club or pub opens. The irony is ironic.
