This is not to say that coronavirus is unimportant. It is though to say that it’s not as important as all that.
Coronavirus: UK schools and offices could close for up to two months
The only reason we might do that is because it has become pandemic. Yet, if it’s pandemic there’s no point in doing that.
After such ineffable logic we should actually go further.
So, the entire population gets it. Some 400,000 deaths perhaps. Horrendous, horrible, foul etc. There are 600,000 deaths a year in the UK. OK, back of envelope, call that a doubling of the death rate. Except, of course, it won’t be. Some goodly portion of those who die from Corvid-19 will be those who are about to die of something else. There’s a reason pneumonia was long known as the old man’s friend.
Of course, none of us wants to be one of them, none of us wants anyone else to be one of them either.
So, what should we be prepared to give up in order to avoid those extra, what, 200,000 (?) deaths?
The economic answer – no, not the one that is economical in the sense of saving money but economical in the sense of using economics to gain an answer – is where the number of deaths avoided is still larger than the number of deaths from our avoidance tactics. That’s the outer limit of how far we should be willing to go at least.
Close the economy for 2 months, as recommended here? That’s, again back of the envelope, a £400 billion hit to the economy. How many will die because of that reduction of 20% in production/consumption/incomes?
No, I dunno either but I’d certainly be willing to listen to people who tell me that it’s more than 200,000. After all, Marmot, Dorling, they tell us that tens of thousands have been killed just by government spending rising from 33% of everything to 34% of everything, that austerity.
Sure, it’s all horribly harsh and all that. But stopping the world because of coronavirus would indeed kill more than allowing it to let rip. So, there’s some limit to how much we want to stop the world in order to avoid it ripping, isn’t there?
The language we use matters - it provides clarity to our own thoughts and enables…
It is now generally acknowledged that the structure of the NHS needs to be overhauled…
In the film Apollo 13, a loss of oxygen causes the crew to start inadvertently…
There's an idea out there which seems intuitive but then so many ideas do seem…
When we think about the darkly opaque goals of modern central bankers as they relate…
As the papers recently filled with the distressing images of desperate souls looking to escape…
View Comments
In every previous century of human history, we would simply have called 2020 "a bad year for the flu." The current panic is solely because we are suddenly able to pin a name on this disease and monitor its spread; also because most of our mortality statistics come from China, with primitive care, a lying government, and most of the data coming from hospitals treating the most severe cases. The cure in Congress is log-rolling, competing bids for how many thousands of millions of dollars we "need." The reaction could indeed be deadlier than the pathogen. China might have known this.
The reason to quarantine and close things down (like schools) is to stop it becoming endemic in the UK or a pandemic generally. If the disease has achieved either of those the benefits of the control methods will be limited and will start to be outweighed by the costs.
However, in the early stages they should not be ignored. If we can reduce the infection rate from say 3 new cases per infection to 1.5 the number of infected will be significantly reduced. (The Chinese figures if you believe them suggest a figure currently of below 1.)
The benefits of these control actions include:
- Over time the temperature will rise and those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will open the windows and let fresh air in (or go outside) rather than sit breathing the recirculated coughs and sneezes of the people near us. (This is one of the main reasons flu is a mainly winter disease.)
- The humidity changes in summer compared to winter shortening the life of viruses outside the body
- time to understand the new disease including the length of time from infection to symptoms, when patients are infectious, why some people have tested negative after infection and later positive, etc.
- Time to develop a vaccine
we used to have isolation hospitals for a reason. They worked then and can work now but don't forget to open your windows, cough and sneeze into tissues and was your hands.
WHO figures 28 Feb excluding China & Korea:
84,146 Covid-19 Cases and 2,876 Deaths in RoW, mortality rate* 0.03%
Italy mortality rate 0.025%
Gov aided by MSM scaremongering - give us More Power
Surprised Tim hasn't swallowed it as he swallows Global Warming scaremongering
* mortality rate based on infected who seek treatment not total infected and recover 'invisibly'
The mortality rate is affected by two things we don't really know, the number of cases that are missed as not tested / limited symptoms and the time to die.
I have seen suggestions that it can take up to 28 days to die which would imply you should compare the deaths to the number of cases 28 days ago not the current number of cases.
From Ambrose Evans Pritchard in the Telegraph
"The latest tracking data as of Feb 22 (unreliable, but the best we have) is that the mortality rate is 4pc in Wuhan, 2.8pc in Hubei, and 0.8pc in other regions of China, though all figures are creeping up as slow deaths hit the data.
There can be long lag times after infection so it is too early to infer ratios from South Korea, Italy and Iran, but this is surely more like the Spanish Flu of 1918 than anything we are used to. Chinese data suggests that roughly 14pc of those infected over the age of 80 are dying."
By only taking crude mortality rates from recently infected countries you are biasing the figures.
It is clear the mortality rate is significantly higher than flu probably over an order of magnitude more and possibly greater than that.
The figures you give have a 3% mortality rate not 0.03% though I presume the figures include China & Korea
Shutdowns of human concentrating activities like schools, cruises etc are not to avoid or stop the virus. It is to slow the pandemics rate of spread so the ICUs do not get overloaded. In a year everyone will have been exposed. I note in Oz our paid for and bought cheap government has encouraged importing latest bug dejeur by making sure infected people arrive from source before closing borders to aircraft from that country.
The mainstream news should be condemned for their scaremongering tactics.... It's as if they are competing to print the highest covid deaths possible.
This is a serious once in a lifetime crisis, yet we don't know what to believe as nearly every 'whole family dies' type headline has a sneaky 'covid related' condition hidden within.
Are 'covid related' deaths in fact deaths from covid.? Were these people even showing symptoms or simply tested positive whilst dying from some unrelated malady?
Anybody can die from covid... But not everyone who dies with covid dies from it.
This causes massive anxiety in the populace and gives covid nay sayers plenty of ammo... It must Stop!
April 2020