A Modest Proposal About The Coronavirus

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• That would knock off about 95% of the nonsense the government foists off on the citizens.

• Because you cannot carry out whole-population experiments tens of thousands of times over.

• So before getting Brexit done we need to have studies that show it will be effective? Sounds like a great idea to me. And before Boris gets to be PM, we need studies demonstrating his effectiveness. Even better. However, it would mean we'd never change anything.

  • 'However, it would mean we’d never change anything.'

    You certainly know how to find an argument that'll appeal to me.

• Radio caller tried to argue that no one should be promoting hydroxychloroquine, zinc, etc. unless they could cite double-blind peer reviewed studies, etc. Host asked "you got any of those showing Lockdowns work"?

• Two cost–benefit analyses of the first UK lockdown showed that the costs exceeded the benefits by an order of magnitude.[1][2] Now two global analyses of COVID-19 death rates both found that lockdowns don’t actually reduce the number of deaths.[3][4] Whilst the public wearing masks is ineffective.[5][6]
  [1] https://doi.org/10.1111/ijcp.13674
  [2] https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/graa030
  [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464
  [4] https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339
  [5] https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.01.20049528
  [6] https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-6817

  • [1] and [2] are useless modelling dressed up in a mathematical disguise. They presume that the lockdown actually implemented is the only thing to compare against and cherry-pick countries to compare. If you include places like China, New Zealand and other Eastern countries you see that when properly implemented lockdown is both very effective and much cheaper than those used in Europe which were too late and had insufficient compliance. The studies also assume that there is no cost to no lockdown. However the reality is that people would have taken their own measures anyway. Regardless of when the government said, many would have avoided eating out, going to the cinema, travelling on public transport etc.

    [3] and [4] are also completely bogus for similar reasons. It is no surprise that an incompetently implemented lockdown which is too little, too late, and lifted too early is ineffective. That's not an argument against lockdowns, it's an argument against incompetence.

    [5] is a review of studies. The RCTs should be the best, but as the study says "However, the RCTs often suffered from poor compliance and controls using facemasks." which is pretty fatal - the people you are counting as using masks weren't always doing so and the people you were counting as not using masks were sometimes doing so. They also say that in a household, it may reduce the chance of infection by 19%, but elsewhere it seems to be less effective. That is implausible. Unless masks were perfect we would expect to see that they reduce infection less in prolonged close contact situations as the amount leaking out would eventually be enough to cause infection.The review concludes "The evidence is not sufficiently strong to support widespread use of facemasks as a protective measure against COVID-19. However, there is enough evidence to support the use of facemasks for short periods of time by particularly vulnerable individuals when in transient higher risk situations." which is not what you are claiming. It does not say that masks are ineffective - only that we cannot be sure that they are.

    As for [6], I don't know if you didn't read the article or didn't understand it as it was not designed to test whether mask wearing was effective - only to test whether telling people to wear masks (and providing them with the masks) is effective in preventing them getting infected. For a long time the standard position on masks was that it helped prevent you infecting other people - not that it helped prevent you being infected, which is entirely consisitent with this study.