How the UK Could Have REDUCED Covid Deaths by 50,000+
“3rd Mar ‘20: Johnson advised by SAGE 250k – 500k would die, unless stringent measures were taken; Johnson visited Covid ward & boasted, on camera, “I shook hands with everybody;” Decision NOT to take stringent measures formally made;…”
Exactly six months ago, on the 11th March 2020, a senior UK government official told the BBC that the UK government’s approach to dealing with the Covid Pandemic was to “cocoon” people living in Care Homes and
“…By the time they [the 500,000 people living in “care” homes] come out of their cocooning, herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population.”
Now, six months later, how has this worked out for the UK?
In summary: Not Very Well.
By most measures, the UK has experienced more excess deaths as a result of Covid than any other advanced nation.
For example, Reuters tallied the number of death certificates that mentioned Covid which had been reported publicly by the UK government’s Office for National Statistics by June 19th 2020 as 54,852.
The estimated median time between when someone contracts Covid and death (if they do die from Covid) is 18 days.
On the 1st June 2020 the cumulative number of confirmed Covid cases reported by the UK government was 255,505.
This gives the UK a Case Fatality Rate from Covid of 21.5%.
Contrast this with estimates of between 0.1% and 1% that were being bandied about in February 2020!
The UK reports a second dataset of deaths-from-Covid, an alternative to the list compiled by the Office for National Statistics.
According to this second dataset, that is based on deaths in hospitals, care homes and residential homes, as reported to the European Union’s Centre for Disease Control by 4th October 2020, the UK had experienced 42,317 deaths from Covid.
The cumulative total of confirmed Covid cases, as reported by the UK government to the EU CDC on 16th September 2020 was 374,228.
So using this metric, as a proxy for evidence about the UK’s performance, the UK’s cumulative Case Fatality Rate is 11%.
Again, this is far in excess of the 0.1%-1% that we thought, before the pandemic took hold, that we might be facing with Covid.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics on the 7th August 2020 predicted that
“approximately 65,000 excess deaths are estimated as a result of contracting COVID-19 between March 2020 and March 2021.”
Oxford University’s Our World in Data charts Case Fatality Rates, but it doesn’t, as I have done in those two calculations, use a time-lag.
As at the time of writing, here is the UK’s relative performance, using Oxford University’s Our World in Data data, to other countries:
Johns Hopkins University as at 10th October 2020 charts the UK’s comparative performance globally using these two metrics “Observed case-fatality ratio” (analogous to the EU CDC’s “Case fatality Rate”)
and “Deaths per 100,000 population”:
In 2019 the Economist Intelligence Unit, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) published the Global Health Security Index.
The UK was ranked 2nd overall globally in terms of comparative health security:
And, in terms of preparedness for an epidemic, the UK was ranked 1st:
What then, has gone wrong? How could the UK which had seemed so well prepared for a pandemic have so far experienced using a plethora of different measures some of the highest numbers of deaths in the world?
By the time, the expression “Herd Immunity” entered the mainstream of public discourse in the United Kingdom on 11th March 2020, “Herd Immunity” had already gained currency in certain right-wing circles close to those involved in governing the United Kingdom.
It’s perhaps important to note, however, that the scientific concept of “Herd Immunity” which always involves a vaccine was quite different from the hyper-normalised meaning that “Herd Immunity” had acquired in UK governing circles by the time it had spilled over into popular discourse on March 11th 2020.
This hyper-normalised, technical and novel meaning of Herd Immunity is best summed up by the UK Prime Minister’s senior adviser when, in late February, according to a report in the Sunday Times, he described the UK government’s strategy thus:
On the 13th March 2020, while the UK government was rapidly publicly denying that the country was pursuing a Herd Immunity strategy, the UK Prime Minister told the Italian Prime Minister in a private phone-call that the UK “wants” Herd Immunity:
The following is a transcript excerpted from “Britain’s Coronavirus Catastrophe: Did the Government Get it Wrong?” Dispatches, 21:00 03/06/2020, Channel 4, 60 mins. (Accessed 11 Oct 2020):
TRANSLATION of what Dr Pierpaolo Sileri, deputy health minister of Italy, said on camera to Channel Four’s dispatches program:
“I remember it perfectly because it was the same weekend that I discovered I had Covid. I spoke with Conte to tell President [sic] Conte that I tested positive..and he told me that he had spoken with Boris Johnson and that they had also talked about the situation in Italy. I remember he said, he told me that he [Johnson] wants herd immunity. I said, Look, right now, I’m in bed with a fever, but this isn’t a normal Influenza — It’s something more. I remember that, after hanging up, I said to myself that I hope Boris Johnson goes for a Lockdown…”
At that time the UK government’s chief scientific adviser and its chief medical officer were denying publicly in many different forums that the government strategy was: Herd Immunity. From what has subsequently become known it is beyond reasonable doubt that they were both acting in good faith.
When a scientist uses the term Herd Immunity, they are invoking a whole system of actions that necessarily includes the existence of a vaccine. Scientists, acting in good faith, are not by speaking about Herd Immunity as a practical country-scale policy suggesting it should be attempted without a vaccine. Yet, as it has now become clear, UK government ministers and advisers were promoting and executing Herd Immunity as a strategy for dealing with a pandemic novel pathogen for which there is in existence no vaccine.
Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer (and the UK’s chief scientific officer) in an e-mail released in response to a BBC Freedom of Information request in September 2020, explained the difference between the idea long known to science as “Herd Immunity” and the novel idea of a “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” which appears to have captured the imaginations of those advising and actually inside the UK government as far back as January 2020:
In a further e-mail released in the same cache the UK government’s chief medical officer hints at his frustration at being tagged (in a further Sunday Times Coronavirus expose entitled “38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster” published on April 19th 2020) by a government minister as being supportive of a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” as distinct from “Herd Immunity” inside a population through the use of a vaccine:
In the light of these emails, the apparent contradiction between senior government officials speaking positively about “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” and honourable scientists denying the government was pursuing a Herd Immunity strategy is finally resolved.
On the one hand Johnson, his chief adviser, the head of his behavioural science unit and one of his ministers are labelling a completely different policy with the signifier “Herd Immunity” than the policy of “Herd Immunity” as then understood by scientists such as Whitty.
When Johnson, Cummings, Halpern (chief executive of the government-owned Behavioural Insights lab, who on 11th March had spoken about [vaccineless] Herd immunity in public for the first time) and that unnamed minister were speaking about Herd Immunity, it seems clear they were talking about a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity.”
By contrast, the scientists advising government assumed that when people were speaking to them about “Herd Immunity” they were doing so in the knowledge that such a policy made absolutely no sense in the absence of a vaccine.
Even if you were willing, as a government, to tolerate the 100,000 deaths which Johnson’s government had written to England’s local authorities in early March to tell them to expect, it still, to a scientist would not make any sense, to describe the policy you were pursuing as “Herd Immunity” in the absence of a vaccine.
And yet, the UK government’s action and inaction towards making adequate preparations for the pandemic throughout January, February and until 23rd March 2020 is only explicable, if you understand them as pursuing a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” in substance.
Such a policy is 100% consistent with the thesis of this piece, which is that the UK’s world beatingly terrible performance in dealing with the pandemic is only understandable if you assume, despite the public denials of government ministers, that it set out in early January 2020 to pursue, and that it has continued to pursue, a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” in response to the virus.
That the UK government understood the severity of the oncoming coronavirus pandemic in early February is clear.
At 6.50 a.m. on 10th February 2020, long before most of us outside government had even heard of the coronavirus, Public Health England “Made” (this is a legal and constitutional term of art) The Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020.
At 2.30 p.m. on 10th February 2020 the Government “Laid” these Regulations before Parliament.
As I wrote on March 10th these regulations gave the police the power to detain people if they sneezed.
I have also shown elsewhere, by late February, the government’s own pandemic modellers, the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Emergencies [SAGE] had advised the government that:
On the 3rd March 2020, the UK government was advised by SAGE that, unless stringent measures were taken immediately, SAGE’s sub-committee on pandemic modelling (comprising a bevy of the most respected epidemiological modellers from several of the best universities in the United Kingdom) advised the government that “in a reasonable worst case scenario” between 250,000 and 500,000 people would die from the virus.
On that same day, the United Kingdom Prime Minister Johnson visited a Covid ward in a hospital and boasted, on camera, that “I shook hands with everybody.”
In the following days, the UK government, which had decided not to react to SAGE’s advice and introduce “stringent measures” to prevent the “reasonable worst case scenario” of between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths from occuring, wrote to local authorities in England and told them to expect 100,000 deaths.
On March 13th the government finally decided to introduce “stringent measures” to halt the spread of the virus — it’s worth noting this was exactly the same day that the Italian Prime Minister Conte is reported as telling his health minister that Prime Minister Johnson had told him “we want “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity”.”
It wasn’t until the 23rd of March that ANY formal restrictions were actually introduced by the UK government.
Ten days between decision and action.
Ten days between being warned 250,000 and 500,000 people would die if you didn’t take “stringent measures” to halt the virus’s spread and deciding to take action.
Twenty days of dither and delay.
Incompetence or competence?
If the government was pursuing a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” then this delay is completely rational (within the albeit crazy parameters set by such a scientifically illiterate and untested theory of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity”).
Imperial College London pandemic modeller, Neil Ferguson OBE told the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee that not delaying for a week the time between decision and introduction of “stringent measures” would have reduced the death toll by a half because:
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/539/pdf/
As we saw earlier, the death toll by June was 54,000 people, according to the Office of National Statistics tally of death certificates that mention Covid as a cause of death.
Had the UK Government acted on the 15th March, 27,000 people might only have died.
Had the UK Government acted on 7th March, 13,500 people, by June 19th 2020, might only have died.
And had the UK Government introduced “stringent measures” on the 1st March 2020, the day after its pandemic modellers in the SAGE committee had advised it that up to 80% of the UK population would be infected and 250,000–500,000 people would die, under a “reasonable worst case scenario,” then, the number of dead would have been:
6,750, instead of 54,000.
That would have put the UK ahead of many countries in Europe, but way behind most countries in Europe and the advanced western world.
6,750 deaths from Covid in the UK would have been a tragedy.
Had the UK prime minister, according to the Sunday Times, not missed 5 COBR emergency committee meetings that discussed the pandemic and spent most of February dealing with his complicated private life in a grace and favour mansion called Chevening, then the UK might have realised its potential as the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
Imagine: had the UK government not been infatuated with the scientifically illiterate “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” theory and fitted all government policy around it, 50,650 people who are dead today, might still be alive.
It’s not like the imminence of the pandemic wasn’t clear to those who were watching closely. I went through every publicly available press release from the Hong Kong government after 31st December 2019. I proved in Why Didn’t the West Pick Up China’s Covid Signals? that, even through open sources, it was possible to discern what was happening in time to put into place the necessary conditions to deal with the pandemic in the UK.
Japan, New Zealand, China, Viet Nam, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany and other countries, including countries in Africa, managed to scenario-scan, forecast what coming towards them and prepare.
The result is that they did not lose 54,000 people, most of whom died unnecessary deaths, because their governing class was obsessed with a scientifically illiterate theory of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immuity.”
Later in his evidence to the UK Parliament on 11th June 2020 Dr Ferguson OBE also estimated that half of all deaths had occured in care homes.
The UK government, as a matter of policy, had ejected 15,000 older people from acute care beds in hospitals in early March. It coerced residential carehomes to accept them, even though they had not been tested for Covid. And even though the UK government had been able to publish Regulations in Parliament in early February which reveal it knew that sneezing might transmit the novel pathogen, it did not bother to procure Personal Protection Equipment for either the staff or the residents of these care homes.
As a result, half of the 54,000 deaths that occured up to 19th June 2020 and which are mentioned on death certificates as resulting from Covid, could have been prevented.
Had the UK government acted on the knowledge it had in February… Why didn’t it procure this PPE?
Why didn’t it act to prevent these preventable deaths that many other countries with similar levels of development and demographics managed to prevent?
If a competent UK government was pursuing a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” exactly what occurred between January 2020 and 23rd March 2020, when stringent measures to halt the spread of the virus were finally introduced, would be what you’d aim for.
Such a competent UK Government pursuing “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” would take steps like — delaying imposing stringent measures for twenty-one days to allow the death-rate and the infection-rate to keep doubling so that by 23rd March 2020, it is now estimated, up to 100,000 people-a-day were becoming infected with the virus.
You would be encouraging people to shake hands by modelling such behaviour as you visited a Covid ward in a hospital on March 3rd, if you were a Prime Minister who “wants” “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity”.
Your government would tell councils to expect “100,000 deaths” yet it would take NO action to try to reduce that number of deaths.
In pursuit of testing this scientifically illiterate and non-sensical policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” you would forcibly decant 15,000 older people from hospitals, untested for Covid and without PPE, into residential carehomes.
You would also give up, as the UK government did formally on March 13th, trying to suppress the virus using tried-and-tested technology like test, track, trace and isolate systems to identify carriers of the virus.
If you didn’t realise how bonkers the idea sounded to anyone else who had a modicum of knowledge, empathy and indeed humanity inside of them, you might even boast to the Italian Prime Minister on the same day your government had decided to introduce stringent measures to contain the virus’s transmission that actually “we want “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity.””
Meanwhile, on March 14th 2020, a group of over 500 UK scientists representing most of the universities in the United Kingdom published an open letter that completely pulled the rug from under the policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” and of Herd Immunity as a practical policy to pursue at that time. Remember, none of us knew that the UK government was pursuing this crazy policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity”, until that infamous BBC interview with the CEO of the UK Government’s behavioural science unit on March 11th:
Another set of academics, however, who are associated with Stanford University in California and Oxford University were at this very moment attempting to provide the theoretical underpinnings for the fringe idea that had already taken over the UK’s governing class of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity.”
I and indeed many others have written extensively on the flaws in both sets of academics’ arguments:
In the Stanford Paper the modellers assumed that the Infection Fatality Rate of Covid was the same as for seasonal flu — under 0.1%.
This is their obsession.
In fact, promoting this idee fixe, even now in October 2020 appears to be the sole strategic goal of the people behind both papers: convince society that “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” is a practical policy to pursue, because we can protect the vulnerable, and anyway Covid is not that deadly.
The Oxford Model, similarly, which was given a lot of airplay by those promoting a “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” policy in March 2020 assumed that Covid killed about 0.1% of those whom it infected. It then looked at how many people had died from Covid up to that moment in the UK. The authors of that paper, which was not peer-reviewed, concluded that over 50% of the UK population had already been infected with Covid by March 2020.
This conclusion turned out to be completely false. Imperial College London tested the blood of over 100,000 UK residents in June 2020 and concluded that 6% of the population had had the virus:
The Stanford Paper was guilty of even more egregious errors, as Buzzfeed reported its funder, an airline owner opposed to any form of lockdown, was also promoting the trope, by now well disproven, that Covid was not as deadly as it in fact was:
Then on 19th April 2020, one of the world’s foremost blogs on statistics took a closer look at the statistics underpinning the Stanford study and concluded it had made rudimentary errors in calculations that rendered its conclusions flawed.
Both the Oxford Modellers and the Stanford Paper authors were feted on right-wing media outlets as they represented their albeit flawed academic labours as justifying a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” which made no sense whether or not their flawed papers had, as they were in fact, been completely debunked.
Yet, for some reason, those who wished to oppose government attempts, particularly in the UK and the US, to halt the virus’s spread became obsessed with the idea that “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” made sense scientifically, and that it was a practical and humane public policy.
Even as countries as diverse demographically as China, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan and Senegal proved it was possible to suppress the virus, the sirens call of the “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity’ites” amplified the capitulating idea that it was impossible to suppress the virus. And that rather than heroically trying to do so, the UK should tolerate hundreds-of-thousands of infections and deaths, on the strength of a “theory” that Covid wasn’t that deadly and “vulnerable” people could be successfully segmented from the rest of society, and protected.
Let’s recall what the actual Case Fatality Rate is in the UK…
Depending on the metric and time period between March 2020 and now that you select, the actual empirical Case Fatality Rate is between 8% and 21%.
Those promoting “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” back in March 2020, using their fancy although now debunked models, assured us the death rate would be around 0.1%.
They charmed us with promises that it was possible to segment off a portion of the population who were “vulnerable” and without impacting upon that population, if the virus was let rip through society, we would achieve “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” in a few months.
In fact, the authors of the Oxford Model paper thought they had proved that over 50% of the UK population had already had Covid by March 2020. Yet, the real figure was below 6% when the blood of more than 100,000 actual people (not modelled people) was tested in June.
The “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” promoters told us in March 2020 that “vulnerable” older people could be segmented off from the rest of society. Yet, in fact and in empirical reality, half of deaths in the UK took place in residential care homes for older residents.
The UK government failed to protect residents from unnecessary deaths that have, on average, deprived those who died from an extra ten years of additional life.
The largest (a cohort of 85,000 confirmed Covid cases) empirical study anywhere has found that 0.5% of 5–17 year olds died of Covid. Yet, the same authors of the Oxford Model paper and the Stanford Paper are now in October 2020 advising the President of the United States of America’s Covid czar that the virus doesn’t harm younger people.
You want to just shout:
“Herd Immunity’ites: EVERYTHING you predicted in March 2020 was wrong. The UK government tested your idea of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity.” Now over 50,000 people are dead, who should be alive. Like, what don’t you understand about science? You propose a theory. You test it. And if it fails. You move on. And yet… You’re still promoting the same debunked idea, which most of us saw through at the time (see my collected writings on Covid, including 12 Reasons Why Herd Immunity’s Nuts , and Two Tribes — The “Case Fatality Rate’ites” & the “IFR’ites” Medium I calculated the actual daily average Case Fatality Rate, globally).
The author of the Oxford paper even appeared on Fox News last week, and despite having been wrong about everything so far during the past six months in relation to Covid, she is still promoting the same “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” idea as before. Like a Siren luring Ships of State to the rocks, she’s promising that if we follow her unscientific “[vaccineless] herd immunity” prescription, in another “three or six” months we’ll reach Herd Immunity. That’s what she said in March. Now, without acknowledging all the mistaken prescriptions before, she’s still inciting us towards a policy that has already resulted in tens of thousands of excess deaths.
Research published in the last few days should drive the final nail into the coffin for the idea that we as a society have the capacity to protect vulnerable people from the virus, while allowing it to pass through the rest of the population.
You might think, given how deadly the virus has proved in empirical reality to be, that it would not be necessary to make any more arguments against the “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunityites”.
Yet, given the Zombie Nature of Vaccineless Herd Immunity Theory and that its promoters are again, six months after first surfacing, peddling the same canards in the right-wing media, it’s important that yet again they are refuted.
The canard that, for example, Covid doesn’t harm children — despite the 0.5% Case Fatality Rate in 5–17 year olds in a peer-reviewed research article in the Journal “Science” (Epidemiology and transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in two Indian states) again should not be given airplay (and yet it is).
The further canard that “vulnerable” people can be protected has again been disproved, not just by the fact that half of all UK deaths from Covid affected older people who had been infected and not protected from premature deaths that on average deprived them from 10 extra years of life.
But also because recent empirical research has shown that “overweight” and “obese” people, who make up 70% of our population, are at significantly higher risk of being hospitalised if they catch Covid, being intubated if they are hospitalised, and of dying:
The question indeed remains: why is the UK government so intent on pursuing its failed “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” policy that I have here established that it is pursuing?
At first it looked like it might just have been captured by a Mad Idea being promoted by oligarchs as far back as January 2020 (and in preceding years) that to avoid the rich paying for lockdowns in the event of a pandemic, a justification should be found for the virus to rip through society.
Yet, if the noble aim of protecting the public finances was being pursued, then it too has failed.
Billionaires have also been enriched massively since the pandemic took hold, and that’s with lockdowns across the world. They can have their cake (being enriched) and they can eat it too (not having the bad karma of having sacrificed the rest of us). So why, through surrogates, would they still be promoting this scientifically illiterate, empirically disastrous and inhumane policy of “[vaccineless] herd immunity”?
It even turns out it’s actually cheaper to keep as many people alive as possible, using the government’s own actuarial assumptions about the financial value of its residents’ individual lives.
Remember that, according to the UK prime minister’s senior adviser, the UK government’s policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” was to “Protect the Economy”?!
Yet, the UK has suffered the worst of both worlds: it has one of the highest death rates from the virus in the world. And the UK is expected to suffer its greatest recession in 300 years, according to the Bank of England. And it has already cost £270b in unforecast government expenditure and £300b has been created in electronic cash by the Bank of England since March 19th 2020 to address Covid related issues in the economy.
So what can account for this persistent pursuit of an inhumane, ineffective, scientifically illiterate policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity”?
Is the UK government a genius by pursuing “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” but in its implementation it just made mistakes?
Or is it so completely incompetent that even though it set out to pursue “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” it made so many mistakes that it failed because of this?
Or is what has happened since March 2020 more or less what it expected to happen if it pursued a “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” policy, at least in terms of deaths?
It’s not good enough, either, to say “well, it’s easy for you to write all of this now. We’re dealing with a once-in-a-century pandemic.”
You see, the thing is, I’m on record as having pointed out all of these problems six months ago and at all times in between.
The real question is, as we’re heading towards a second spike, and now that the UK government allowed 2.2m potentially infected university students to take up residence in universities all over the UK in the middle of a pandemic, how can you be making the same mistakes all over again?
Unless you’re pursuing a policy of “[Vaccineless] Herd Immunity” this consistent in/competence simply makes no sense.
My Covid Posts Collected:
