Round 2, ding-a-ling-a-ling…

I’m left deflated today. I understand the argument that a united effort sees more compliance, but I genuinely think Bojo was on the right track with measures targeted at denser areas of the population with higher rates.

Nothing about the latest COBR slide of growth amongst the over 60s really shouts at me that those in deepest Norfolk, Cornwall or Kent, need to close non-essential shops, asap.

I’d have liked to have seen a more united effort with cities, even if London doesn’t really need it, simply uniting the effort North and South might have been enough to kick those currently flouting the rules into more stringent compliance. Enough to turn the RE down the notch needed to allow us to carry a sustained rate through the winter.

Perhaps the economic modelling shows furlough, rather than struggling with footfall falloff is better for these areas, so simply joining the cities in these measures is better. If this is the case, a stronger argument from the government to support this is really needed.

I’m heartened mostly by Steve Baker’s statement outside №10 yesterday having taken a group of scientist and analyst in to scrutinise the governments data, he seemed pretty supportive of listening to what Bojo had to say.

What I’m increasingly annoyed at is the degree to which the deatheaters that circle round @toadmeister, and his band of militant lockdown sceptics, have drowned out intelligent contrarian debate, more than anyone else leading to these very measures coming in.

Sow enough doubt in measures — e.g.

• down on masks
• measures don’t work
• Tcells burned it out

… and all you do is make them less effective leading to stronger measures. A sort of lunatic self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just working though his latest list of 10 reasons sums how off-point his whitterings are increasingly becoming.

1) Reasons need to be good to suspend liberty

So stopping denial of NHS treatment is not a good reason then?

2) Quarantining the sick and health doesn’t work

Well if you can’t distinguish between the two as 80% are asymptomatic, and you don’t have fast enough testing to tell the difference. What’s your alternative if lesser measures are not slowing case growth?

3) No evidence LDs reduce mortality

I’ve repeated this evidence many times, to his deaf ears, to show that countries with far less effective lockdowns like Brazil and Peru have seen up to 30x the mortality rates by age band. This does not even include this reality that excess mortality upgrades on C19 death figures in these countries are more like 150%, to our 50%. As in, the picture is actually far worse.

As to his view that US states provide evidence lockdowns don’t work, for the 8 states he lists, the reality as per this piece is that only 3 held out on this, more so as this plot shows by ranking the US states by density and plotting their d/1m rates along side, the states in question are all far less dense even than Sweden, yet relative to neighbouring states of similar density, they’ve seen higher mortality rates. Plus, before the summer was out, all states that did lockdown, then lifted measures and saw cases rise rapidly, making it very clear that the lockdowns suppressed this.

Sure, they burned out into a higher HITs, but they were still distancing, so it is not like they hit their true HITs, and as the weather has got colder and behaviour dynamics have changed, sure enough cases in all states are on the rise again. The US is currently in the worst state it has been since the start, nicely gifting Trump his first 100k+ cases in one day just days ahead of his re-election attempt.

Most striking of all is New Jersey which already has 1855 d/1m, 3x that of the UK, and the highest measured rate anywhere in the world, yet it is demonstrating at likely near 37% spread, with measures like ours still in place, it still has the capacity to see the R0 lift and so too the HIT, leading to yet more case growth, scary.

As to Sweden, they had a lockdown, a voluntary one, achieving similar suppression to us, and even Tegnell is now capitulating saying herd immunity was not their strategy, and the latest view of their daily case rates seems to suggest cases are now doubling every 7days and that without the decelaratory benefit of summer weather, they are heading to same place we are. I’d be unsurprised to see stronger measures than they have ever seen before Christmas.

Further, as I’ve argued for months in this piece the entire comparison between the two, the suggestion we could have followed them, is plain daft. To the point where even the Spectator is now making most of my arguments, with no credit, or apology mind.

4) The Great Barrington Delusion

Tiered measures have been entirely this. Measures to protect those in Care Homes and the NHS have been in place all summer, the vulnerable have been advised to distance and get food delivered. The tiered system has been all about having the young mix, and all it shows is you can’t plug the holes in the sieve of spread up the age ranges. It has still spread to them, and caused the projection of NHS overload.

To argue, as Gupta does, that isolation for the vulnerable has been dreadful, but to suggest a policy that would require tighter measures than we’ve managed to achieve, is lunacy. It will only be worse for them, and more so than anyone else. It is plainly an unachieveable dream.

More so, if you apply the rates of death for those in younger age groups seen in places like Brazil/Peru to our population, the people the GBD would have catch it more will generate far more deaths than we’ve already had. Enough to still see hospitals needing to cancel treatments for cancer, etc.

To quantify, at 66% spread, all those under 70 would generate 61k deaths, we’ve had 8.7k so far.

5) Lockdowns cause more deaths

No, they don’t. New Zealand, whose course I don’t advocate, does provide a useful control for this mad claim. They had a stronger lockdown, 25 C19 deaths, no delays to other treatments, and fewer than expected deaths.

Toby’s big list of issues, are all caused by services in hospitals being drowned out by C19 treatment pushing them all aside. Sure, moving as quickly as we can toward true herd immunity is a better goal than New Zealand’s of trying to ignore the problem all together, but it is plain for the rest of us to see that allowing too many cases of C19 at any one time, along the way, is what is causing all the other knock-on deaths and economic damage from having to overreact to keep things from bubbling over.

His conjecture that lockdowns cause this is duplicitous. With no measures, C19 would rise more rapidly, leading to even larger demand for NHS services, with more drowning out of other treatments, and with far greater deaths form C19 outside hospital where the mortality rate trebles as there is no oxygen.

6) Lockdowns wreak mental health havoc

Yes, they entirely do, but so too does a terrifying fear you can’t get treatment in a hospital for anything. Which would only be heightened by creating an even bigger spike in cases.

As does frustrating the living crap out of everyone by writing plainly illogical crap on lockdownsceptics, and whipping the country up into a fervour.

7) Lockdowns cause catastrophic economic damage

Yes, they do. Which is why we needed to be encouraging people to comply with the measures we had before this, not sowing dissent making them more likely, blinkered idiot.

We needed to support Bojo’s tiered system, keep restrictions just to areas that needed them, helped foster a culture of compliance by recognising the greater libertarian good that comes from the needs of “the many” outweighing the needs of “the few”.

What you entirely fail to imagine is the societal change that will happen in an area where NHS is overrun. Law and order is likely to collapse, riots, looting, a whole raft of dark outcomes.

8) Global economic recession will reverse the progress

Yes, it will. It is dreadful, it is consequence of the virus, not policy to preserve life, if it weren’t places that have seen far less successful lockdowns would be fairing so much better with fewer deaths, and they are not.

More so, this is really far more of a 1st world problem than people realise. Here is an attempt to quantify this in a UK centric way, by considering how many deaths we could have based on age banded IFRs from serology studies. For this purpose we assume the mad level of 100% spread, but purely for comparison. At this level the UK could see ~450k deaths. However, other countries don’t have the same numbers of old people. If we keep the population total at 66.7m, but re-adjust the demographic to match each country in the plot, we can see how many deaths each country would get if it were the same size.

What is stark is how much less of a problem the virus is being in countries like Pakistan where the median age is 22, in the UK 41. This means the UK and Sweden will simply have 5x their deaths. Add to this most of these 2nd world countries have other big killers, they are all slowly realising this is not really as bad for them as it is for us.

9) Lockdowns are fundamentally undemocratic

Yes they are, but so then is any process of electing someone else to make executive decisions. The only way this is undemocratic is if they weren’t going to pass it through parliament this week to vote on it.

They are.

If it passes through parliament. It is by definition, about as democratic as it can actually get in any country in the world.

10) Lockdowns make the police forces illogical and draconian

Speeding on the motorway kills 1/1000 of the people C19 does. Yet we are happy to let the police chase us, stop us, lock us up, for rules collectively known as laws. These new rules have simply come into place rapidly, shocking us more, but that does not make it more or less wrong.

I don’t rail against Toby’s list because I want a lockdown. I don’t, I want C19 to stop affecting our lives. I happen to think upgrading beyond the tier system was a mistake. It corrupts a very powerful argument the PM was making, and won’t in reality help rural and towns folk at all. However, the only way to get Bojo’s attention, and direct his efforts better, is to make sound arguments from a solid foundation of data, and Toby simply isn’t, and with such an influential voice, I’m just left hugely disappointed and frustrated at what he could have achieved. His advice simply isn’t SAGE enough.