Delaying the First Lockdown May Have Saved Lives
Dr Raghib Ali, a Senior Clinical Research Associate at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge and an Honorary Consultant Physician in Acute Medicine at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, has written a comment piece for the Telegraph in which he argues that if the UK had locked down earlier, it might have meant fewer people dying in the first wave, but that saving would have been more than offset by a greater number of people dying in the second wave.
It is true that two countries – Norway and Finland – who locked down a week before the UK (and closed their borders) have been remarkably successful in having both small first and second waves and no excess mortality to date.
But they are the exceptions – what happened in many other countries in Europe who also locked down (and closed their borders) at the same time is that they did have very small first waves in Spring 2020 but this was followed by much larger second waves in autumn/winter 2021 (and now into spring 2021, too).
And this has happened despite second and third lockdowns in many of these countries as people understandably struggled to maintain compliance with restrictions for months on end.
Dr Ali’s argument is that suppressing infections more effectively in the spring of last year would have meant more people becoming infected in the autumn and winter when the NHS would have been less able to cope. Thanks to the comparatively high number of infections in the spring, the British population had more herd immunity going into the autumn and winter which meant a lower rate of infection than in other parts of Europe.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The idea seems confirmed in the comparison in between Spain and Portugal.
https://twitter.com/MLevitt_NP2013/status/1373784572391923712
Excess death among younger cohort in Portugal during winter 2021 is higher than among under 65 in Spain during spring 2020.
The same rationale.
WTF? Lockdowns are backed by no evidence, anyway.
Please include dr. Pierre Kory’s and Dr.Tess Lawrie’s research on ivermectin. Why can’t we get a prescription for this early Tx of COVID? Why are symptomatic COVID positive pts sent home til what? They get worse, need hospitalisation, ventilation and die? Surely if the data is available showing ivermectin, repurposed drug with a long safety record works, why isn’t it being used. Drs throughout the USA are prescribing it but not here. Why?
Whitty said the same before lockdown#1. The harder we lockdown the more it comes back and that will coincide with winter. Should have followed the original pandemic plan
It looks like strict lockdowns are only really worth it if you actually eliminate the virus like Australia and New Zealand, but those countries of course had a lot of geographical privilege: they weren’t international travel hubs, they were islands far enough from other countries that they didn’t trade with them by trucks, and they were in the southern hemisphere (which meant that in the weeks before their initial lockdowns they had seasonality on their side).
As for Norway and Finland, I guess it comes from that happy combination of being politically progressive and rural: the same reason why Vermont is one of the best performers within the 48 contiguous United States.
“It looks like strict lockdowns are only really worth it if you actually eliminate the virus like Australia and New Zealand”
“Worth it”?????
Really? – to be eternally locked in a detrimental circle of isolation because of a non-‘High Consequence’ virus???
It seems sometimes that even the critics are losing sight of the basics : namely that this virus has caused a level of mortality no greater than about a quarter of the years in the last 25. All of those years were weathered without any of the current Nervous Nellie twitching, ducking and diving.
The whole point of a zero-Covid approach is that once the virus is eliminated you can go back to normal (minus international travel).
If you’re thinking of the occasional snap lockdowns that such countries go through when their border quarantine gets breached, that threat could be significantly reduced by vaccinating the quarantine hotel workers (whom I suspect will be the first people that Australia and NZ will jab once they get their hands on some vaccine).
Much of what we’ve been going through has been essentially a moral panic, fuelled by the fact that a handful of Pacific Rim countries did manage to eliminate the virus using NPIs. If East Asia had been hit as badly as Europe I suspect the atmosphere would be very different.
The suggestion that policy can be made by responding to an event caused by a single individual is ludicrous. The argument about vaccinating quarantine hotel workers is a circular one. Of course if a country succcees in preventing anyone returning to or entering that country, quarantine hotels are not needed. However if any kind of world connectivity beyond total draconian isolation is needed (and that means any kind of toursim industry) the reality of zero Covid is a sham.
My “vaccinate the quarantine hotel workers” suggestion is intended to minimize the short-term threat of future snap lockdowns in countries that are already following a zero-Covid approach. It isn’t an argument for other countries to adopt such an approach, and the zero-Covid countries will of course remain isolated from the world until their general populations are vaccinated.
Indeed: how many zero Covid advocates do you believe are people who hate tourism for non-Covid reasons?
“Zero-Covid countries will of course remain isolated from the world until their general populations are vaccinated.” In that case they will remain closed forever because what we are calling ‘vaccines’ do not prevent infection or transmission of covid 19 and will not build up the necessary herd immunity. Those countries may end up bitterly regretting losing the opportunity to safely build up herd immunity in their summer season when they could.