Has virus lockdown all been for nothing?
THERE IS a growing body of evidence which, if it is ever proved true and it may well be when our present nightmare is over, would leave the Government’s policy over the past 20 months in discredited tatters. We lack the figures that would prove it one way or the other because they are simply not being released to us. Which in itself is suspicious.
In short, when the final allsources death count is authenticated, did total lockdown cause more deaths than it prevented?
And by how much? It is already established government policy swerved violently from inadequate to panic-stricken around March 14. This was because the Government swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the prediction of one man that without total lockdown there would be a holocaust of over half a million casualties.
Increasingly it is being alleged that, as with his previous predictions in earlier pandemics, he didn’t know what he was talking about. Since then the damage to our society, economy and country has been beyond calculation.
It is a very true axiom that if you are faced with a problem or an enemy – and coronavirus is both – the first task must be a rapid and accurate analysis. Get that right and your plan of action will probably work. Get it wrong and nothing will work. Worse, it might even be counterproductive. That is the accusation now being levelled at lockdown.
Trying to predict the future is the oldest delusion known to Man. It has never worked, save exceptionally by a fluke. This time we were told “Follow the science”.
Meaning bow to the new god. The Government certainly did. Two problems: the scientists all said different things so the Government chose the scariest “model”.
Second snag: no one examined what had happened before.We had had bird flu, Asian flu, BSE, MERS and SARS. We had survived them all without wrecking our country.
No clues here? Rubbish – the clues were all there. By following faulty science we might as well have been following bird entrails, crystal balls, tarot cards or the old lady’s tea leaves. Of the previous pandemics the worst was Asian flu which ran through most of 1969 and spring 1970. When it finally faded we had lost 80,000 citizens.
But we did not close down a single bar, restaurant, pub, corner shop, major industry, airline, hotel, public park or anything else. We took the pain and carried on. We grieved for the dead but we did not buckle. The Wilson government, with all its faults, did not panic. It
was ousted in June 1970 but for different reasons. That was 50 years ago. Perhaps we were a different people then.
Each year we are swept by seasonal winter flu. Each year it carries away 20,000 to 30,000 of us, the huge majority enfeebled by advanced old age and illness.
Thousands of treatments for non-Covid ailments have been cancelled or delayed to give blind preference to Covid, while nonCovid deaths are mounting. We know our Covid deaths are not yet 40,000. But have all the other causes plus non-Covid flu topped that figure? Has all the misery been for nothing? Was it all based on a catastrophic series of misjudgements in high places?
Only Covid-ascribed deaths are being released to us.The others are being quietly buried.That too must end when lockdown ends, the sooner the better. We have a right to know. Have we been duped?