Catastrophic cost of lockdown
RWE think our Royal family has issues but at least the Queen hasn’t had to abdicate and flee to live in shame and exile in the Middle East. I’d love to know what King Juan Carlos’s daughter-in-law, the uber-cool Queen Letizia, thinks about her husband’s dad’s fate. Maybe the former TV news anchor is phlegmatic. After all, as the old saying has it: “Once you’ve seen Juan Carlos, you’ve seen them all!”
RTHIS week a friend told me about an elderly relative who died a few weeks ago from emphysema.The poor man, a lifelong smoker, had been slowly suffocating for a year or more. He wasn’t expected to make it past May. Sure enough, he died before the month was out. Of emphysema.
But his death certificate recorded that he’d been carried off by Covid-19.
A blood test a few days before his death showed the patient had the virus, although he wasn’t displaying symptoms of anything other than the lung condition about to kill him.
OnWednesday Public Health England – surely the most useless, unfit-for-purpose organisation in the land – finally admitted what many of us have long suspected: large numbers of deaths attributed to the coronavirus were in fact completely unrelated to the disease.
A whopping great 10 per cent, in fact. So down goes the death toll from the virus at a stroke, from 46,526 to 41,874.
It’s also emerged that England’s death rate has been falling a lot faster than official figures showed. In fact it looks now as if the country had its first completely death-free day on Thursday August 6.
We have consistently (and I’d say flagrantly) over-estimated the threat of Covid-19, starting with the absurd prediction of 500,000 deaths by Imperial College London’s
Professor Neil Ferguson. Data experts who later reviewed the computer code used in the professor’s model described it as “a mess which would get you fired in private industry”.
(Of course there was no need to fire Ferguson: he had to resign when, after lecturing the rest of us on the need for social distancing, he allowed a woman to visit him at home during lockdown).
But it was his doom-laden forecast which single-handedly tipped the Government into imposing the most draconian restrictions on freedom of movement we’ve ever experienced in this country. So with death rates falling (and now known to be exaggerated) we have to ask if lockdown was actually worth all the suffering caused.
The trashing of the economy, the worst recession in our history, avoidable deaths at home with people too frightened to go to hospital for fear of catching the virus, chaos in education, the explosion in domestic violence, steep rises in anxiety, depression, and heavy drinking?
No. Lockdown will come to be seen as one of the most catastrophic misjudgments a British government has ever made.
In Sweden, which kept schools open, businesses running and the economy in top gear, there have been fewer deaths per capita than in Britain.
Not roughly the same, or more. Fewer. Indeed, UK coronavirus cases peaked BEFORE lockdown was imposed.
It seems sensible protocols – hand washing, social distancing, wearing face-masks
– are enough to control the spread of Covid-19.
You don’t need to drive your economy into a brick wall and put the fear of God into the public. A great reckoning is coming.