patrick.net

I am steeped in dread. I foresee months, if not years, of inane gesturing towards ‘safety’ that makes no appreciable difference to the nation’s health.

Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame the nauseating plummet of global GDP in 2020 directly on a novel coronavirus. After all — forgive the repetition, but certain figures bear revisiting — COVID’s roughly 290,000 deaths wouldn’t raise a blip on a graph of worldwide mortality (reminder: 58 million global deaths in 2019). COVID deaths will barely register in the big picture even if their total multiplies by several times.

For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000. Malaria, 620,000 in 2017, almost all in Africa (so who cares, right?). In 2018, tuberculosis, developing treacherous antibiotic resistance, killed 1.5 million people. Why haven’t we closed down the whole world for TB?

What is destroying lives and livelihoods is not predominantly the illness. The UK economy is not in a tailspin because it can’t survive without the labor of the 32,000-plus fatalities, however much we may miss them as individuals. This is not a natural disaster but a manmade one.

I’ll not bore you with the data (that’s what Toby Young is for), but evidence abounds that lockdowns have had a negligible effect on the arc of national infections. (In a recent sampling, the majority of COVID patients admitted to New York hospitals were sickened while ‘sheltering in place’. A growing number of New York doctors want restrictions lifted.) ...

Politics, as opposed to science, does not reward the correction of mistakes, given that correcting a mistake also entails admitting to having made one. Worse, the bigger the mistake, the greater the political urgency of defending it at all costs.