It's a good summary of the arguments against lock down, I don't think they have left out anything from what I read. For me there are some red flags in that letter which I'll get to in a bit.
The problem I have with the letter on the whole is that it assumes that the worlds medico scientific body woke up one day and decided collectively to commit a world wide conspiracy, in part lead by the World health organization.
Why would they do this? What is their motivation? What do they gain from panicking the world? making the world go bankrupt, and inflicting mass social harms? I haven't figured that one out.
How would you co-ordinate that? through media hysteria? ok lets assume a scenario where the vast majority of the worlds scientist have been heavily influenced by media in the fashion that climate change science is accused of the same media hyping phenomena.
Does that fit with what actually happened when Covid came along?
From what I've seen, in the beginning, exactly the opposite happened. The WHO down played the threat, and a great number of Scientists in the west initially tried to compare this thing to an influenza outbreak, (which is where the herd immunity argument comes into play as a non lock down strategy). Rather than overstate the threat, what actually happened was an assumption that herd immunity, as with the Flu, meant that a no lock down policy is probably ok, because we will manage Covid like a Flu.
I think the letter correctly identifies what happened in Italy as being a watershed moment in setting off the initial alarm bells. But it's not as simple as the death rate (the army trucks being full of bodies is real...you have to pause and wonder why that is happening now, and not every Flu season).
A key fact they overlook is that the reasons many countries went into lock-down was based off the realisation that COVID has a chink in its armor, which allows you to interrupt the chain of transmission. No such chink exists with Flu. New Zealand had the luxury of time to see this chink identified overseas.
Even with all the dead bodies in Italy, and the dire warnings, the majority in the west dragged their feet.
Bear in mind New Zealand had a herd immunity mentality in the beginning also. But the eventual Lock down was driven by changes in Scientific understanding. Our language changed from managing the outbreak to elimination. That's been verified by our top Scientists, that we changed because of the scientific discovery made in other countries.
One of the biggest red flags in the letters main arguments is seen in this comment:
"you could have some one tested positive for COVID-19 with zero symptoms and feeling absolutely fine, who is then run over by a bus. That person has to be listed as dying of COVID-19".
Ok lets forgive them for being emotive, and using a ridiculous point to make an argument and look at what they base this type of accusation on.
They use the example of Italy's death rates causing the panic, they argue that the deaths need to be separated because of peoples underlying conditions. They say Ninety Nine percent of people who had Covid died from something else.
Ok, here's how H.I.V, works. H.I.V never killed anyone. H.I.V. untreated as we know stuffs your immune system and you get Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, thereafter you die from things like pneumonia.
It's still an Hi.I.V. - A.I.D.S death, because catching Pneumonia if you have A.I.D.S. kills you, developing A.I.Ds comes from having H.I.V....so it's an even less direct link, there are two phases to H.I.V. A.I.D.S. but we accept the end result as good science.
Another Flag for me in these debates is when people talk about Covid death rates, and Influenza death rates in isolation. Flu and Covid will not make way for one another, they will probably hit some poor souls in a lethal combo and there is no reason not to assume that this will prove lethal, no reason apart from a Lockdown and aggressive immunization in combination, may limit flu and covid numbers.
Another problem with comparing Flu to covid is this:
Flu in countries with decent Vaccination programs spreads with a slowed curve.
Covid as we have seen in the cases of say the big clusters, and in countries where it has got out of control, hits you with exponential force all at once.
Using the ridiculously high strike rate at the Bluff Wedding where nearly everyone got Covid, can we imagine a modern day example of a Flu doing the same at a similar social gathering?
Flu has pushed our health care system to max capacity in the past, You can only speculate what Flu + Covid will do, but some countries unfortunately will find this out.
Health Science works by looking at threats in combination when more than one threat exists, rather than isolating one threat from another when you're talking about a patients health. And the logic for doing this is undeniable.
For the sake of intellectual debates and statistical purity you can take this approach of isolating things to make these either or comparative arguments, but if the patient ends up dead, I don't think they would appreciate pure stats for stats sake in a post analytical way.
I don't want to create any hype or hysteria, however when you criticize the lock down, you need to take into account all the scenarios a Govt would be warned of by the experts.
One of those scenarios would be a worst case scenario. This letters Author to be fair did say some of their thinking is with the benefit of hindsight.
But if we are to fairly criticize the decision makers, then we cannot do so using hindsight.
One of the (Very unlikely) scenarios Govts would have been presented with is 'the worst case scenario'.
To get a hint of what one looks like you can look to the case of the meat plant in the US linked to eight hundred Covid cases. The plant is closed, and the CDC is investigating that plant in the fashion we imagine from the movies. They're on the ground, crawling all over it, in Hazmat suits.
This is an industry that would be factored into a worst case scenario, a supply chain.
To keep people from unnecessary panic, governments push messages like " We will not run out of food, there is no problems with the supply chain" they are telling the truth of course....but people have shown they panic none the less.
When these Governments were presented with worse case scenarios, Healthcare was a known weakness, supply chains would have been highlighted in the same discussion.
At the end of the day we will quite possibly get to see if this person is right.
Sweden of course has a voluntary social distancing policy (this is a whole other long discussion) and while not stating it is a herd immunity approach, in real terms this is what they are doing.
Sweden compares favorably to lockdown countries for transmission cases. Sweden however is seeing a higher death rate among elderly care home residents, the argument is that these deaths are somehow the result some bad luck with the virus getting in through the staff.
I think Sweden underestimated the threat from the carers who are not in bubbles in real terms, I think they assumed that P.P.E. and hygiene would keep Covid out. I think Sweden thought that isolating the vulnerable by stopping visitors, and staff using good hygiene would be fine. I don't know their P.P.E practices, but we have cases here in NZ of P.P.E. not working in this very setting.
When this letter quotes Sweden things were looking a lot better, and this is because in many ways Sweden is several weeks behind other countries in the curve.
I see the author referenced Fox News. Make of that what you will, but it is strongly associated with Donald Trump and Covid 19 denial.
Time will tell.
The long term is the hard to know part. There are still too many questions we need answers to. One of the main ones is whether immunity to Covid lasts.
But if it takes two years or more to get a Vaccine, even the lower estimates of death rates if Covid proves to be a year round virus rather than seasonal like the flu, will see some totals that are far worse than any Flu.
To be fair to this person, there is a compelling argument in the Swedish model. They assume that at some point when you come out of lock down you will get hit hard (possibly even harder). Whereas Sweden if this pseudo herd immunity works, will not face this problem, and will be able to function as normal.
That's a good argument in theory, if and only if, the gamble that immunity lasts is accurate.
