This COVID Hysteria Is Unforgivable
COVID-19 mortality is similar or lower than other causes of death by age-cohort — schoolchildren are 2x more likely to be struck by lightning
No doubt many people think they have done “the right thing”. It doesn’t matter how much effort the sceptical among us put in to our arguments in favour of a proportionate and evidence-based approach to the risks of COVID-19, the response we get is always a variant of “yes but it is really bad and people are dying of it”. A strange repost because our argument is not “COVID is good and nobody has died of it”.
We must have this national argument within the context of the overall risks of illness and death that people face at various stages in their lives — 1600 people per day die on average in the United Kingdom — often in terrible circumstances. Happily, the great majority of those people die long after Abraham Lincoln’s famous “three-score-years-and-ten.” The global backdrop is that an average of 153,000 people died per day in 2019. One million people have sadly died from COVID-19 in 2020 which represents 6.5 days worth of global deaths — we are now almost in October.
Life can be a lottery and the risk of having your life cut short before 70 is a sad fact and many people have had to mourn when that sadly does happen. But the risk of it being COVID-19 that causes that is small and very similar or lower to the ever-present risks to life we all face. We should therefore all have enough personal sovereignty over these issues to make our own decisions — balancing the costs against the risks as we each see appropriate.
Most of my friends, family and others across the country may indeed think they have made their own decisions, without fully realising the demands they have placed on others by their frequent acquiescence with the government decrees which have closed down some peoples lives and livelihoods. The problem we should have with all of these people is that their additional incremental contribution to the hysteria, because of their acceptance of the implemented measures, has led to those of us who disagree having our personal freedoms taken away, our personal economic prospects severely diminished and in many cases our health deteriorate. To them, these issues all sit weightless on the other side of the scale versus those arguments in favour of lockdowns; plus the involuntary muzzling of our faces, cruelly curtailed holidays, cancelled weddings, lonely births, callous-funeral rules and countless other monumental affronts to those who wish to live in a society where we are all free to choose for ourselves. All these things are irrelevant to them because “COVID is really bad and people have died”.
“But If You Spread It, People Will Die”
Implicit in the argument that we should try to “stop the spread” is that we actually can effectively stop the virus spreading once it has arrived — that Boris Johnson and his teams of ministers and advisors can stand firm like King Canute holding back the tide of a virus which was already past them and spreading amongst us, almost before anyone had even noticed — only with 20:20 hindsight do the armchair-specialists say “if only we had done X, Y or Z in February we would be like New Zealand” — this is a highly doubtful proposition given the UK’s proximity to other global population centres.
But what of the argument that possible “asymptomatic spread” means that because person A can kill person B without even knowing they had the virus, restrictions on the personal liberty of A are justified to stop that? In a House of Commons debate on Monday 21st September 2020 Sir Edward Leigh questioned the Health Minister Matt Hancock’s conservative principles in removing peoples liberties in dealing with COVID-19. In response, Mr. Hancock said:
“As a Conservative, I believe in as much freedom as possible consistent with not harming others. One of the sad things about this virus is that because of asymptomatic transmission, if people put themselves at risk of catching coronavirus and get ill, they are not only putting themselves at risk but putting others at risk as well. That is the Conservative principle behind protecting the health of the nation in the face of this pandemic.”
The principle behind Hancock’s argument is very easy to deconstruct: the risk of having an infection which can be passed on to someone else who may die of it has been omnipresent for centuries. In the recent past for instance, in the 2014/15 influenza season there were 28,300 excess flu deaths in the UK that could by the same yardstick as 2020 have been reduced with shielding measures, mass-house arrest and the carpet-bombing of the economy — as much as 50% of the spread of influenza can also be asymptomatic [1] and large numbers of people have knowingly gone to work with these types of illnesses and spread them to others — this will have resulted in deaths in every year that preceded 2020. So if Hancock’s “conservative principle” holds, why did we not implement those measures to stop people dying in 2014/15 as well?
You also might think that the risk from COVID-19 is so much higher and therefore this must be treated differently to flu in 2014/15. This is a false assertion at this moment in time because the 28,300 deaths in 2014/15 were over a long 5 month flu season from November to March, which is 190 deaths a day and just 10 less than the Sir Patrick Vallance’s “October scenario” of 200 deaths per day presented on 21st September which led to further restrictions on our daily lives.
So really what is the difference with Covid in 2020 versus influenza in 2014/15 and many other occasions before that? Is it the marginal extra virulence or infectiousness of it versus influenza, or was it the uncertainty over how much worse it was going to be because the virus was new? If it is the infectiousness and virulence, in exactly what measure of each is the threshold crossed which means a public-health dictatorship has to kick-in and place us under house-arrest and wreck lives? Having proclaimed his “conservative principles” as justification as he did above, the heavy burden of proof is now squarely on Matt Hancock and those that say such things to tell us *precisely* where that line is drawn for the future.
What Level of Risk Can the British Public Put Up With?
The average life expectancy of a Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain was an astonishing four weeks. Nobody would argue Britons should routinely be subjected to this level of risk, unless the circumstances were as extreme as they were in 1941. But all sorts of much lower risks have existed since the 1940s and our compatriots have borne those risks without abruptly halting their lives. During the Hong Kong flu of 1968, adjusted for our larger population today, the equivalent of 36,500 Britons died — but the UK economy grew by 4.5% that year and freedoms were not curtailed like in 2020.
Astonishingly, it turns out that the risks of dying from COVID-19 are not so far out of sync with the general risks of life for any age cohort — although you would not think that was the case if you watched our rolling 24-hour news coverage. The work by David Spiegelhalter at the Winton Center early on in the pandemic on this was excellent. He noted that:
“The relation of Covid-19 mortality risk with age is slightly steeper than it is for normal actuarial risk, but for ages over 45 the lines are fairly parallel, indicating that the average risk of catching and then dying from the virus were roughly proportional to the average normal risk over the same period [March to June 2020]…One in 50 people over 90 died with Covid-19 over this period compared to one in 2,300,000 schoolchildren aged between five and 14.”
As a reference point, the odds of being struck by lightning in the UK are 1 in 1.2 million — so schoolchildren aged 5–14 were almost 2x more likely to be struck by lightning.
Shown below, the risk does rise slightly versus your general life-risk in your 50s, 60s and 70s — but that roughly 1 in 20 people aged around 77 dies every year won’t come as a surprise to anyone of that age — most of whom have come to terms with their own mortality — but even among those in their mid-80s roughly 17 out of 20 people will survive an infection with COVID-19. These risks are in no way unprecedented in our history and we should all be able to bear them and proceed with our lives with a smile on our face.
I don’t know about you, the reader, but I can say with certainty that even at my age of 34, let alone 84, if I knew with 100% certainty today that I was going to die of COVID and the only way that could be prevented was to place my fellow citizens under house arrest and wreck the lives of millions of them — I would not take up the offer because of the effect it would have on my compatriots, with the attendant long-term risks to our liberty. If I now project myself forward 50 years, I can also say with certainty that I would not want the life chances of my Grandchildren to be flushed away so I could live out my wonder years, rather than having a low chance of the possibility of them being cruelly snatched away from me at the tender age of 84. Life is for living, even for the young — I would never want to stand in the way of that.
The Public Estimates the Risk at 100–300x Higher
People have routinely overestimated their risks of dying from COVID-19. In one study people in the UK, US and Germany who were polled each estimated that 7%, 9% and 3% of their compatriots respectively, had actually died of COVID-19 by July [2]. These arithmetic mean estimates are 100x-300x the real numbers of deaths. Not much wonder many among us are scared.
But such is the willingness to believe the hype and go along with crowd behaviour in 2020. If in a quiet moment you are ever tempted to look back at mob mentality in history: the French Revolution, 1930s Germany, the Russian Revolution; and wonder to yourself “if I was alive then, would I have got swept up in that mad crowd behaviour?”; then COVID-19 is a window through time for you to get your answer. If you went along with the national consensus on this then yes, it is very likely you would have gone along with those national-consensus’ too — most people did then and most people do now.
What has happened in 2020 is almost done but it is high time we returned to personal sovereignty in 2021: on 1st January National Sovereignty will come back from Brussels, but that is not enough — when it gets to London it should bypass those panicky, majority-idiot children in Westminster and continue straight through and directly back to the individuals of this country. As for the COVID hysteria, those among us who can think about risks independently should do so — with the benefit of the internet there is no excuse not to. The resources the internet connects us with help us not to go along with consensus like those that did in the sorry periods in human history that are behind us.
So let us accept our own mortality and stop with this endless fear-mongering, hospital-dodging, work-avoiding, muzzle-wearing, veering away from our fellow citizens in the street and wearing visors around them like they are some kind of toxic dump of a human plague to be avoided at all costs. It is inhuman and uncivil to behave in this way. The risk is low and the sensible people among us can easily learn to cope with it.
Most of all — people should be allowed to make their own choices. If you wish to stay at home and wear a face-nappy that is your choice, it is not up to me to stop you. But please let me decide when I leave my house and what I wear on my face — the risks posed to you by not taking my freedoms away are extremely low.
