Covid-19 Perspective & Priorities
Any crisis requires comparative and reliable data to give our priorities perspective and context. Is the seemingly extreme and knee jerk reaction of bringing the world to a halt to fight Covid-19 pandemic justified? Has anyone given any definitive scientific rationale for it? Alternatively, are the justifications provided scientific?
This scrutiny in no way attempts to minimise the risks the pandemic poses. What it does endeavour to do is to make sure that the cure being prescribed is not worse than the disease.
So how do we do that? We do this by first gauging the size of the problem. We should remember that big and small are relative terms and only have meaning when we compare them to something else. The seemingly large distance covered in a flight from New York to Sydney pales into insignificance when compared by the enormous distance covered in a moon flight!
Perspective
How do the dangers of Covid-19 pandemic compare with the other known dangers to human life? Here is a list of some (not all) of the long existing threats to human life,
Source Links: WHO 2016, WorldCounts, WorldOMeters, Alcohol,
Infant, TB, Influenza, Opioid, Alcohol
What? The severity of the threat posed by Covid-19 currently ranks as 10th amongst the threats listed above. Does this justify our extreme no holds barred response even if it was ranked 9th, 8th or even 5th? What comparable actions were taken to prevent the fatalities due to other threats which have been with us for years? Why didn’t the authorities order curfews, lockdowns, closing of borders or worldwide economic shutdown for saving lives which were being lost year after year?
Some might say that some of these deaths were inevitable. Yes, but what about the tens of million which were not?
- Why were there no screaming newspaper headlines decrying the annual 8.4 million deaths due to hunger?
- Where were the TV pundits who should have been debating the 4.1 million innocent deaths due to infant mortality?
- What drastic actions did the politicians take to reduce the impact of the seasonal influenza which infects an estimated 1 billion people and 650,000 deaths worldwide (John Hopkins – Coronavirus Disease 2019 vs. the Flu and WHO)?
Were these other deaths any different to the ones brought upon by Covid-19?
Priorities
The reality is that the risks in all these cases were the same or greater than Covid-19. The main difference between the two being that in all the other ones we had the knowledge, data and means to prevent them but chose not to !
From the above pie chart of 5 million lives lost annually to injuries and violence, the obvious question that arises is if there is any comparison between the money spent on preventing wars (2% fatalities) with that spent on preventing road traffic injuries (24% fatalities) or homicide (10% fatalities)? Who decides the priorities? Who dares stand up to fight the establishment orthodoxy?
If the media, intellectuals, experts and leaders really cared, why weren’t they equally vocal on these other threats in the past? Why has Covid-19 suddenly galvanised them into aggressive concern about human welfare? Is it genuine or do they have an agenda?
In UK the same media, bureaucrats and leaders who are confidently pronouncing their battle plans to fight the Covid-19 are also the same people who did not have the gumption, or any clue, to run a punctual train service, deal with the “wrong kind of snow on the tracks” or prevent the spate of knife crimes in London. Yes, they might be well intentioned and doing their best, but should we blindly trust them to put our way of life, social fabric, economy and perhaps even our freedom at risk?
Extended lockdown, large scale business closures, massive unemployment, disruption of food and essentials supply chain and open ended borrowing by the government might all contribute to unintended consequences nobody has a clue about. Shouldn’t we stop, think, discuss and then decide to make sure we do not suddenly find ourselves falling off a deep cliff’s edge?
UK has tried to emulate the authoritarian Chinese model of extreme lockdown measures whereas Sweden opted to take a slightly lenient approach allowing its citizens to go out and businesses to stay open while voluntarily exercising necessary social distancing measures. Now compare the current infection and fatality rates of UK with that of Sweden with their different approaches to fight the pandemic,
Are there any lessons to be learnt from these two models? Yes, we do not know how these two different policies might play out in the future, but it is exactly for this reason we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater?
Misleading Forecasts
Initially, the World Health Organization (WHO) had mentioned 2% as a mortality rate estimate for Covid-19, in a press conference on Wednesday, 29 January 2020. This was revised on 3 March 2020 in a media briefing by WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who stated that “Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected” (Link).
The current New York official figures for the spread of Covid-19 show 300,334 confirmed cases. However, a new research carried out on the basis of blood samples taken from 3,000 people at random in supermarkets and shopping centres across 40 locations in New York state showed 13.9 per cent testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies, New York City accounted for the highest percentage of those tested at 21.2 per cent. This means that New York might have 1.7 million infected people as against the current official figure of 300,334!
These same results are showing up in independent research being carried out across USA with Los Angeles showing similar trends. If correct these figures project a Covid-19 threat more in the neighbourhood of seasonal flu than the existential threat it is being made out to be (The Telegraph, Public Health LA County).
Does this almost certain exaggeration sound reassuring or scientific in any way? How can it be scientific when the above forecasts were based on speculation (or Chinese whispers!) and not on any real data about the rate of spread of the infection? What if the fatality risk of Covid-19 is 0.3% instead of the 3.4% projected by WHO? Would the world response still be the same if we were threatened by a virus far more infectious than the seasonal flu but no more deadly?
… and Finally,
During the six years of second world war (1939 – 45), approximately 60 million lives were lost without any thought of imposing a lockdown or voluntary destruction of national economies. Millions knowingly went to their death in ground, air and naval battles to secure our independence and way of life. With Covid-19 we seem to be trying to fight a sanitised war with the aim of saving all lives at any cost. There is only one problem with this approach,
There has never been a war in the history of human civilisation which was won on that premise.
Hercule Poirot always followed the money to find the motivation for any crime. Isn’t it interesting that irrespective of the crisis be it globalisation, immigration, political correctness, global warming and now Covid-19 the west is always at the losing end and China winning? Isn’t it also curious that the experts always err on the side of their extreme bias? Is it because it results in easy gratification of their ego, lust for power and wealth?
It is important to remember that despite the general belief that wars are always lost because the enemy was clever, the reality is that they are more often lost because a large number of people, who Lenin termed “useful idiots”, contributed in the loss through their arrogance, ignorance and stupidity.
We all have a duty to make sure we win this war!
