patrick.net

Are you certain that all those people have died from coronavirus as opposed to with coronavirus? As I’m sure you know, American hospitals get paid around $30,000 by the federal government for each patient they lose to the virus, which must result in some fatalities being ascribed to COVID-19 when the real cause of death is something else. And it’s worth bearing in mind that the average age of COVID fatalities is 80 and an estimated 90 percent have co-morbidities.

But even if the figure is as high as you say, that’s still fewer Americans than died during the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957-58, estimated to have killed up to 116,000. In the second half of 1957 the Dow fell about 15 per cent, but it rebounded quickly, not least because the economy wasn’t mothballed for three months in response.

I’ve done an admittedly cursory amount of historical research and as far as I can tell a policy of quarantining entire populations, whether in a state or a country, has only been tried once before — in Mexico in 2009 as a response to the H1N1 pandemic, aka Swine Flu. And it was abandoned after 18 days because of the rising social and economic costs. ...

So a knee-jerk response by a totalitarian dictatorship, which involved denying tens of millions of people their basic rights, was then mimicked by the rest of the world, thanks to the sage advice of the WHO.

One of the weirdest things about this is that the WHO published a report in 2019 about how to respond to the next pandemic in which it specifically recommended against the indiscriminate quarantining of whole populations.

The suspension of civil liberties across the world — in the UK, the right to trial by jury has been suspended, which dates back to the 13th century — might conceivably have been justified if there was compelling evidence that lockdowns suppressed fatalities, but there ain’t. Zilch, nada, bupkis.

Compare the deaths-per-100,000 in those countries that have locked up their citizens with the deaths-per-100,000 in those that haven’t and there’s no evidence that lockdowns have ‘worked’. Nor do you see a relationship between the severity of the shutdown and the deaths-per-100,000. ...

But compare the deaths-per-100,000 in those US states that issued stay-at-home orders, such as New York, with those that didn’t, such as Arkansas. No evidence lockdowns were effective. Delaying lockdowns, as in Georgia, didn’t result in a tsunami of deaths either, as Gov. Brian Kemp’s critics predicted. Nor have those states that have ended lockdowns early seen an uptick in infections, as JP Morgan has pointed out. ...

In the UK, an estimated 50,000 people will die unnecessarily from cancer alone. But the most devastating impact of following China’s lead will be felt in low- and middle-income countries, where public health programmes designed to prevent the spread of TB, HIV, dysentery, malaria and all the other mass killers have been suspended. The death toll from that alone will run into the tens of millions.

Even though we won’t see the full impact of this disastrous policy for some years, I think we can say with near certainty that the lockdowns will cause a greater loss of life than they’ve prevented (not least because there’s no evidence they’ve prevented any). ...

I have no doubt the lockdowns will come to be regarded as the most catastrophic policy error that’s ever been made in the history of the world, including in wartime. I’m going to write a book about this calamity called Burning Down the House, and that’s what politicians, public health officials, bureaucrats and their lickspittles in the mainstream media have done – they’ve laid waste to the global economy and killed countless millions of people in response to a virus that’s no more deadly than a bad bout of seasonal flu. Future generations will look back and marvel at our stupidity. ...

You don’t like Trump? I’ll take him. You can have Boris. I think your President will turn out to have got more calls right during this crisis than our Prime Minister, including singing the praises of hydroxychloroquine. His gut instincts about the virus — not that bad — and the shutdown — needless act of self-harm — are right. ...

For the most part, the people responsible for the shutdown policies across the world have been the same pointy-headed muckety-mucks, sucking on the public teat, that have been screwing up the world for centuries. Some conservatives on my side of this debate think the epic mishandling of this crisis will be the last hurrah of these central planners. Yes, they’ve messed up before, but never on this scale.

As ordinary people survey the wreckage of the economy — and millions across the world start to die as a result of the shutdowns — there will surely be a reckoning. But alas, I don’t think so. They’re just too powerful.