We got it all wrong

Re-engage with life, rebuild societies, re-establish a more courageous, more fact-based social contract 

– Pic by Shehan Gunasekara 

This, I hope, will be the last of my explicitly “COVID” pieces, as we transition to recreating competitiveness in Sri Lanka, which I want to pick up as a theme. 

However, should we be tempted to relapse into this self-destructive temptation, I thought I would do a “grand tour” of COVID fallacies, once and for all, grounded in data and the best medical assessments we have from around the globe. Should you need to reframe a discussion, seek grounds to help influence policy, or just need a basis to take a disciplined stand to move your life and business forward, here you go.

Everything touted as “best practice” re COVID-19 and the medieval “lockdown” remedy was wrong. The seismic economic, social, and non-COVID medical impacts were not necessary, and it was herd thinking and “lemming” behaviour run riot that led us astray. We can quickly do a run through the pseudo-scientific, media hysteria fostered, medical guesswork morphing into policy making, absurdities.

Fatality rate never merited panic

As best we know today, it is roughly .07%-0.2%, in line with seasonal flu. Any new virus has a declining fatality rate over time. Though there were hysteric over-predictions coming out of limited Wuhan data, on 17 April a Stanford study was released that should have stopped all shutdowns, indicating the infection was far more widespread than had been known due to antibody findings. This meant, by extension, the fatality rate plummets.

The study was attacked with debauched versions of its methodologies and conclusions being trotted out for public flogging in the media. The lead researcher, Dr. John Ioannidis, was taken aback by what he called “the mob mentality,” which insisted “this has to be the end of the world.” How mathematical speculation was seeking to dethrone real data was more than surprising. 

Since then, the findings have been replicated all over the world, with roughly the same results, including the CDC in the US showing a below 0.3% IFR (infection fatality rate). They too said roughly 35% of infections are asymptomatic.

Oxford University’s latest study concludes an IFR between .1% and .41%. And indeed Dr. Ioannidis published a meta-analysis of 12 separate studies, including Kobe Japan and Oise France, all which reinforce the comparison with seasonal influenza.

Coronavirus was far less deadly for the young and much deadlier for older people with pre-existing conditions

Therefore, sending sick older people to nursing homes and locking up the young was about as stupid as you could get. 

Italy reports 96% of Italians who died from COVID-19 were older than 80 years old and had “other illnesses.” In NY State, two thirds of fatal cases were above 70 years of age, and 90% had an underlying contributing illness. Without an underlying chronic condition, irrespective of age, Dr. Scott Atlas of Stanford University stated, referring to this data, your chances of dying are extremely small. And he further pointed out, younger adults and children have almost no risk of any serious illness from this virus. 

So, why did we blow up the planet and bring these younger folk’s lives, as well as their ability to maintain economic health for everyone, to a screeching halt? And why did we close schools?

Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and numerous other countries with now re-opened schools haven’t had any subsequent outbreaks in schools or day care centres. There is also no evidence after considerable study, of secondary transmission from children back to adults or grandparents. So, what is driving this policy is not science, just pure adult paranoia, and media conniptions. We are destroying the educational and social experience of children at a crucial developmental time in their lives over “statistically irrelevant” alleged risks being touted with no justification at all. And no, the desperate attempt to conscript “Kawasaki Disease” doesn’t help this misguided cause. It is a distinct disease, afflicts very few children, has been around for years, and is typically treatable.

Asymptomatic people infected with COVID-19 aren’t seemingly infectious

There was, until recently, only one study coming from China, which systematically studied this. Zero transmissions were found from a carefully tracked asymptomatic patient, who came in for other reasons, was diagnosed with COVID-19, and then tracked in terms of contacts. Alas, the study was only released some weeks back, was never covered by the media, or mentioned by any policy maker I’ve found. 

Of course, it’s a solitary study and therefore not definitive. However, on 8 June, possibly knowing that waves of people have been congregating in protest rallies after the George Floyd killing in the US, WHO gave us this ravishing headline, ‘Coronavirus spread by people with no symptoms appears to be rare’.

Drumbeats please!

The statement was made by Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for coronavirus response. She writes, “We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases; they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward.”

One day later, there was such a furore on social media and among the media apologists, WHO had to “tap dance” around this declaration. However, they affirmed they were talking about the cases they knew, not making global declarations, and countries doing contact tracing had not reported any credible asymptomatic transmission. 

So, everyone wearing masks and staying at a rigid distance slavishly now appears increasingly absurd. In fact, 99% of the COVID regulations, from this one finding if sustained, become virtually useless. Regardless, where it is very congested, taking a leaf from the East Asian success stories, take care, yes. Other than that, if ill, stay home. We’re back where we started again!

Outside of superspreaders, community spread seems extremely unlikely and limited

Professor Hendrick Streek, who has been leading the study of what was being claimed to be the German equivalent of Wuhan, Heinsberg, states “There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time.” He too was savaged in the press for daring to question the orthodoxy.

He goes further, “When we took samples from door handles, phones, or toilets, it has not been possible to cultivate the virus in the laboratory on the basis of these swabs…”

And he warns that lockdown has more sinister repercussions: “People could lose their jobs. They might not be able to pay their rent anymore and staying inside for a longer time can lead to weakening of our immune system.”

COVID-19 is not spread outdoors

Hence, why lock everyone inside? Virologists who suggested Vitamin D enriched sunshine and fresh air as remedies were again lampooned and ostracised and even censored on YouTube!

China has had more time to study all this. They say 80% of outbreaks took place in the home environment, 20% in buses and trains, most instigated in some larger gathering. The Chinese study simply says: “The transmission of respiratory infections…is an indoor phenomenon.”

Doing their own study, the health minister of British Columbia, Canada says, “Absolutely no evidence that COVID-19 is airborne.” Going on, “The overwhelming majority of transmissions occur through close, prolonged contact and that is not the pattern of transmission we see through airborne diseases.”

Masks are of limited use and should be utilised accordingly

They can be helpful in crowded subways, buses, or places where large groups of people are in close proximity and cannot practice social distancing there.

Also, re-using masks is problematic, and to be fully effective, they would have to render you virtually incapable of breathing! In fact, they have a deleterious effect on your oxygen levels over time anyway.

Outside the situations described above, the New England Journal of Medicine reports in a recent article: “We know that wearing masks outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to COVID-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with symptomatic COVID-19 that is sustained for several minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching COVID-19 from a passing interaction in a public setting is therefore minimal.”

The six-foot barrier is just a “best guess”

Apparently, this hails from the 1930s and speculation that coughs or sneezes would land, in terms of droplets, within one to two metres. They also spoke of being coughed at up close or touching surfaces and then touching your own face.

Seeking to find such virus samples outside labs when people actually interact, via bioaerosol spread has, to date, not been successful. 

No one has been able to cite any scientific or established medical basis for not being able to visit a friend’s house (assuming no one is symptomatic there), or go to a museum (mind boggling how one thinks you can’t keep a sane distance there), or to be able to have gatherings of 50 and not 75 say. It is the petty tyrant lurking inside many policy makers that likes to assert these things mindlessly and so definitively.

Professor Robert Dingwall, an advisor to the UK Prime Minister, finally just told us this, “I mean the two-metre rule was conjured out of nowhere.”

The “black swan” was not the virus but the lockdowns

Who could have predicted that a new virus would be hyped to such frothing foam, that we would take the most unprecedentedly stupid step in recent political and economic history, and literally shutter the entire planet? 

Roughly 8,000 people die a day in the US. However, we can apparently tolerate that if that comes from gun violence, cancer, suicides, heart disease, car accidents, flu and pneumonia…but NOT COVID-19! Economic ruin for millions and untold ripple consequences socially, emotionally, educationally, can be flirted with in relative fact-free abandon, as long as this one scourge is chased from the public square.

But…why? 

Idiotic scriveners, including at respected journals, claimed a $180 billion testing regime would be needed before a major economy could be rationally restarted. Somehow though China managed without it, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Israel, too. 

And will “testing” scare off the coronavirus?

Lockdown is a medieval concept and only infiltrated US policy planning via a high school research paper in 2006

I’ve written of this before and so won’t revisit it in detail. However, this was a paper extrapolating based on no knowledge of viruses, epidemiology, or public health. It was roundly rejected by a group of specialists, led by Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the public effort to eradicate smallpox. He pointed out the repercussions could be ruinous, there was no science behind just widespread ubiquitous “locking down” or quarantining, and he argued that free societies have successfully dealt with pandemics for centuries while remaining functioning.

As late as 2019, WHO did not even list “lockdown” as an option in their list of 18 “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza”.

China’s panicked three-week economic shutdown of Wuhan and two-month shutdown of travel in and out of the province, instigated by waiting too long, after there was a mass eruption, and superspreaders had travelled far and wide, became somehow the playbook for everyone. 

The second reason an extreme plague prescription had the cobwebs removed from it, and found new life in a widely criticised high school study (never intended to be a guide to real-world policy) was the hysterically inaccurate models from Imperial College and others, now being recanted by their authors (or “rationalised” at least) and decanted next to facts, so we can see how clouded the judgments were. Even the IHME model in the US has proven to be an unmitigated disaster.

While the China and early Italy “visuals” were being magnified by unrelenting media coverage, these models, set off the pandemic policy fireworks, and all the drawbridges of society were hastily pulled up.

This summary about these hysterically inaccurate models can best be summed up by the National Review Institute: “To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.” “Dangerous drivel” (especially given Ferguson’s disastrous past record of inaccurate predictions) and “poppycock,” in comparing emerging facts to their predictions, comes readily to mind and to the tongue.

Lockdowns had no impact on the course of the disease

This most rankles people. Surely all this pain, suffering, isolation, loss, was for something?

But we now know the virus was in circulation much earlier than anticipated, at least since last December in various places. Hence, we could not contain what was already in circulation.

Virtually all the data shows the virus peaked either pre-lockdown in country after country, or too early in the lockdowns for that to have been the neutralising agent. 

JP Morgan of all sources, crunched numbers as they are bound to do, reported 1) the least damaged economies had the least onerous lockdowns, 2) lifting lockdowns has seemed to have no negative impact on deaths or hospitalisations and 3) lifting lockdowns seems not to have had any impact on viral transmission. Their research states: “…many countries saw their infection rates fall rather than rise again when they ended their lockdowns – suggesting the virus may have its own “dynamics” which are “unrelated” to emergency measures.” Imagine that!

European studies have come to the same conclusion, analyst Thomas Meunier, agreeing with Bloomberg analysts writes: “…no lives were saved by this strategy, in comparison with pre-lockdown, less restrictive, social distancing policies.”

Many worst-case examples came from nursing homes, even hospitals, and other superspreader environments

This was abundantly the case in Italy and the UK for example, and re the US, 42% of the deaths come from 0.6% of the population, from nursing homes and assisted living facilities. 80% of those placed on ventilators in NYC ultimately died, which showed that wasn’t the best treatment in most cases after all (possibly too aggressive as a treatment option).

Sweden of course, but for their own nursing home fiasco, would have half the deaths they have recorded, even though they have done exponentially better than all the models and naysayers predicted and perhaps hoped (Imperial College model predicted 100k deaths in Sweden by June, and they are slightly south of 5k now), and are a “model” of how managing a free society can work without buckling to unsubstantiated hysteria. 

And no mention should ever be made of Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan…depressingly sane, successful, and economically open. Taiwan’s economy actually grew in the first quarter of 2020!

Other negative social consequences utterly ignored

Leadership is always about assessing cost/benefit, trade-offs, there are rarely perfect choices. Looking at diets, if someone said “lock down your mouth,” well it would probably work in shedding pounds, but may also shut down biologic functioning after a while. 

So how can it have been “following the science” to ignore deaths caused from suicide, skipped doctor’s appointments, vaccinations not done, screenings deferred, unemployment stress and more? No one will admit the error, as apparently today’s culture is about constant denial: public health crackpots will retreat to their charts, opposition political parties will say each death is a referendum on the party in power, the party in power will claim they have saved untold lives while privately cursing the public health doomsayers.

Dr. Yoram Lass, formerly of Israel’s Health Ministry offers penetrating candor: “It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations.” As a result, he points out starvation and unemployment march together in developing countries where unemployment literally IS mortality. And quality of life has been acutely undermined everywhere.

The ignored bell curves

100 years ago, Dr. William Farr pointed out that all viruses follow a bell curve. Today it is called “Farr’s Law.” Recently Chinese and American scientists published a study to see if COVID-19’s behavior has followed suit. They found the predicted path and the actual path are a fine match indeed. 

Another eminent Israeli mathematician and professor, Professor Isaac Ben-Israel pointed out that no matter what you do, the virus (based on data around the world), peaks in 40 days and virtually disappears by day 70. He noted 140 people die normally in Israel a day. He could not fathom why an illness killing roughly one or two a day for a specific and relatively limited period of time, well in line with normal mortality, is worth losing 20% of Israel’s GDP over.

Farr’s law essentially points out such diseases catch the low-hanging fruit (the elderly with comorbidities in this case), and then start to sputter and progressively flail. This is precisely what has happened here.

The real death and destruction

This is likely the greatest global economic disruption in history, and it is self-imposed, becoming that much more unique. Trillions of dollars of lost economic output, and who knows what sustained impact going forward. Even a conservative estimate of lives lost to suicide and unemployment due to the lockdown, with knock on medical impact that can’t be really even forecasted, is terrifying. And there’s so much more collateral impact: across several leading economies 650,000 on chemo, half of whom we are told didn’t come in; two thirds of cancer screenings skipped, 40% of stroke patients needing urgent care didn’t come in, according to US reporting. There are counterparts to this everywhere, certainly here in Sri Lanka and across South Asia.

Stress impact on immune systems from being locked up is frightening to consider, from losing businesses and homes, future prospects and hope with it. And, instead of hospitals being overwhelmed, in many economies, the healthcare system is facing disaster from pay cuts, furloughs and supply shortages, as primary care is pushed to the brink. 51% of primary care in the US are uncertain about their financial future in the next four weeks alone.

There are mental health impacts worldwide, domestic violence spikes (quite significant here), childhood mortality due to delayed or cancelled vaccinations, far too many impacts to inventory or catalogue. Deaths from prolonged social isolation itself, along with skyrocketing prescriptions for sleep and anti-anxiety medications all paint a further bleak picture.

The collective and abject failure of nations to question groupthink deserves assiduous study from psychologists, doctors, economists, and possibly shamans, for some time. It has been a leadership Waterloo.

Telling terrified people, it’s time to resume life

That will be the new leadership needed. Re-engage with life, rebuild societies, re-establish a more courageous, more fact-based social contract. Secure nursing homes should there be another ‘wave,’ stay home if ill and wear masks if ill and have to go out, everyone wash your hands. That and rinse out common sense.

And let’s focus less on preserving lives that can be ended any day by a slip in the bathtub, or, on the contrary, not for decades even if in the midst of a war. We can influence, we don’t control. 

Let’s focus rather on something we can better influence, namely having those lives take on renewed meaning, vitality, and enterprise…for our sakes and everyone else’s. 

We have to dust ourselves off from this debacle, and somehow exfoliate, empower and energise the future.