Professor Mark Woolhouse, who is Chair of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the UK’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, well understands ‘interconnectivity’ and globalised population modelling. Writing in The Telegraph this week, he says that we must all now follow the Swedish approach and learn to live with SARS-CoV-2. Unless we do this, we will never get back to ‘normal’ life.
Woolhouse knew a second lockdown was on the cards before we’d had the first one. His team’s UK modelling showed that a lockdown ending in June would be followed by a slow, initially imperceptible rise in cases, culminating in another lockdown in late September.
This is exactly where the UK is at now. Lockdowns, says Woolhouse, are a “short-term fix, not a long-term solution. […] It is profoundly disappointing that six months into this pandemic, having rejected every alternative proposed, we keep coming back to lockdown, a strategy that is visibly failing around the world.”
Woolhouse advocates for targeted measures to be applied in ways that minimise disruption to businesses and schools, while protecting the vulnerable and the elderly. He is adamant that governments should not continue in endless cycles of economically crippling restrictions until we secure the elusive vaccine, saying that “we must not allow the cure to become worse than the disease”.
The sensible and democratic approach would be to apply risk-based procedures to COVID-19, recognising that while the virus is unpleasant, it is not so unbearable for the vast majority of people that we should shut down society indefinitely in the misguided belief that we can eradicate it.
Could we educate people, asks Woolhouse, to manage the risks themselves – based on their circumstances – in order to minimise government intervention in people’s lives? “Would that work?” he asks. “It seems to be working in Sweden.”
While COVID-19 is undoubtedly serious, we seem to have been panicked into believing that it is infinitely more serious than it really is. The global death rate from it appears to be between 0.1 and 0.3 per cent of those infected. The US is currently reporting 6.83 million cases and 199,000 deaths and hence is in a state of panic.
Yet in 2018 Americans suffered 67,000 deaths from influenza, which is also a serious illness that we care much less about. The overwhelming majority of deaths from influenza generally, as well as from COVID-19 specifically, occur in people with underlying health conditions.
New Zealand suffers an estimated 500 influenza deaths on average per year, which scarcely makes a dent in our collective thinking. We have so far suffered 25 COVID-related fatalities out of 1,800 confirmed cases. Our relatively high mortality rate of 1 percent is likely due to either low levels of testing or a lack of exposure to COVID-19 in the general population.
If we are concerned, because of this, about a runaway pandemic overwhelming the public health system, shouldn’t we be doing something about the public health system?
Or are we a people so dislocated from reality that we have been caught paralysed, staring deliriously into the headlights, terrified of our own mortality?
Alternatively, are we rendered so hysterical by globalism, modern lifestyles and information overload that we no longer know how to manage risk?
Or have we simply gone mad? Severe restrictions and lockdowns, which are injurious to our economy and to civic life, appear to have been pre-programmed to remain with us indefinitely. Is this what we really want? How long will it be until our slumbering population awakes?
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