The UK govt needs to start telling us the truth on Covid-19; lockdown is NOT a way of beating the virus
..from Russia Today, Moscow
[ Editor’s Note: I had been wondering when this delicate subject would come up for a wide distribution discussion, and I’m not surprised it started with Britain’s National Health Service, as it has been a time bomb waiting to happen.
Malcolm Kendrick is not the Covid rescue dog, but a realist medical GP exposing conundrum that there are no options available that are going to make everyone happy.
As our mothers reminded us all through childhood with the admonition that “you can’t always have your way,” we will be facing options of which none will be to our liking. Trump knew this right away, which is why he did his, “It’s all going to just go away” silliness.
Kendrick is not the first to mention the issue that there seems little prospect of not having Covid eventually working its way through populations around the world.
A serious attempt to stop the viral spread would bury countries under such debt and economic upheaval that at the end of the day the cure could be adding to the pain of the pandemic. People would die of “economic” disaster.
Political leadership in too many places has been “deer in the headlights”, sadly too focused on first, “how do I save myself from having this disaster laid at my feet.” The cheap buck passing we have seen beginning, with the most recent being Trump trying to put the stink on the WHO director or China, anyone but the Donald.
The timing for Kendrick’s article caught the bad news yesterday that the largest death tally from Covid is in the US, but also the possible good news that hospital admissions for it had started to slow down, a welcome sign that hospitals now have less fear of getting into a triage situation.
Now we must begin choosing a path that is the lesser of unhappy choices. What will make this even tougher in the US will be all the political scapegoating that will be going on in a US election year, with not only Trump’s presidency at stake, but possibly his future freedom due to his criminal allegations.
Shakespeare, with his timeless creations has one for us now, a gem regarding our Acting President who presents himself as being in control of a situation which he has had little control over, and demonstrates it frequently.
“Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown. Our thought are ours, there ends none of our own.” Hold on tight folks, it’s going to be a long tough ride … Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … April 11, 2020 –
“We should know what that exit strategy is, when the restrictions might be lifted and what the plan is for economic recovery to protect those who have been hardest hit,” he said this week.
This is an entirely valid question, but the government cannot have an exit strategy unless they have an overall strategy. One follows directly from the other.
And there are only four possible strategies:
To eradicate the virus from the entire population by enforcing lockdown. Or to enforce lockdown until there is an effective treatment. Or to enforce lockdown until there is a vaccine. Or to enforce lockdown to slow the spread of the virus, so as to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Eradication is virtually impossible with such a highly infectious disease. Even if the UK was successful, if other countries were not, keeping Covid-19 out would require border closures for years, maybe decades. Endless checks on planes, boats, lorries, cars. Constant testing and restrictions. It is almost certain that the virus would still slip through. This does not seem a viable option.
What about finding an effective treatment? The chances are vanishingly small. Influenza, a very similar virus, has been around for decades, and no game changing medications have yet been found.
As for a vaccine, this solution is so distant that it does not really exist. It will be a minimum of 18 months before an effective vaccine can be developed, then tested, then produced in sufficient quantities to be of any use. Waiting for 18 months before ending the lockdown would be socially and economically impossible. We would be committing national suicide.
So there is only one overall strategy that can be followed. Control the spread to avoid overwhelming the NHS. This has never been made explicit, but the government has, albeit indirectly, told us that this is exactly what they are doing.
In the last few days, a letter was sent to all households, signed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, before he himself was confirmed to have contracted the disease. It was entitled ‘Coronavirus – stay at home; protect the NHS, save lives’. It contained this key passage:
“If too many people become seriously unwell at one time, the NHS will be unable to cope. This will cost lives. We must slow the spread of the disease, and reduce the number of people needing hospital treatment in order to save as many lives as possible.” The key sentence is the first: “If too many people become seriously unwell at one time.”
This fits with the initial UK strategy. Contain, delay, research, mitigate. The UK has passed through ‘contain’ and is now in ‘delay and mitigate’. Research sits in the background and may, or may not, provide a solution.
However, ‘delay and mitigate’ doesn’t mean that people will not become infected and die. It just means that the NHS will not be overwhelmed by a wave of them happening at the same time. We are simply, it should be made clear, trying to control the ‘peak’, which now will likely be a series of ‘peaks’.
At present, ministers are not admitting this. They are presenting lockdown as a way of “beating this virus.” In order to enforce lockdown, they are haranguing and scaring the population into compliance.
Covid-19 is being presented as a deadly killer that does not discriminate. Young, old, we are all at risk of contracting this dreadful disease. Every night, the television news has story after story of young people who have been infected, and who have died. In fact, just five people under 20 have died so far.
There is hardly anything said about the fact that the average age of death is around 80, that the vast majority of those dying are old (92 percent are over 60), and have several other serious medical conditions.
The reality is that for anyone younger than about 60, Covid-19 is only slightly more dangerous than suffering from influenza. The infection fatality rate (IFR) currently stands at around 0.2 percent in those countries doing the most testing. This figure will inevitably fall once we can identify those who were infected but had no symptoms.
By avoiding this more reassuring message, by frightening everyone into compliance, the government has painted itself into a corner. How can they say to people that last week you couldn’t drive two miles to walk in the countryside, or go to the beach, or go to a restaurant, or lie in a park sunbathing, in order to prevent the spread of this deadly killer disease… but this week you can?
Worse than that, when cases begin to rise again, about a month after lockdown is relaxed, will we all have to lock down again to prevent the next surge? How will the public respond to this? I don’t know, but I expect that it is going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to force everyone back into lockdown again.
By this point, millions will have been financially crippled and will be desperate to work, if their jobs still exist. Thousands of businesses will have fallen over, bankrupt. Hundreds of thousands of operations, and cancer treatments, will have been postponed and cancelled. I have already warned that it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that significantly more people will die as a result of the lockdown than will die from coronavirus.
That great harm is being done by it was made clear in an article this week in the Health Service Journal: “NHS England analysts have been tasked with the challenging task of identifying patients who may not have the virus but may be at risk of significant harm or death because they are missing vital appointments or not attending emergency departments, with both the service and public so focused on COVID-19.”
“A senior NHS source familiar with the programme told HSJ: ‘There could be some very serious unintended consequences [to all the resources going into fighting coronavirus]. While there will be a lot of COVID-19 fatalities, we could end up losing more ‘years of life’ because of fatalities relating to non-COVID-19 health complications.’”
It may well seem that all this suffering was… well, for what exactly? To simply prevent a surge of cases. This government, all governments, must be honest about this and admit that in the longer term, we cannot prevent almost everybody getting infected and acknowledge that some of those infected will die.
When lockdown restrictions are lifted, this does not mean that the virus has gone. It does not mean that people cannot infect each other. It does not mean we can simply carry on as before. It means that we have kept the first surge under control.
So, what is the exit strategy? The answer is that we don’t have one. We have a strategy of delay and mitigation which will continue until… when? Until everyone has been infected? Until we have an effective treatment? Until we have an effective vaccine? Until enough people have been infected that we have achieved herd immunity?
The government must tell us the truth and be clear about what end point they are seeking to achieve. Only then can we have an exit strategy.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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“It may well seem that all this suffering was… well, for what exactly? To simply prevent a surge of cases. – Malcolm Kendrick
Or the engineered COVID-19 causing SARS-CoV-2 virus was introduced so a trial run of “medical martial law” could be implemented?
Senator Dr. Scott Jensen: Right now Medicare is determining that if you have a COVID-19 admission to the hospital you get $13,000. If that COVID-19 patient goes on a ventilator you get $39,000. No diagnosis required for CV-19 being cause of death, just a presumption.
“The cheap buck-passing we have seen…” You could have just as easily meant the Fed magic money Wall St. bank and hedge fund bailouts. Lockdowns? We don’t care about no stinking lockdowns!
They’re covering up the body counts right now as we speak, and since everyone is forced inside, it is not necessarily easy for people to just take strolls down to the local morgue to verify if info online is either subterfuge or truth. Neocon lackeys are going to cover this thing up for Trump until they put enough doubt into people’s minds once they have overcome the curve that this is just another ‘democrat hoax’ to ‘inflate’ the numbers. When in reality there under-reporting this thing. Quite possibly many in the hospitals in the US perhaps have had to let people die because of the lack of necessary equipment.
They are already admitting in Britain that people are dying in the hallways, awaiting admission. But that can also be a factor of people living alone, especially older folks, coming in with a late stage illness. With New York’s Potters field doing big business, there are people dying with no one around, or anyone that wants to pay for anything, so they call 911 at the end and then just leave. We are not hearing much in terms of leaked first responders about these “abandoned” or old curmudgeon people that don’t want to go to the hospital. It’s a sad reality.
Jim, check your facts, no-one in Britain is ‘dying in the hallways’, this is nonsense. The hospitals are very busy, but there has been no overwhelming of available beds, the worst problem is a lack of PPE for hospital staff.
Thanks, Jim for the response. It is disheartening that a lot of Americans are going to be hurt by this.
Let’s hope the Russians find a vaccine. They know this a bioweapo n and sent to Italy 100 of their top notch military scientists with experience in Chernobyl and defending Russia from the 24 US bioweapon labs surrounding it.
It needs time. Yes, we have very powerful and professional military radio-chem-bio troops and traditional Soviet virology school and science. But everyday we (the world) lose people and time. Scientists work, examine, try to find the key. The rest, we, the peoples, have to do ourselves. Care about us.
““The most expensive among us”…Dave please interpret this for us. Thanks. Happy Easter to all. We will be working as usual tomorrow as family gatherings certainly will not be obstructing the schedule. But I might head out to Walmart, not far away, for a discounted lily to brighten the day.
This is the message Mainstream Media must push forward. We don’t need any heroes Just reality and PPE, lots of PPE. We will take care of everyone, not just Cofefe-19 patients but all the rest, we just need to have the simple protection not to infect you and ourselves. Masks, gowns, shields and gloves with plenty of soap and alcohol! We got this shit there are so many bad bugs we deal with every day. Just stop tightening the supply of PPE the stuff was cheap, Its not like a PET scanner or Digital Portable x-ray machine. We got this. My thought is heard immunity is what will be the reality of this bugs demise. It has been important to try to flatten the curve but boy what a cost! I am pretty convinced this was a bio-warfare virus gone wild, intentional or not we have to deal with it.
Whether the majority of the population says it or not, most people probably think this is bio-war.
When 80% of a population is exposed to a virus you have herd immunity, two weeks after the the peak the epidemic is over, and no need for a vaccine because everyone would already have immunity. Testing to see who has it serves no purpose. He says testing for antibodies would provide useful data. Social distancing and isolation guarantees we will have a second wave, more people will die. If we had left it alone it would have been over a week ago. From Dr Knut Wittkoski. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg&feature=emb_logo. Same as Dr Kendricks, the virus is going to run its course no matter what you do.
Removing cash and going chip will certainly leave a trace; couple this with toll readers when you drive and there you have it. Don,t forget about smart meters and appliances. Will we be charged more for doing laundry during peak hours, you bet. On the other side of this pandemic there will be more push for restriction. Who knows what the next problem will be or the problem after that? But if you look a wee bit into the crystal ball we can see what reaction solution will be. The old world order is the new world order.
And the more widespread it is the higher the chances of mutating due the huge number of replications that are taking place, all random we know from our own genetics, to find one that advances the chances of an organism living in the deadly competition among life forms.
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