Maybe Covid-19 is not as bad as we first thought, but our leaders don’t know what to do next…

One of my favourite quotes is from the screenwriter William Goldman:

“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

I believe this quote applies to all areas of life, not just the movie business. The older you get the more you realise we are all faking it and making it up as we go along. Many of our leaders suffer from imposter syndrome, full of worry and self-doubt. My first peek behind the curtain was at Queen’s when I saw all the medical students as pissed up and clueless as the rest of us, within a few years they would have lives in their hands.

And so its the case with Covid-19, obviously all the experts know more about the topic than you or I but still they are as clueless as the rest of us. There is a massive range of opinions across the experts, it can be very difficult to know who to listen to. We have gone into lockdown which seemed the best strategy under the circumstances but along comes stupid sexy Sweden who decided to be contrary and go for lockdown lite.

The New York Times has a good report on Swedens response to the virus.

Trust is high in Sweden — in government, institutions and fellow Swedes. When the government defied conventional wisdom and refused to order a wholesale lockdown to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus epidemic, public health officials pointed to trust as a central justification.

Swedes, they said, could be trusted to stay home, follow social distancing protocols and wash their hands to slow the spread of the virus — without any mandatory orders. And, to a large extent, Sweden does seem to have been as successful in controlling the virus as most other nations.

Sweden’s death rate of 22 per 100,000 people is the same as that of Ireland, which has earned accolades for its handling of the pandemic, and far better than in Britain or France.

Yet, on this warm spring day, at least, there was little evidence that people were observing the protocols — adding further mystery to Sweden’s apparent success in handling the scourge without an economically devastating lockdown.

All around Ms. Lilja along Skanegatan Street in the Sodermalm neighborhood of Stockholm, younger Swedes thronged bars, restaurants and a crowded park last week, drinking in the sun.

They laughed and basked in freedoms considered normal in most parts of the world not long ago, before coronavirus lockdowns, quarantines and mass restrictions upended social norms. As other nations in Europe begin to consider reopening their economies, Sweden’s experience would seem to argue for less caution, not more.

Now critics point out that Swedens death toll is 9 times higher than its neighbouring countries but its a complex issue. For example, while the death rates are higher now, could they be lower in the Autumn and Winter? put simply are people dying now who would have died within the next year or two anyway? It is easy to criticise that attitude as being cold and uncaring but I believe Sweden are being pragmatic and looking at the bigger picture.

Over in the Wall Street Journal there is a profile of Stanford scientist John Ioannidis:

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

In part he blames the media: “We have some evidence that bad news, negative news [stories], are more attractive than positive news—they lead to more clicks, they lead to people being more engaged. And of course we know that fake news travels faster than true news. So in the current environment, unfortunately, we have generated a very heavily panic-driven, horror-driven, death-reality-show type of situation.”

The news is filled with stories of healthy young people who die of coronavirus. But Dr. Ioannidis recently published a paper with his wife, Despina Contopoulos-Ioannidis, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, that showed this to be a classic man-bites-dog story. The couple found that people under 65 without underlying conditions accounted for only 0.7% of coronavirus deaths in Italy and 1.8% in New York City.

“Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people. I’m not saying that the lives of 80-year-olds do not have value—they do,” he says. “But there’s far, far, far more . . . young people who commit suicide.” If the panic and attendant disruption continue, he says, “we will see many young people committing suicide . . . just because we are spreading horror stories with Covid-19. There’s far, far more young people who get cancer and will not be treated, because again, they will not go to the hospital to get treated because of Covid-19. There’s far, far more people whose mental health will collapse.”

I do not envy the choices our leaders need to make, loosen the lock-down and see more deaths, or keep the lockdown and wreck the economy and risk serious mental health and societal problems.

Whatever they decide just remember its a coin toss, Nobody knows anything.

Brian O'Neill

Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.