Who could disagree with the UK lockdown?

With the lockdown accepted almost as an article of faith it seems reckless in the extreme to even suggest it could be wrong. Apostates are hunted down all over social media and ridiculed, punished and belittled with methods designed by the Church of Scientology and inspired by the Congregation on the Doctrine of the Faith or maybe their FaceBook accounts are just deleted.

Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro received righteous contempt for their foolish suggestions that we could ride-out the tsunami of viral particles washing over the nations of the World killing so many in its wake. Such people, we assure ourselves, are from a crackpot cult out on the far right that sees profit and power as the only virtues. Boris was, many suspected, an acolyte at least for a while with his egregious handshaking and flippant rhetoric but then that Pauline Conversion as he emerged from a few nights in ICU.

Boris delivered the lockdown but his faith, it seems, was short-lived as now he plans to open up England socially and commercially and in doing so is upsetting leaders of the devolved administrations and risking, according to Nicola Sturgeon, a true acolyte of lockdown, “unnecessary deaths”.

Because of this and lockdown fatigue the four UK regions are struggling to maintain a consensus on, and control of, lockdown as more and more leave home to join three hours queues at reopened Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. So daily publication of deaths, still at a higher than comfortable level, it is hoped will keep us all on board; staying at home, protecting the NHS, saving lives and forgetting the economy.

Some weeks ago, back when the deaths in the UK were 13,000 and in Sweden were 2,000, Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, gave an interview in which he shared his views on the rights and wrongs of national policies to deal with Covid-19. His short pithy view is that there is no such thing as right and wrong when it comes to dealing with a new viral pandemic such as SARS-CoV-2.

Johan’s views are important because he officially advises Anders Tugnell, the Swedish state epidemiologist, and unofficially he advises the WHO; and they both listen to him.

Johan is, in a dispassionate and statistical kind of way, more or less certain that the UK and other European lockdowns were wrong in that they were too extreme. His advice has steered Sweden on a very different course through this pandemic and he feels he is right and his challenge to those who disagree is to wait until April 2021 and looking back at this time see what really happened. His view is that deaths in Sweden will be no different from the UK and other European countries. His view is that national deaths due to this novel virus will be roughly the same whether or not a country took an extreme approach to lockdown or a more casual approach. The problem is that once you lock-down there is no easy way to open up again without getting more transmission and more deaths.

The UK lockdown was based almost exclusively on Professor Neil Fergusons’s Imperial College report to SAGE that used models based on lots of unknowns. That paper suggested that without doing anything 510,000 people would die in the UK and 14,000 in N. Ireland. With a minor lockdown such as currently applies in Sweden that would be 250,000 or 7,000 and with a complete lockdown we might get away with 20,000 UK deaths. The Imperial College paper was not peer reviewed that is, it was taken at face value and this is rare given the impact it had on informing, and ultimately defining, public health policy.

Johan Geiseche is clear in his view that this new coronovirus is acting like a flu; most suffer a trivial condition to which they become immune and he predicts that currently some 33% of the UK population has been infected and by the summer this will be up to 66% where the much hated term “herd immunity” will begin to protect the population. UK epidemiologists strongly disagree with this estimating perhaps 5% of the UK population have been infected at this stage and we have no idea if immunity is protective.

As we head towards a possible 45,000 UK deaths in this wave of the infection the UK has certainly flattened the curve which was primarily to stop the NHS being swamped. NHS capacity was increased as needed so the lockdown predictions in the Imperial College paper were only valid for the first week or so as NHS ICU capacity was by then scaled up.

I certainly hope that Johan is wrong and that for all our efforts and the social and financial pain suffered we will get many less premature deaths than if we had a less rigorous lockdown as they are having in Sweden. Only time will tell but Johan Geisceshe is one of the few people who has earned the right to disagree with the UK lockdown.

Photo by PabitraKaity is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA