Jacinda Ardern might brag about “going hard and early”, but the facts say otherwise. Ardern waited and dithered – most notably holding out until the very last day to cancel her grandstanding Christchurch memorial. Likewise, Ardern might also boast that New Zealand’s draconian lockdown “worked”, but there’s not much evidence for that. Indeed, the evidence is mounting that lockdowns are useless.
Worse than useless, in fact.
The whole rationale for oppressive lockdowns is supposedly “stay home, save lives”. Instead, it’s looking more like staying home is going to cost lives.
Thousands of cancers are being missed every week because patients are not going to their GP, a leading charity has warned.
Cancer Research UK said the numbers being referred by doctors for urgent hospital appointments or checks had dropped by 75 per cent since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
Sarah Woolnough, from the charity, said about 2,300 cancers were being missed every week as a result, and many patients’ operable cancers would become inoperable if they remained undetected.
Separate figures estimate that another 400 cancers a week are being missed because screening for breast, cervical and bowel cancer has been suspended.
Normally up to a million patients a year would attend these vital checks to detect tumours early, but most health trusts have stopped sending out letters.
There is a growing concern among medical professionals that patients with serious illnesses are suffering from the ‘collateral damage’ of the coronavirus crisis.
The Office for National Statistics revealed yesterday that the total number of deaths in England and Wales in the week to April 10 was the highest since January 2000.
And just under 1,800 of the additional deaths were not attributed to coronavirus, suggesting the crisis is having a devastating wider impact.
As governments panicked and rushed to be seen to be outdoing each other in crushing the civil liberties of their citizens, the justification was “flatten the curve”. “We have to prevent hospitals from being overrun!” they wittered. So it seemed strange that so many doctors and nurses had so much free time to choreograph cool TikTok videos.
In fact, rather than being “overwhelmed”, many hospitals have been notably empty. Even in New York, citizen journalists were showing hospitals that were very far from being overcrowded battlegrounds. But it’s not just anecdotal evidence: hard data from the UK (one of the worst-hit countries, remember) shows that tens of thousands of NHS bed are empty. Four times more than normal.
Many hospitals have stopped carrying out diagnostic tests, particularly chest X-rays for lung cancer and colonoscopy procedures for bowel cancer. In another worrying development, hospitals have also paused operations to try to cure early-stage cancers including those affecting the bowel, stomach and lungs.
A study by University College London estimates as many as 18,000 extra deaths from cancer in the next year, as a direct result of measures taken to “flatten the curve” of the Chinese virus.
Add to that when the economic bill comes in for the lost jobs, closed businesses and skyrocketing welfare and stimulus payments, and it’s going to be harder and harder for governments to justify their frenzy to shut down entire countries.
But they’ll have almost certainly moved on to the next moral panic by then. No doubt “climate emergency” will get another round.
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