Coronavirus Facts People Are Not Talking About Enough

Jeremy Harris is a businessman and investor from Auckland, New Zealand.

• Professor Neil Ferguson from the ICL has estimated that 66% of all the people who die from COVID-19 during this pandemic would have died in the next year. If correct, this means that each month that passes since the start of lockdowns, ~5% of the people that lockdowns are trying to save have or would have died from natural causes (other than COVID-19). In New Zealand it has been over 2 months since lockdown began, meaning that ~10% of the people we were trying to save when initially going into lockdown would now be dead no matter what the response was, or in fact if there were no pandemic at all.

• If you are under 40 and healthy your chance of dying from COVID-19 is about the same as driving a short distance to and from work for 2 weeks. If you are over 80 and have two or more co-morbidities your chances of dying are about the same as going skydiving once – but every 8 jumps they forget to give you a parachute. Yet the proposed solution – lockdown – has been the same for everyone.

• In most countries the Constitution (formal or otherwise) grants the individual freedom from medical experimentation. However, the risk of death from COVID-19 grows exponentially with age. So, if lockdowns work, and if you are over 65 and have a co-morbidity the government is denying you your best chance of being exposed to Sars-Cov-2 and recovering, and exponentially increasing your chance of dying for each day that passes. If lockdowns are effective, as they believe, governments are conducting the equivalent of a grand medical experiment without your consent with your increased chance of death as the ethical casualty.

• In the best-case scenario that can be made for lockdown, it is at least 300 times worse than the virus itself. For example, in the worst (realistic) case of a completely uncontrolled release of Sars-Cov-2 in New Zealand it would kill 5,000,000 (population) x 0.3 (30% herd immunity) x 0.0025 (IFR) = 3,750. Each of these people would lose an average of 2 years of life (at the absolute most) = 7,500 years of life lost. For every 1% of GDP NZ loses our life expectancy drops ~0.1 years, so at our government’s (absurd) projection of just a 4.8% loss of GDP, due to the lockdown they put in place, it equals 5,000,000 x 0.48 (years of life lost per person) = 2,400,000 years of life lost.

This is before considering years of life lost due to lockdown’s ‘special’ effects, such as reduced cancer screening, avoidance of hospitals, etc. and considering the fact that the simple step of protecting care and rest homes will reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths significantly.

• The Common Cold Research Unit in the UK who discovered the first coronavirus spent 43 years researching a vaccine for the common cold (including the 4 cold-causing coronaviruses). They gave up given the enormous size of their task versus the benefit. SARS, the coronavirus from 2003, does not have a vaccine, despite the fact they have been attempting to develop one for 17 years and its IFR is a terrifying 10%, and the prospect of its mutating into an easily transmittable form (very low chance but incredibly high cost if it happened) that would completely devastate the world. Similarly, for MERS with a plague-like 35% IFR. All of this should be strong evidence that the 12- to 18-month timeline given for development of a vaccine is wishful thinking of the highest order by those who either do not understand the process of developing safe vaccines, or who feel public pressure to downplay how hard it is to do safely and quickly, especially for a type of virus which has no existing vaccine.

• What will happen to vaccine research efforts when it becomes increasingly obvious that this virus is only 2.5 times more lethal at an individual level than the standard influenza when novel and will become the 5^th cold causing coronavirus when its novelty ends (once all the world’s population has been exposed)? What will countries like New Zealand and Australia which have effectively closed their borders until a safe, effective vaccine is available do? And what was the point of our lockdown and border closure if we will need to open up anyway?

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