Jeremy Harris
Jeremy Harris is a businessman and investor from Auckland, New Zealand.
As we emerge bleary-eyed from hiding behind our couches and under our beds, into the level-1 sun (or rain), with the fear subsiding we are now able to appraise objectively where we find ourselves as a nation.
For many New Zealanders, the last couple of weeks of March were a panicked blur. I too heard the shocking statement from the WHO that the fatality rate from COVID-19 was 3.4%, i.e. fatal to 3.4 people in 100, and I knew this was almost one-third more than the 1918 pandemic flu. So why weren’t our borders closed and everyone on lockdown much sooner? What was the Government doing? I dashed around spending almost 50 hours in those last 3 days getting ready for level 4 (some toilet paper may have been bought).
The day before lockdown started, for the first time in my life I begged a man on my knees (I’ll spare you the details – but it wasn’t pretty). All of a sudden, boom, we were in level 4. I had lots of time to read, to think. As an exporter who is responsible for a number of families’ livelihoods, I decided to find out exactly how severely this virus was going to degrade the world’s health and wealth. What I learned in the first 24 hours in level 4, freely available to all who wanted to find out, shocked me to my core. As a country we had made a massive mistake, maybe the biggest in our peacetime history; and it was, sadly, obvious. Here is what we now know – and could deduce without too much effort then.
The infection fatality rate (IFR) for this novel virus (properly called SARS-2) turns out to be, so far, approximately 0.25%, not 3.4%. This is almost 14 times more benign than the WHO’s early projection that was reported with little contextualising. This figure is now obvious from the dozens of detailed PCR assays and serological surveys that have been done around the world.
The USA Centre for Disease Control (CDC) advises that the IFR for symptomatic cases is 0.4% and they estimate that 35% of cases are asymptomatic (however there is evidence to believe asymptomatic cases could be as high as 69%+). This brings their IFR estimate down to a maximum of 0.26%. The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University estimates that the IFR is in the range 0.41% – 0.1%, noting that in all epidemics the IFR trends downward as the epidemic progresses. For context, the IFR of ‘regular’ flu is 0.1%.
Furthermore, this risk is almost completely concentrated in those over 65 years of age and with serious underlying health conditions. If you are under 40 and healthy your chance of being killed by SARS-2 is approximately 4 in 100,000. That’s not a typo. The Telegraph newspaper in the UK recently reported that children are so naturally resistant to SARS-2 that they have a higher chance of being killed by lightning within the next year (if only they were allowed out of their houses). For many this will be hard to hear; how can this be true when the whole world has given up so much? But it is. The reality is for those under 65 and healthy, life should always have gone on largely as normal; there should have been no lockdown and few if any closed borders.
You may also still be under the impression that we need 60% – 80% of the population to be infected to reach the unfortunately named herd immunity. However, this too is incorrect. Professor Michael Levitt (Nobel Laureate) and Professor Karl Friston (a most eminent statistician) have both calculated from the case data that there seems to be some form of “immunological dark matter”, some natural immunity in the population, which slows SARS-2’s exponential growth as soon as it starts spreading, and brings down the required herd immunity by 50% – 80%. We now have a number of studies giving a possible mechanism for how this works, perhaps by unexpected T-cell response and localised immunity in the mucosal glands. More studies are sure to follow.
The facts as they stand are on the whole pleasant relief from the menacing images that impelled severe shutdowns; indeed, we have cause for celebration, and good reasons for markedly decreasing the political restrictions required to control this new virus, since the threat is at least 28 times smaller than we initially feared.
As a country, we urgently need a conversation about how realistic it is to expect a safe vaccine within a year or two. The 10% -15% of our economy that relies on open borders has already been severely damaged and the longer we wait, the smaller the chance of recovery.
The collapse of firms and of sole traders will kill people too, conceivably thousands of people over the next 50 years if we wait even a year. How likely is a vaccine? The Common Cold Research Unit in the UK, pioneers of coronavirus research, for 43 years sought a vaccine for the common cold (including the 4 cold-causing coronaviruses). They gave up, emphasising the enormous size of their task versus the prospective benefit. No vaccine has been developed against SARS which caused the 2003 coronavirus epidemic, despite 17 years of research effort and a shocking IFR, 10%. 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 the development of a vaccine is wishful thinking 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. To hold out ill-founded hopes of protection is cruel.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the SARS-2 pandemic is likely to wane over the next few months and lapse into a less important status, e.g. the 5th cold-causing coronavirus. The final global death tolls are probably not going to end up significantly worse than a very bad seasonal-flu year. Let us ask ourselves what is our country’s endgame? How long will we remain closed to the world when no vaccine is likely coming soon, while the need to restore commerce and education is urgent? And how many lives and much quality of life are we willing to sacrifice before we decide to live with this virus like adults? This is a genie which has gone global and cannot be put back in the bottle.
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