Oh, to have a leader like Jacinda Ardern! Oh, hell, no, thank you very much.
The New Zealand prime minister, already a rock star amongst that tiny, incredibly privileged sliver of humanity that is the left-elite, sent her tiny legion of adoring fans into fresh paroxysms with her self-proclamation that her draconian lockdown of the entire country had “eliminated” the Wuhan virus in that country.
Except that she hadn’t. Inevitably, the virus re-emerged in New Zealand, and Ardern hit the panic button again. While this absurd political dance goes on, the country’s economy is tanking.
Far from being the shining example to the world, Ardern ought more properly be considered a masterclass in failure.
Of course, “progressive” types are apt to bleat that “even one life is too many” to be taken by what, all evidence indicates, is a mildly threatening pandemic. This merely serves to highlight the left’s thoroughgoing inability to grasp basic economics. Economics is all about lives: not just the few taken by (or, more usually, with) COVID-19, but all the others blighted by panicked government responses.
There are almost eight billion people in the world and six months into the pandemic barely any young have died from the virus.
Based on Swiss data published in respected medical journal The Lancet last month, the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 for those aged 20 to 50 is one in 10,870, or about the same as being hit by a car. Young people should be far more worried about the collapse in education, their inability to travel and enjoy their lives, and their highly diminished job opportunities and incomes that the Treasury and Productivity Commission have recently laid out.
For those aged up to 44, the coronavirus is less of a threat than dying from a random accident each year, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics.
But, despite their vanity about “listening to the science”, the left are not about to be, well, scientific: dispassionately weighing the evidence and the numbers. They’re all about moralistic panic. Especially the Boomer left, who just happen to be most at risk of the virus. When the British government suggested age-targeted interventions (stay-at-home quarantine for the over-70s), the Boomer cohort instantly soiled their Depends.
“I won’t put up with this ageist claptrap!” shrieked elite Brit Boomer, Ann Widdecombe.
Alas, age-targeted interventions weren’t top of mind in the Victorian government, whose decision to move into stage four lockdown is an incredibly high-stakes gamble. If no vaccine emerges — or no vaccine with side effects mild enough that people are willing to take it — what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions with all the attendant social and economic costs that will last years?
New Zealand is held out as a role model, but it’s a small, remote country. Its biggest industry, tourism, has been ruined, and at some point its citizens may want to come and go.
As a “small, remote country”, moreover one with no significant public transport infrastructure (one of the biggest vectors for community transmission), New Zealand was always at the lowest risk imaginable. Pointing to low-to-no transmission (however temporary) as vindication of Ardern’s draconian lockdowns is classic, fallacious, post-hoc reasoning.
Observing a decline in deaths or case numbers after a government took a sledgehammer to its economy says nothing about the effectiveness. Pointing to New Zealand in rapture proves nothing.
In fact, there’s no reliable relationship between lockdowns and viral trajectories across countries.
“Full lockdowns and widespread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality,” the authors of another recent Lancet study looking at Europe and the US found.
This is something that has been well-known at least since I first wrote about it way back in April. The evidence has only grown clearer since. Lockdowns do not work.
But politicians are, almost to a non-binary person, so ossified in their thinking that their brains should be found under glass in the British Museum. Politicians would rather refuse a massive Chinese bribe than admit that they were wrong.
Which is why, having rejected the Plan B in the first place, Jacinda Ardern will drag New Zealand kicking and screaming to its economic grave rather than admit that she was wrong.
The BFD. Cartoon credit BoomSlang
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