I’ve written about this so many times that I’m about as sick of saying it as long-suffering BFD followers are of reading, but let’s have one last try, for the slow kids in the Beehive:
Lockdowns do not work.
But governments don’t want to hear that. The basic principle of “first, do no harm” is anathema in politics. The iron rule of government is, “first, do something”. Who cares whether “doing something” works, or even makes things worse.
Even more important, “Never change your mind”. Changing your mind to suit changing circumstances was all well and good for John Maynard Keynes, but any government that dares do so invariably gets hung out to dry for “back-flipping”. Even John Howard barely weathered the storm when he reversed his policy on the GST.
But few politicians are John Howard. So, they remain rusted-on to their lockdown policies, no matter how damning the evidence against them.
King Canute realised he couldn’t control the tides. Outbreaks of the coronavirus in Victoria and New Zealand should remind us that controlling the spread of an invisible, highly contagious virus is not much easier.
Much damage can be done trying though.
The relatively better performance of countries like Australia and New Zealand has everything to do with population and geography, and bugger-all to do with government.
Least of all draconian lockdowns.
If this sounds revolutionary, it was the conventional response to respiratory, airborne-spreading epidemics before coronavirus messed massively with our collective intelligence.
In 2006 the World Health Organisation commissioned a review of the evidence for “non-pharmaceutical interventions” from previous flu pandemics from the 1910s, 1950s and 1960s.
It’s surprising reading.
Well, not really. It’s been in the public domain for 12 years, after all. Lockdown sceptics such as myself have been referring to it for months.
“Reports from many countries indicate that mandatory case reporting and isolating patients during the pandemic of 1918 didn’t stop virus transmission and were impractical,” said the authors, a collection of top advisers from government scientific bodies in the US, Britain, Australia, Sweden and Switzerland.
“Aggressive interventions to isolate patients and quarantine contacts, even if they are the first patients detected, would probably be ineffective, not a good use of limited health resources, and social disruptive,” they continued.
“Routine mask use should be permitted but not required.”
It might be tempting to dismiss the source – the maligned WHO – but, remember, this was 12 years ago, long before a pandemic erupted in China and engulfed the world.
In any case, the same findings have been around for just over a century.
The NSW government in 1919 concluded benefits from interstate and intrastate travel restrictions within Australia — border quarantine for four days, not 14 — were “very meagre”.
Authorities in Alberta, Canada said “quite simply, isolating individuals and families or quarantining entire communities did not work”.
Measures like quarantining arrivals are only of benefit to us lucky, isolated few, in places like Australia and New Zealand.
“Screening and quarantine of entering travellers at international borders did not substantially delay introduction, except in some island nations,” [WHO] wrote.
Indeed, Australia and New Zealand are likely to have far fewer deaths than other countries, just as they have done in every other pandemic, not because of the specific genius of our lockdowns but because we are far away.
Don’t just take the WHO’s word for it, either.
One of the great epidemiologists of the 20th century, the late Donald Henderson, argued, also in 2006, that “large scale quarantine” — universal stay at home orders — were “so extreme … they should be eliminated from serious consideration”.
Henderson’s speciality was smallpox, a lot more contagious and lethal than this latest coronavirus. “Communities faced with epidemics … respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted,” he wrote.
Scholars have been crunching the numbers for months, as lockdowns spread like a nasty rash across the globe. They keep coming to the same conclusions: lockdowns are useless. Worse, in fact, than the disease they falsely claim to abate. More and more people in public life are starting to say the unsayable, too.
It’s increasingly likely, as philosopher Peter Singer noted in this newspaper last week, that many of the restrictions imposed will be seen as a damaging overreaction that had little effect on viral containment but a highly detrimental impact on livelihoods.
Who knows? One day, even politicians might get it through their thick skulls.
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