I’m disappointed to announce that Professor Shaun ‘80,000-dead’ Hendy’s self-penned, self-congratulatory screed published Wednesday last at Newsroom, left me feeling bitter. That’s not a nice emotion to have.
Nevertheless the good professor’s column, in spite of the hubris on display, is enlightening as to the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of our Ministry of Health who, it would appear, went shopping for Covid numbers, big gloomy numbers, Doom-porn, before March 17, 2020. That’s interesting, don’t you think?
MOH’s announcements of the previous seven days had been distinctly ‘Don’t worry’ at all, be happy, advising us on March 10th
“The risk of an ongoing outbreak of #COVID19 remains low. Don’t worry about stocking up on groceries…”
then
“Most people don’t need to worry about attending public events or going to school…”, on the 11th, and on the following day, March 12th declared:
“With lots of public events [Pasifika, The Blues game in Auckland, Ardern’s Christchurch misery-fest] coming up this weekend, it’s important to stay home if you feel unwell and not spread your symptoms to healthy people. If you feel well and plan to attend an event, make sure you practise good hand hygiene as often as possible.”
Just wash yer’ hands, she’ll be right.
This tells us that the switch was flicked on the PR plan, from maximum chill to maximum fear-and-loathing, in the seven day period March 13-20th. The “Hard and Early” propaganda farce was already rolling down the runway in Wellington’s creative agencies…they just needed ‘facts’ to back them up. ‘Facts’ that hopelessly-wrong Hendy would soon provide.
Meantime whisperings were occurring in the prime minister’s ear: remember the infamous alleged ‘friend from overseas’ who had counselled Ardern mid-March to “Go, just shut down, because here I am in lockdown with thousands of people dying. Just shut down”, which informed her of the necessity for action? To which Ms Ardern must have mused – ‘How could I justify that, I’d certainly need some scary scenarios. Who can we call?’
‘Is that 0900 Dodgy Numbers,…yes? It’s MOH here…’
The MOH was shopping elsewhere for numbers too, along with the prime minister. Our top epidemiologists had been working out their ‘final report’ to the MOH on the “Potential Health Impacts from the COVID-19 Pandemic for New Zealand if Eradication Fails” which was presented on March 23rd. Authored by Professors Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, along with Drs Lucy Barnard and Amanda Kvalsig, and a month in the making, the document delivered projections for infections, case-loads, hospitalisations, and mortalities under three ‘Rate of infection’ (R0) scenarios.
Historically speaking previous global pandemics exhibited the following R0‘s
- 1.80 (IQR 1.47 – 2.27) in the 1918 influenza pandemic.
- 1.65 (IQR 1.53 – 1.70) in the 1957 influenza pandemic.
- 1.2 to 1.8 in eight Southern Hemisphere countries for 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza.
For their report our doctors and professors chose R0’s 1.5 (the mean R0 for both the 1918 influenza pandemic in New Zealand community settings, and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, an R0 then ‘of common sense’ or ‘proven experience’ you might say), 2.5 (extrapolated from the ‘Pacific Princess outbreak and, while not comparable to a New Zealand community setting or demographic, this R0 was christened ‘Most plausible’) and 3.5 (the mean of outlier studies, and almost certainly not realistic under New Zealand conditions).
Their report concludes that under a regime of “general contact reduction”, a term used to describe
“the summated impact of a potentially wide variety of different interventions: people may adopt enhanced personal hygiene measures (hand washing, cough etiquette etc); they may decide to have fewer contacts (physical distancing); and governments may close venues and schools, restrict mass transit, curtail mass gatherings, and restrict travel (within and between countries).
New Zealand could expect to be visited with anywhere between a low of just 7 deaths and up to 2,520 under the sensible R0 1.5 (about 1,000-1400 deaths are attributed to seasonal influenza or pneumonia every year in NZ), or between 8,560 and 12,700 souls succumbing under ‘plausible’ R0 2.5.”
Imagine their surprise then, when the team were requested by MOH to come back with worse figures, and soon. Wouldn’t one ask: why? How had we gone from reassuring the public on the 10th to scaring the b’jeesus out of them on the 24th?
There was no time for an answer, the ‘worse case’ was delivered by the following day. Necessarily simple, or brutal, given the time constraint Professor Wilson ended up using the completely unrealistic R0 of 3.5, also multiplying the average daily new cases introduced from overseas by a factor of 10, and nearly doubling the case fatality ratio from 0.45% to 0.83% to get a new result. The ‘Worse Case’ figure had now ballooned to 27,600.
Prof Wilson’s work was in vain, it seems; perhaps not scary enough. The prime minister had been ‘supplied’ much more nauseating figures from a newcomer, or a nobody – depending on your definition – to epidemiological modelling, a George Soros acolyte, an ‘economist’ named Rodney Jones whose figures quoted by the Boss-lady in the days immediately following the State of National Emergency (SONE) in which ‘Kind’ Jacinda repeatedly, and illegally, threatened us with “force”, both civilian and military.
Hendy tells us in his spiel that for “six weeks”, from March 17th, his team toiled with mathematical models, yet he would bizarrely, infamously, make his ludicrous 80,000 claim within just nine days of the stated start date, and within three days of the SONE announcement. Amazing, eh?
In his article Hendy is sneeringly disdainful of those pointing to the obvious flawed assumptions of his group’s modelling “Our early models have had their armchair critics…” he says. Armchair critics? The ‘models’ were simply ridiculous, the critics simply rational, and some extremely well-qualified.
With not a hint of self-awareness, Hendy laments, using the new lefty-favourite term for any statement, comment or opinion not within the approved narrative, the “disinformation” railed against his team’s “science” and, peculiarly, for a supposedly objective number-cruncher, comments:
“But we were not immune here: as we approached the 2020 election, senior National party figures would start ‘just asking questions’.”
As they well should have, Prof Hendy. That’s their job and their right, and your numbers were wrong.
It’s the sheer audacity of Hendy’s spiel that makes me bitter, not a pause or thought for jobs and businesses lost to these crazy, unjustified, lockdowns and his only concession condescendingly, and politically, couched:
“One of the early things we did get wrong was just how well our Alert Level system would work. Much to our relief, our team of five million just smashed it.”
Good grief. How pathetic.
What a shame that he didn’t find space to let us know what he and his team had discovered during their research of actual cases here in New Zealand, and therefore how wrong their initial assumptions were:
“We estimate that New Zealand had an effective reproduction number Reff= 1.8 for COVID-19 transmission prior to moving into Alert Level 4 on March 25 2020 and that after moving into Alert level 4 this was reduced to Reff = 0.35.”
That information is hidden away from the public gaze, but you can access it here, and it reveals that the R0 of 1.5 was, and always was, the most responsible enumerator for the potential Covid epidemic casualties on these shores, and that all of MOH’s ‘Worse Case’, economist Jones’s, and mathematician Hendy’s group’s projections were always nuts. Just hype. Bullshit in…(insert your own words here).
Thousands of people are out of work, with more to come; that hurts. The country is in increased debt to the tune of $100,000,000,000. Hendy kept his job, his salary, and got a gong, despite being wildly wrong, and worryingly:
“The models built by this team would inform Cabinet’s Alert Level decisions, managed isolation and quarantine policies, and use of digital contact tracing.”
Maybe that explains something about the latest over-the-top lockdowns?
Shaun had a party, but we all paid for it, will keep paying for it, and now he rubs our noses in it.
That’s why I’m bitter.
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