Orwell's 1984: From Novel to Manifesto

I wasn't aware that Boris was going to make an announcement of any kind last night due to binge watching Bulletproof2 all day, so it was just a coincidence that I started watching ordinary TV just as "ordinary" life disappeared: The Prime Minister was addressing what until 8:30pm had been a free country and telling its population that we now live in a police state.

I, all my family and all my friends, have been placed under house arrest without even being accused of a crime - we're guilty of ??? Well what exactly ???? I went out yesterday and didn't see one single person stood closer than five feet to anybody else: in my locality social distancing was more than just observed, it was respected.

Boris said it was "for own my good". Really? Confined to the house, deprived of social contact, restricted diet, no exercise except walking once a day or going for a bike ride (that'd be nice - I live at the top of a very steep hill: Chris Hoy would have issues!), unable to replace anything unless it's on his list of essentials?

My analysis of currently available (publicly anyway) data suggests that Covid-19 might end up being responsible for around 2500 UK deaths, not the 250,000 or so which could possibly justify "solutions" which as Donald Trump has said may be worse than the problem.

I don't think it should be beyond the intellect of our government to realise that Northern Italy has some of the worst air pollution in Europe (at least until the last two weeks according to European Air Quality Index), so is it not likely that after decades of breathing it, the local elderly develop respiratory problems?

Nearly all Covid-19-related fatalities have "underlying health issues" (or so we're told), and thousands die globally infected with some type of coronavirus such as influenza, so we the people of the UK have now had our civil liberties removed in what may be just an attempt to prevent one particular coronavirus, (Covid-19), from replacing others as the bedfellow of those "underlying health issues"?

I can't find any worst-case predictions for Covid-19 causing a massive increase over and above the current coronavirus situation, and we haven't been told how many ‘corona-deaths’ were of people infected with Covid-19 but didn’t necessarily die of it, just what appears to be an assumption that without Covid-19 they'd still be alive.

When we have so many unknowns, and so little reliable data, how can last night's announcement be justified? What will be the results of shutting down the economy? It's very likely that unemployment will rise dramatically, and crime will rise along with it. Mental Health issues will increase, families with dysfunctional or dangerous relationships will begin to collapse, and the elderly all this is supposed to be protecting get a worse quality of life due to isolation, so may end up with reduced life expectancy anyway.

An economic depression will definitely result in poverty, pain and death which may vastly outweigh the current pandemic crisis, and that may just re-set and re-start when our brave new world has its draconian restrictions lifted.

And what if they're not?
What if our government decides that going back to how we were just a few days ago isn't safe for other reasons? Civil unrest due to the inevitable shortages of whatever goods, services and products we've come to expect or rely on? Climate change? Maybe they'll just get to like the privilege, power and authority?

I'm sat here blogging instead of doing anything more productive, or simply playing golf in the sunshine, because isolation is "for my own good", and that's precisely what many of the vulnerable students I used to teach told me was something their abusive parents said to them as a justification for their cruelty or neglect.

None of this feels as if it's for my benefit, and that's without me thinking that the pandemic effects haven't been modelled on statistically robust data (unless of course Boris is privvy to information we've not been given), so on balance I'm already leading towards contracting Covid-19 and seeing what happens as a preference to eventually standing in front of an army tank because I want to see my daughter and seeing if that really is safer.

The Way I See It

The media (and the UK government earlier today) is calling Covid-19 a once-in-a-century pandemic, but it might also be a once-in-a-century series of interconnected chaotic global responses to a problem that hasn't been adequately defined.

Many countries have introduced draconian measures in an attempt to counteract the disease, but as far as I can tell, there just isn't enough reliable evidence as to the numbers infected, or continuing to become infected, for governments and modellers to make such monumental decisions or to monitor their impact.

If the pandemic dissipates, whether that's on its own or as a result of social distancing and lock-downs, the impact of it may allow the world to return to something like "normal", whatever that will mean for the next decade or so. However, if the pandemic continues to spread around the world, how will those making the decisions be able to ascertain whether they've made a positive or negative impact when the consequences of long-term lockdowns are unknown and vaccines or affordable treatments take years to develop and test properly.

The data collected so far (or at least the information I've been able to find), on the number of people infected and how the epidemic is evolving don't appear to be particularly reliable statistically speaking as it's probably safe to assume that some deaths and the vast majority of Covid-19 infections are being missed due to the limits on testing. Therefore, it's impossible to state with any degree of confidence if we are failing to capture instances of coronavirus by a factor of three or 300 as few countries, if any, can test a large number of people and so don't know how prevalent the virus is in a random sample of the general population.

This creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19 as the reported fatality rates (according to the World Health Organisation it's 3.4%) don't just create fear and panic, they're completely meaningless. As far as I can tell, those who have been tested for Covid-19 are disproportionately patients of some description with severe symptoms and bad outcomes, and since few health systems have unlimited testing capacity, this sample selection bias will only get worse.

There has been only one instance of testing an entire, closed population, that of the passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess cruise ship where the case fatality rate was 1.0%, but it needs to be noted that this was a predominantly elderly demographic for whom  the Covid-19 death rate is thought to be higher than the general population.

Taking the Diamond Princess mortality rate and applying it across the age structure of the UK, our death rate of people from (or possibly with) coronavirus would be 0.125%. However, we need to caveat that as this calculation uses what I consider to be extremely thin base data (7 deaths from 712 out of almost 4000 on board) the true death rate could be one fifth of that (0.025%), or five times higher (0.625%).

We also need to consider the possibility that some of those infected may die later, and that cruise ship tourists may not be truly representative of the rest of the developed world (i.e. their lifestyle, on or off ship, may mean they have different frequencies of chronic diseases) so if we say double those base estimates we get a varying case fatality ratio somewhere between 0.05% and 1.25% across a country like ours.

That difference indicates the risk of what is being done as a population-wide fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza, which if it is the true proportion, the world's global lock-down and its likely social and financial consequences is not at all rational.

Now of course the Covid-19 case fatality rate isn't likely to be that low, and there are many common-cold-type viruses that have case fatality rates up to 10% when they infect the elderly, particularly if they're residents of nursing homes, but these “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of worldwide deaths every year without the vast majority being tested for their existence.

We've had successful influenza surveillance systems for decades, and typically something like 20% of laboratory tests confirm its presence in the samples sent for testing, while the estimated number of annual influenza-like deaths in the UK is between 4,500 and 11,000, therefore a positive test for coronavirus should not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.

If we take a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis of say 0.3% as the case fatality rate of individuals with Covid-19, and assume that 15% of the UK gets infected (7,000,000 people), that translates to about 30,000 deaths, but without anybody knowing there was a new virus this would just get buried in the annual noise of deaths due to an influenza-like illness.

According to the Office for National Statistics, this year's death rate remains below its five-year average, and a long way under the levels of 2017-18, but even if the 2,100 were to be added to that total we might casually just note that this season's flu seems to be a bit worse than average, and the media coverage would be proportionate to that which accompanies the marriage of two minor celebrities.

It's obvious from the empty shelves in our local supermarkets that many people are worried that the 104 deaths from (or with as it should probably be more accurately labelled) Covid-19 in the UK as of right now is going to increase exponentially to 520, 2600, 13,000, 65,000 ... and that the pattern will be similar all over the planet, but is that realistic? At what point will the curve flatten as our Chief Medical Officer keeps talking about every time he's on TV?

Statistically speaking, we can't answer those questions without knowing the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population, then  repeating the exercise at pre-defined time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections, but unfortunately that's information we don’t have.

So in the absence of data, we've got prepare-for-the-worst reasoning which has led to lock-downs and social distancing without knowing if these measures have any sort of positive impact. Closing the nation's colleges may reduce transmission rates, but it may backfire if students socialise anyway, and the school closures might mean children spend more time with susceptible grandparents, or disrupt their parents ability to work.

And looking further forward, with the caveat that I know next to nothing about virology, might school closures also have the potential to reduce the nation's chances of developing long-term herd immunity in an age group that is apparently free of serious disease?
"Flattening the curve" to avoid overwhelming the NHS as our country is apparently attempting to do is admittedly conceptually sound because it theoretically means that other common diseases and conditions can be adequately treated. However, if the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and these extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, flattening the curve could make things worse by crippling the NHS for longer instead of a short, admittedly acute, period of time.

The bottom line is that we simply don't know how long lock-downs and social distancing can be maintained without irreversibly crippling our economy, and  destroying the fabric of society for generations, possibly even to the extent of civil unrest and long-term mental health issues.

The very minimum we need right now is unbiased prevalence and incidence data, and that means not prioritising testing for those suspected of infection, but a true random population sample so that governments can make evidence-based decisions, not ones based entirely on theories and models.

The most pessimistic scenario I've had on my TV this week, and one that my maths mean I really don't subscribe to, is that Covid-19 might infect 60% of the population before we develop a herd immunity and if only 1% of infected people die, there'll be more than 40 million deaths globally. And since that would make Covid-19 as deadly as 1918's Spanish Flu (although in this case the deaths would be mainly the elderly or people with pre-existing conditions), this is the justification for lock-downs and social distancing, making them not just desirable, but imperative.

Hopefully, rather like back in 1918, life as we know it can continue, at least in something resembling civilised societies, but lock-downs of months and years have consequences we can only guess at, and the lives of billions, not just millions, will be impacted, so we really ought to have some data before continuing with these plans to jump off the cliff just in case there is a chance of actually landing somewhere safe.

Putting Panic into Context

Sanity and Sanitisers

A friend of mine has asked if I'll send him some hand sanitiser as all the shops where he lives have run out, and there is still some on the shelves in my local ASDA. At first, I didn't think he was serious as he's way too intelligent to get caught up in the Coronavirus panic, but apparently not: he genuinely wants me to post him as many bottles as I can get.

It may be that his family are pressuring him, but mine are far more grounded, as are all my friends living locally. Maybe it's a Yorkshire thing? Maybe we'd rather risk death than pay inflated prices for scented squirty soap? Or maybe as my daughter put it, Yorkshiremen would rather die than suffer the embarrassment of being thought panic shoppers?

I accept that Coronavirus (Covid-19) is a pretty virulent virus, but not in the contagious-imminent-danger-to-everybody's-health way.

As I type this there are 125,743 confirmed cases worldwide, almost 81,00 of which were or are in China, and 3,169 deaths in China plus another 1441 elsewhere in the world. So 4,610 deaths in total and half the planet is in lockdown.

Why? What has driven this hysteria? Two years ago, all the way back in 2017-18 the Office for National Statistics recorded 50,100 ‘excess winter deaths’ but it was business as usual. The explanation (for the deaths, not the lack of hysterical reaction), according to the ONS, was probably ‘the predominant strain of flu, the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, and below average winter temperatures’. Across the pond where Donald Trump has just announced a flight ban from mainland Europe and the golf I'm watching on TV is discussing the ban on spectators from tomorrow onwards, according to the US-based Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, over 80,000 died.

In both countries most of the victims were geriatric, many with compromised immune systems, as is the case with the UK Coronavirus deaths - or as I prefer to refer to them as a statistician, deaths of people with Coronavirus (not necessarily from, due to their age, health and underlying conditions)

And seasonal flu? According to an estimate by the CDCP, it causes somewhere between 291,000 and 646,000 deaths globally a year. To put it another way, if the number of deaths from coronavirus rises a hundredfold in the next few weeks or months, it will only have reached the lower bound of the estimate for existing strains of flu. How many of us wear face masks because of winter flu? How many planes and trains are cancelled? Does the stock market slump?

There is some justification for being more wary of Covid-19 than the flu as the former is an unknown quantity which we've not evolved with and don’t yet have a vaccine. But we know more about it by the day, its death rate is under 3 per cent and it is mostly killing people with pre-existing health conditions.

And probably more importantly, if it can, or does, spread quickly and easily, why don't we all have it already? In the past week, I've been on 8 trains (all crowded) and four buses (two full), attended a conference, a rock concert and a football match (1000, 2000 and 30000 people respectively) and been to the gym where nobody has cleaned down anything, sanitised between exercises, or avoided personal contact four times. And I'm ok. As is everybody I know and know of, but if the virus is virulent then surely this wouldn't be the case?

So where is the evidence that closing large gatherings of people makes anyone safer or slows the spread of disease? Is it logical to assume that Covid-19 can be passed on easier at a football match or the now-cancelled Australian Grand Prix than in a gym?

Maybe I'm missing something about Coronavirus and the attitude of people like me will only compound the problem, but it feels like this is just the latest "end of the world" phenomenon to trouble the populations of developed countries along with other apocalyptic portents such as climate alarmism, nuclear Armageddon and financial collapse.

At the end of January, Brexit had just been completed (sort of anyway) without incident, the standoff between the US and Iran had fizzled into nothing, the Australian bush fires had largely gone out, so did the media need something else to worry us about?

Reactionary hysteria has taken hold all over the world. Saudi Arabia has suspended religious pilgrimage trips to Mecca (oh the irony that the praying won't make the most devout any safer!), the Italian Prime Minister has ordered the lockdown of the country’s northern region, Ireland has closed schools and colleges, and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said today it was 'inappropriate that we continue as normal' and will recommend the cancellation of gatherings of more than 500 people to protect front-line services from Monday. She didn't supply any information as to why Monday and not tomorrow if the measure is so necessary, or why allowing gatherings at the weekend was appropriate, but common sense does seem to be in short supply.

As the great Homer Simpson once said "you can prove anything with facts" so why haven't the governments of the world provided some which justifies their extreme actions?

Or is that there aren't any and this hysteria is the result of a media frenzy which has caused the "leaders" of some countries to be scared of not being seen to "do something" whether or not it makes sense?

Political Mathematics

Many years of interacting with MPs, advisors and policy makers has made me very sceptical when any of them start to use numbers to illustrate a point: the latest of which is the London Mayoral hopeful Rory Stewart who claims in this week's Sunday Times to have slept in 50 different homes around London as part of his ‘Come Kip With Me’ scheme.

However, as he apparently only launched his campaign in the second week of February, a whole 27 days before Sunday, this means that Mr Stewart would have to have slept in almost two homes a night every night, never spending an evening at home, for his claim to be true.

He also says that “you learn an amazing amount because you’re spending 14 hours with somebody”, which means he wants us to believe that he's spent 700 hours in other people’s homes over the last 27 days.

Which is an admirable amount of effort when there are only 648 hours in 27 days ….