Raging Against the Machine is Rational, not Heartless

There was an article in yesterday's Times where one of the columnists tried to make a case that supporting governmental panic and the imposition of arbitrary authority by enforcing the current lockdown is a rational position.

Melanie Phillips lauds the Prime Minister's refusal to offer any serious prospect that the deprivation of personal liberty and economic strangulation may be nearing the end. She goes as far as to state that "Urged days ago to announce a speedy exit from lockdown, he has refused to be pushed. He'll set out his plan next week amid signs that restrictions will be lifted only slowly. This has taken courage."

I don't know anything about Ms Phillips's background or expertise, but in my opinion, this is ridiculous: we've not been supplied with any evidence to support claims that the lockdown policy has succeed. Even the government's official figures, now exaggerated by imprecise recording methods and the inclusion of categories not thought necessary a week or so ago, align more to my predictions from early March than those of the Imperial College model.

The much-vaunted new intensive care hospitals haven't been needed - 100 patients treated in total at the London Nightingale when there are 4000 beds! - and nor in my opinion will they be. Any assertions that this is because of the lockdown doesn't have any obvious basis. Just because B follows A doesn't mean that B caused A. It doesn't take "courage" for a largely pointless policy to have its outcome smoothly misrepresented as a success, courage would be the admission that the draconian restrictions on our civil liberties are an error.

The case against the PM's panic policy is not some arbitrary transient choice between compassion and money/freedom, or the worry that governments given or allowed the powers ours now has have always been reluctant to part with them. Melanie Phillips doesn't appear to care: "Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there's no acknowledgment of Johnson's complex balancing act. For such people, lockdown must end immediately. Some of them claim, moreover, that there never was any need for it in the first place. The virus, they say (with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts) poses no serious threat because it only kills relatively few old people or those who would have died this year anyway." and adds that "A dismaying number of these "economy-firsters" have seized on certain statistical studies to claim that the virus death rate is lower than had been forecast and therefore Covid-19 is not so dangerous after all."

Well I'm most definitely not an "economy-firster", and would like to think that I'm compassionate, sensitive and understanding (although my wife may disagree!), but you don't need statistical studies to know that the forecasts on which the Panic Policy was based were flawed: the empty Nightingale Hospitals show that.

The question is simply whether the government’s actions have caused the death rate to fall to "manageable levels", or whether they haven't, despite Ms Phillips assertion that "it's only because of the lockdown that it's under control". At the moment, without any evidence whatsoever to back that claim up, the jury is still very much out on that one.

Ms Phillips adds: "But all these statistical calculations are suspect because we still don't know how many have been  infected, nor how many have died." Well, it is true that we won't really know how many have died until the outbreak is over, but even then it will be almost impossible as there is no rigour to the way deaths are attributed to Covid-19: They appear to be have been simultaneously over-estimated (in general) and under-estimated (in care homes).

I've got no doubt that there are heartless individuals "with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts", it is very, very wrong to suggest that they are the only people who oppose the PM's policy.
Some of us are not materialist. We simply analysed the data we had available and came to a very different conclusion, and we've yet to be proven wrong.

Nobody I know, and nobody any of them knows, has had, let alone died from Covid-19, which strongly suggests that the Lockdown Panic Measures are an unnecessary danger to the long-term life and health of the British public. We are going to end up living in a country which will not be able to sustain the health and welfare services we currently take for granted and which won't be able to afford the living standards which sustain health.

And all in response to a problem which even the government's chief advisor knew was never the size he'd claimed it to be, otherwise he'd have kept to his own social distancing values wouldn't he?