Cost of Freedom

The Prime Minister said when Sue Gray’s report was released on Wednesday that the hundreds of billions spent on dealing with the pandemic had left the UK in a "very difficult fiscal position", or to put it another way, our cost of living crisis is actually a £370 billion cost of lockdown crisis. 

I'm not writing this with the benefit of hindsight, as I always thought lockdowns achieved nothing, but Sue Gray's report tells us that Boris, Party Marty Reynolds and the rest of the Downing Street Frat boys clearly didn't believe in them either.

And they appear to have got away with everything!

They have got away with trashing our economy, imposing lockdowns and even breaking those oh-so-important lockdowns on multiple occasions because large numbers of people still believe that lockdowns were a good, some sort of necessary evil.  

The general public will not accept otherwise because they don’t want to believe what is (and in my opinion always was) something very obvious: we were subjected to three absolutely pointless lockdowns. 

That the government didn’t believe in these rules is evidenced by the fact that while you were having your cancer treatment cancelled or your small business closed down again, Downing Street was partying to the extent that at one point there were so many empties the bin was overflowing. 

The truth is that the public don't want to believe that all the pain was for nothing. It would be embarrassing for them to contemplate the thought that they'd collaborated with their own needless oppression, which as John Tierney in City Journal says, "Adults meekly surrendered their most basic liberties, cheered on leaders who devastated the economy and imposed two years of cruel and unnecessary deprivations on their children. They don’t want to admit that these sacrifices were in vain".

The Sue Gray report also tells us what many of us have known for many years: we already knew: Boris Johnson lacks discipline, character, maturity, integrity and any sense of responsibility.

While everybody's local pub was closed, the Downing Street gang were having "work events" which consisted of drinking in the afternoon, getting into fights, vomiting, spilling red wine, leaving at 2am and were responsible for "multiple examples of lack of respect and poor treatment of cleaning and security staff".

Under Johnson’s premiership, the "work force" under him have trashed the office of the government, trashed the economy with lockdown and they have trashed the country. 

So if you think that our political elite are laughing at you, it is because they are laughing at you. 

If you feel they've "got away with it", it is because they have got away with it, and if, like me, you think that maybe you shouldn’t have gone along with the masochistic lockdowns, then it’s because you shouldn’t have gone along with them. 

Lockdown – the joke is on us.  

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?

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.

Economics with the Truth

I rarely go anywhere first class - way too expensive - but I had a voucher for the station lounge which I used this morning prior to my journey down to London.

Anyway, there are free copies of the Financial Times along with the coffee and the croissants so for what is probably only the second or third time in my life, I picked one up (the FT, not a beverage or pastry!) and leafed through it.

In it is an article which even my decades-old Economics A level education can understand as utterly ludicrous.

The Economics Editor Chris Giles complains that the British economy has actually been doing too well since the referendum. Yep, the UK has been over-performing.

So not only is the paper apparently mystified by the country not voting as we were told to by the government back in 2016, it also cannot understand why the markets haven’t done what George Osbornes and other "financial experts" predicted either.

Giles - presumably someone with an Economics education above my A level? - states that “relatively benign economics has emboldened politicians to harden their Brexit demands and refuse to compromise” and follows that with “it is now too late for markets or the UK economy to exercise much discipline on Britain’s politics before the scheduled exit date of March 29”.  He then goes on to state that since the referendum “economic performance has been tolerable while the employment rate has reached record levels.”

Or in other words: it’s too late now for a Project Fear's Deal-free Brexit financial and economic Armageddon to happen, and far from our performance being "tolerable" one only has to flick through four pages of the very same paper to find some GDP Growth figures which list the UK as currently the fastest-growing European country in the G7 while Italy and Germany slide towards recession....