Covid: time to admit defeat?

By Pete North - October 14, 2020

If you catch anyone saying we should “follow the science” then you’re looking at either an oaf or a con artist. What we have here is two conflicting philosophies on public health. One is high risk, high immediate mortality, the other is lower risk with greater economic impact – and neither offers us any certainty or guarantees. We have no data to support either approach particularly since an advanced civilisation such as our has never faced anything like this. Everything we’re doing is a best guess based on flawed data.

This is when scientific expertise largely becomes conflicting noise to the point of uselessness. I’m not remotely interested in their theories. I prefer to stick to what we do know – and that’s when you have to go right back to basics.

For starters, we know lockdowns have an effect. If you take the public out of the equation then you have a reduced infection pool. But that is not sustainable in the long term so before you deploy a lockdown you have to ask if your reasons for doing it are valid. What measures are taken in conjunction with it? If you have a rapid means of detecting and containing fresh outbreaks then you can ease lockdown measures.

We have a tried and tested means to do this. Test, trace and isolate (TTI). Local authorities employing traditional techniques are good at this. Central governments with apps and databases are not. So unless the government is willing to turn test and trace over to local authorities, which thus far it isn’t, it becomes a binary matter. Either you lock everyone down in perpetuity until a vaccine appears, or you simply give up the ghost on the assumption that even the most lethal virus imaginable couldn’t be more murderous than an incompetent government over the longer term.

Personally, I would like for us to get this right with local TTI in conjunction with more localised lockdowns where absolutely necessary, and wherever possible divert the sick from mainstream NHS operations. Not easy, but possible. If, however, we are going to fanny about with gadgets while Tories farm out contracts to their mates while they flush our jobs down the toilet, resulting in a far greater public health crisis in the long run, then we might as well take our chances.

I don’t like the idea at all. There are no data that supports the herd immunity theory and “long Covid” looks like a public health disaster in the making. But it now comes down to an even simpler political question. How long are you prepared to wait for a corrupt and inept Conservative party to get its act together? If they haven’t worked out the basics after seven months, will they ever? If we’re still in the same boat by Christmas then we might as well give it up as a bad job.