Is this the age of hysteria?
We’ve all seen them; the dire economic warnings of apocalypse and destruction. Nothing will be the same, millions jobless, World War 2 sized debt and destitution. The hysteria even got so bad at one point that some UK newspapers were warning of another Great Depression.
The now famous Imperial College London model spearheaded by (somewhat unfairly it may seem) disgraced Professor Neil Ferguson predicted that without intervention the UK could see over 500,000 deaths within months.
The WHO warned that it was imperative to enact extremely strict and historically unprecedented lockdowns on the world’s population in order to stop the spread of Covid-19 and potentially millions of deaths, economic destruction and the possible collapse of society as we know it.
On the flip side of this were the patently dangerous takes from populist world leaders like Donald Trump, Joao Bolsonaro and, to some extent, Boris Johnson who at various points described the virus as nothing more than a little flu, or like a cold.
The UK, infamously, declared that it was looking to pursue some kind of ‘herd immunity’ policy where the ultimate goal was to slow the spread of the virus rather than try and crush the spread like countries such as China and Italy.
Bolsonaro still appears to be denying that an issue exists, and Trump appears to now be claiming that he always knew it was serious, despite copious video evidence to the contrary. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Trump said. An eerie similarity to a line from Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 seemed to hang in the air: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
In contrast to the extremes, Sweden took a different approach, deciding not to lockdown their society but instead providing a series of instructions and government advice that they expected people to follow, taking their own personal responsibility to protect others. The jury is most certainly out on whether that will ultimately be successful, but bars, schools and restaurants remain open but under social distancing rules.
In truth, nobody will really have a definitive answer of who had the right approach until probably later next year. Discussions about international comparisons actually are premature for now, we don’t know who’s going to have had the best policy for some time.
Lockdown
The UK’s initial policy of ‘herd immunity’ does, on the surface look almost Darwinian, and when that is compared to the approach that almost every other European country was taking it also seemed quite irresponsible.
Sweden, however, have to some extent followed that approach and managed to keep their fatalities fairly low. But what changed in the UK?
Reporting in the UK has it that the modelling produced by Professor Neil Ferguson was released days before lockdown was announced and left the government in a blind panic and convinced them to initiate lockdown almost immediately after, in late March, some weeks after the horrific scenes in Lombardy and Spain.
Comparative, but not identical, lockdowns occurred all across Europe, in the USA and in other parts of the world too. But something curious seemed to be happening, in that the increase of infections that was supposedly ‘exponential’ wasn’t actually exponential, and was tracking a remarkably similar curve all over the world.
Economic meltdown
Back to predictions of economic disaster then, and where we feel these foretellings landed on the accuracy scale.
There’s an irritating and unshakeable feeling that the pandemic followed a similar path to Brexit, Trump, Corbyn and UK politics in general in falling slap bang in the middle of a culture war.
Those on the left of politics appeared to be calling, in varying degrees of seriousness, for complete lockdown until either a vaccine arrived or the virus was eradicated regardless of economic cost. On the flip side, the pages of The Spectator, Spiked, and The Telegraph were filled with people declaring the virus nothing more than a cold, and that lockdown was a disgraceful unforgivable curtailing of our liberal freedoms.
Daniel Hannan, one of the chief architects of Brexit, even Tweeted “The coronavirus isn’t going to kill you. It really isn’t”
It all lacked nuance, and pandered to hysteria on both sides. As usual the correct answer probably lay somewhere in the middle of all this, and required a balanced and thoughtful debate that never materialised.
Having said that, whilst the economy has faced some serious challenges, it doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere as bad as even optimistic forecasts said it would.
As The Atlantic put it, “In an age punctuated with almost biblical chaos—plague, brutality, and surreal images of the president posing with a holy book he fumbles like a strange cut of meat—there has been one queasy and bizarre constant: “... and stocks rose.”
Despite huge losses on the S&P 500, the Dow and The FTSE in February and March, they have now largely recovered and in many respects are growing faster than at almost any other time on record.
Bloomberg published an article in a tone of bafflement at the fact that the UK economy appeared to be recovering whilst in the midst of a pandemic, and The Bank of England’s head economist came out to revise dire predictions to state that the UK recession wouldn’t be as bad as feared.
All that can be put down to a confidence interval or a margin of error, but given that America shed a historically unprecedented 20 million jobs in April, it’s a little harder to explain just how the US managed to add 2.5 million jobs back into their economy in May.
Now, it would be absolutely premature to declare the recovery well and truly on, and probably wrong too. Having said that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to explain away what is, realistically, a pretty historic recovery in some senses.
The questions in April appeared to be ‘how bad could this get?’, not just for the leisure and tourism industry, but also pubs, bars and hospitality as well as other industries. Another question being asked was, despite probably high demand after lockdown, just how many businesses will survive?
But if the astonishing figures from the housing market are anything to go by, then they may not need to worry. Government support from the treasury has been almost biblical in its scope and depth, and for a Tory government that really should have us all sat up in interest.
How much credit goes to the treasury, the chancellor and ultimately the Prime Minister will have to wait, but for all intents and purposes right now, there’s some quite strong indicators that we might be about to see the greatest economic recovery and growth in history, it might just look a little different.
Hysteria
Ok, so is this the age of hysteria? In some senses it’s understandable, the 2010’s were some of the most disruptive and world-changing years in our recent history so it’s probably fair to allow a generation of Millennials some slack when they’ve already lived through two recessions, a historic political upheaval and now a global pandemic, but something feels off.
Truthfully, the government were probably right to bring in a lockdown to slow the spread, and at the time with limited information they had to act quickly to save lives.
But now? Well things are now looking a little more settled.
To name but a few developments, Nobel Prize winning scientist Karl Friston has said that he believes that up to 80% of people have a cross immunity from other coronaviruses, two top Italian doctors have said they believe that Covid-19 has weakened so significantly they believe it no longer clinically exists in Italy, a study by the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore found that nine of 18 patients they studied showed an immune reaction in their T cells to the virus, in spite of never having been exposed to the virus and The ONS have posted their own data showing that infection rates have now dropped to just 0.1% of the UK population.
It’s difficult right now to say that the government got everything wrong. There have been mistakes, and some almost criminal instances of rank incompetence which will be discovered in more detail once the dust has settled, but this should be balanced with the fact that decisions needed to be made that affected the lives of millions of people on the back of an unknown virus that had only appeared weeks earlier.
One question rankles, however, are we going to discover in time that a lockdown that has cost global economies billions, potentially huge mental health issues and untold suffering, was based on flawed science?
We’ll finish with some facts. The Imperial Model that predicted half a million deaths, initiating lockdown, was described as “totally unreliable” by David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on".
Previous models built by the same team predicted that up to 200 million people could be killed from bird flu. 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.
Ferguson’s team predicted a case fatality rate for swine flu was most likely 0.4%, leading the government to assume a worst case scenario of 65,000 deaths. The final fatality rate was 457 deaths and a fatality rate of 0.026%.
In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would die from exposure to BSE (Mad Cow Disease), and that could rise to 150,000 if there was a sheep epidemic. The final death toll was 177 deaths.
The Imperial Model assumed an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for COVID-19 of 0.9, whilst the WHO initially estimated mortality rates at 3.2%, whilst more recent studies by Stanford have it at 0.02% and 0.4%. It may not look a huge difference, but extrapolate 0.5% or even 2.7% across a global population of 7 billion people.
Again, nobody is going to really know who was right for some time, but with emerging science casting huge doubts over initial assumptions, we might be about to be on the cusp of one of the worst mistakes the world has ever made.
