The raw numbers are available from the Office of National Statistics for all to see. The epidemic peaked in mid-April 2020. For the 11 weeks up to the 3rd of July 2020 (the last date for which numbers are available), the number of deaths per week was falling week-on-week. For weeks 25, 26 and 27 the number of deaths (from all causes) in England and Wales was slightly below the 5-year average.
While it's not an all-clear for people who have one or more of the co-morbidity factors, for the vast majority of healthy people, it's time to chuck the lockdown and get back to work, school and Uni. If you're over 65, obese, and have type-2 diabetes, by all means, stay at home and do your shopping online. Likewise, if you're immunocompromised or have severe lung complications, you should be isolating yourself.
The purpose of the lockdown was "to flatten the curve so that the NHS was not overwhelmed" and that goal was achieved. Now what we are seeing is that the continuation of lockdowns everywhere is causing more harm than it is preventing. We're beyond the stage that there is anything to be gained by keeping people in a state resembling house arrest, and every day that businesses are shut and people are not at work, at school or at Uni is compounding the harm to all of us.
Worldwide, lockdowns are now causing more deaths than they are preventing. For the UK, and other rich countries, the long-term cost of shuttering everything will soon be seen. The number of people who are unemployed will dramatically increase. People will be unable to pay their rent and will need substantial support to not end up homeless and due to the lingering effects of years of austerity, inevitably, many will be made homeless. The number of people using food banks will rise substantially. And then there's the long-term psychological damage that isolation has caused. The mental health and social care capability in the UK has been severely eroded by years of austerity. You have to wait many weeks just to get a call back from a mental health person, let alone substantial help. Anyone in the midst of an actual crisis has virtually no hope of getting help. A large number of new cases of PTSD and depression will only compound the problem.
For poor countries, forcing people who live hand-to-mouth to stay at home is a death sentence. Denied the right to earn money, they are unable to buy food. Oxfam has stated that the number of people facing starvation is set to rise sharply. Across Africa, the effects of global lockdown are already noticable. People are now dying as a consequence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but not because they were infected by the virus. The consequential effects of the whole world following the recommendations of the WHO and shutting businesses, schools and transport logistics will most certainly kill millions of people. Unless, of course, there's a huge effort to distribute food to those in need, and seriously, don't hold your breath on that. The rich countries that normally would be able to chip in and help will be overwhelmed by the needs of their own citizens.
So, why has this pandemic been treated differently from every other pandemic this century and in the last century? Never before have all the healthy people been quarantined like they have in 2020.
We may have collectively "saved" the lives of 250 000 people in the UK. That means that, by employing the most costly and extreme measures possible, perhaps that number of people will live for up to another 6 years before they die. Of course, that assumes the most extreme end of the estimates from the Imperial College pandemic expert who has over-estimated every pandemic this century by orders of magnitude, Neil Ferguson, are accurate. None of his forecasts has been even close, and it's quite unlikely that this one is any different. People forget that there have been pandemics before. The "Hong Kong" flu of 1968 to 1971 killed an estimated 80 000 people in the UK. Was that considered a reason to destroy the livelihood of millions of people and potentially doom over a billion people to death by starvation? No it was not. Is SARS-CoV-2 the "Doomsday Virus" that virologists fear? The one that will have the transmissability of the common cold and the case-fatality rate of Ebola? No, it's not. It is not even as bad as the Hong Kong flu, and it's certainly not as bad as the 1918 H1N1 flu that killed somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people. It's a real virus and must be taken seriously, but not at the cost of killing millions, or even over a billion people who have not even been infected with this novel virus because we've all been stupid enough to believe that the end of the world was nigh.
