We're pointing out that in many places the cure is indeed worse so far. A lot worse.
The US obviously hasn't
applied the cure, or you wouldn't have over 60,000 dead - and counting. You've had late and half-arsed responses put in piecemeal and ad hoc in random places across the country. If you ran your military like that you'd spend two decades fighting goatherds and still have to sue for peace with them. Oh wait...
Let's look at lives lost due to the lockdown vs those lost due to the virus. Lives vs the economy and freedoms and all that are arguable; but if your cure kills more people than it saves, or less, that's not really arguable.
In Australia we got onto it early on, and things were more or less co-ordinated. With the benefit of hindsight we can see what helped and what didn't - basically, closing the borders, quarantining new arrivals and testing and tracing ensured that daily new cases would decline; the rest of the restrictions didn't do much. But that's because we got onto it early - you can test and trace people after 100 cases, if you try it after 10,000 cases, by the time you get to the 10,000th one you've got another 50,000 cases.
If you get onto it later, then a lockdown may be necessary. But it has to be co-ordinated across the country.
Nonetheless, the lockdown has costs. I'm working on an article for this. We get,
- less road deaths
- less pollution deaths
- more suicides and overdoses as goes with unemployment
- more deaths from cancer and heart disease as people are reluctant to visit medical facilities for fear of infection, and health authorities put off non-urgent scans etc
We've had basically 6 weeks of lockdown so far, and have 10% unemployment (up from 5.1%). This will have avoided 105 road and pollution deaths, and caused 597 other deaths, for a net increase of 491 deaths. Given our current mortality rate for the virus, this would be equivalent to 35,760 cases.
If we go to 3 months of lockdown - as seems to be the minimum talked about - we'll hit 15% unemployment. This will save 210 lives, and take 1,210 lives, for a net increase of 1,000 deaths, which we would expect from the virus if we had 72,742 infections.
Should we go for 6 months of lockdown (our state Premier's emergency powers extend till September 30th, and the federal government handouts end then, too), we would see 20% unemployment on most models. This would avoid 420 road and pollution deaths, and cause 2,017 other deaths, for a net increase of 1,597 deaths, equivalent to 116,171 infections.
In fact we have had, at the most recent figures from yesterday, 93 virus deaths from a total of 6,767 infections. Something between the last two scenarios seems most likely, which is to say that the lockdown will cause 1,200 or so extra deaths. And so if all that has avoided around 100,000 infections in Australia, we're overall better off. Certainly, closing the borders and quarantining early on gave us most of our infection reduction; arguably a tough lockdown cemented it. But what we're doing now is mostly pointless.
This modelling does not hold for a country which moves late and piecemeal. Here in Australia we are looking at virus deaths OR other deaths. In places like the UK with overwhelmed health systems they are looking at virus deaths AND other deaths. It's not really much use trying to slow down
after you hit the brick wall.