Time to end the covid paranoia

The government’s measures to control the covid 19 virus have now been in place for almost six months. During that time the number of daily deaths, hospital admissions and patients in intensive care due to the virus have all fallen by 99% from their peak in mid April. Yet neither the government nor its scientific advisors in SAGE appear to have realised this, and the same can be said about alarmist media outlets such as the BBC and Guardian who are continuing to instil a sense of fear in the population. There is still far too much unfounded paranoia about a second wave in which, according to some official projections, the estimated number of people who will die from the virus in the coming winter could be twice as many as those who have so far succumbed to it.

As outlined in the previous blogpost below, the government have faced a problem more daunting than any since the end of the war. They have been criticised sometimes fairly, and sometimes unfairly, about their response. Positive achievements have been the construction of the Nightingale hospitals in record time, and the large scale manufacture of new ventilators. The original purpose of the initial lockdown was to ‘save the NHS’. This objective was achieved as the NHS was never in danger of being overwhelmed. The ‘eat out to help out’ scheme has been a huge success and the furlough measures have preserved millions of jobs for the duration.

Unfortunately, in all other respects the government’s response has been confused, paralysed by exaggerated fears about the effect of relaxing the restrictions against the virus. There has been a massive mission creep away from protecting the NHS to instead an attempt to suppress the virus, which appears to be impossible. Much emphasis and effort has been placed on the track and trace programme in which people with the virus are placed in quarantine for a couple of weeks. A huge increase in testing has been undertaken which has resulted in several local lockdowns. However, the number of people testing positive has been minute compared to the overall population, and almost all of them appear to be healthy since there has been no increase in hospital admissions in those areas. So this testing regime appears completely pointless as the pandemic is now almost over, and society is now largely protected by herd immunity.

All the evidence suggests that we have almost reached herd immunity throughout Britain. This was achieved initially by allowing the virus to spread unhindered during the January to late March period before lockdown. During lockdown the virus continued to spread albeit more slowly. In the UK the restrictions were more relaxed than some countries, and thus the virus could continue to spread, mostly through shops and supermarkets. As some of the restrictions were gradually lifted the number of deaths and hospital admissions still continued to fall and this has continued until the present time.

So it is now time to bring to an end all the restrictive measures currently in place so that we can all return to normality. The only thing that is preventing this is the alarmist fears of government advisors who are clearly not properly assessing the evidence, but instead remain in thrall to discredited theories that bear no resemblance to actual reality. The government has certainly not been following the science, since for the most part the scientists the government has come to depend on have been in just as much ignorance about the nature of the virus as the rest of us. It is now time for the government to declare that the pandemic has ended, and so bring the curtain down on the covid paranoia which is bankrupting the country.