Why are we not thinking rationally?

Writing in these pages in mid-December, I asked various questions that have yet to be answered.  Correlation does not imply causation, but even if it did, can people explain this enthusiasm for brutal draconian restrictions on our existence that keep getting imposed on us?

“But lockdowns work”. Except that there is no evidence of this once a virus is endemic within a population.  We have seasonal increases in mortality when our normal operating envelope changes – e.g. during a heatwave in the summer, or a very cold period in the winter.  Forget causation, the stringency of restrictions does not seem even to have correlated with ‘success’ in tackling Covid-19 outbreaks.

We have now completed the whole of 2020.  There is excess mortality associated with the Covid-19 epidemic for a few weeks around April.  There were heatwave-associated deaths in August, and apart from that the rest of 2020 was relatively uneventful from the actuaries’ point of view.

But there was – as every year – a steady increase in mortality associated with the change in the seasons.  This is not unexpected.  And – like every year – there is a peak in hospital admissions for respiratory disease.  Why is this inducing blind panic this year?  Clearly, the seasonal uptick is coming off the back of an NHS exhausted by the total, unmitigated shambles of attempting to track, trace and isolate a virus that is endemic in the country. Clearly things might have been different if we had closed airspace in February… but we now know that it was endemic in Italy throughout 2019, so was likely present everywhere else in Europe (we just didn’t test for it then).

I wish the ‘lockdown works’ narrative had been fully debunked from the start – the net harms are clearly terrible, and each time we have introduced them the feared ‘exponential growth’ had already slowed of its own accord.  Schools should never have been closed, and we should not be doing this again – asymptomatic transmission does not seem to be the ‘thing’ it was feared to be.  This is corroborated by a November 2020 study that considers “years of life potentially lost under differing conditions of school closure,” and concludes that schools should remain open.

I wish the country had not obsessed with ‘cases’ of Covid-19 as we have done – we know that the family of coronaviruses are endemic, and that they mutate over time, becoming more harmless as they do.  For all the increase in positive tests for SARS-CoV2, there is no denying that the baseline mortality rates from respiratory disease were very unusually below average for the summer months.

I wish mask mandates had not been introduced as a knee-jerk reaction. The ‘about turn’ was imposed with no due consideration of the possible harms, but we know that these are terrible.  None of the so-called evidence in favour was in any way conclusive, and the increase in seasonal infections is likely to blow this evidence further out of the water.  We do know that potentially they could make transmission worse and certainly have bad side effects, as outlined here.  They are very nasty for children, as outlined in this recent pre-print following a study of 25,000 children in Germany.  Mandating masks in schools is essentially child cruelty.

And I am afraid I do not buy the ‘vaccine saviour’ narrative either.  Usual disclaimer: I am “pro-vaxx”, and I am indirectly linked to some companies that are working on cancer and Covid vaccines.  But how is a vaccine that was (1) tested on under 75s, (2) does not necessarily cover all the current variants and (3) will not be meaningfully rolled out until the spring (i.e. the end of the season) make such a massive difference? Hopefully it will make a difference, but it may well be that it does not.

It seems that people are unable to look at a complicated situation and think rationally about it.  We know that in 2020 we caused more harm with some of the actions we took as a nation.  We know that lockdowns cause net harm, and that the impact is more severe on the poor, the weak, the downtrodden, the vulnerable.  But the ‘healthy wealthy’ don’t see the harm in a few extra weeks or months hidden behind the sofa.

And all this is before we consider whether we have the checks and balances in place to stop a nefarious regime repeating the exercise in future with real intent, and whether we want to live in a police state that crushes rational dissent.

I wish I had a more positive message.  But we need to wake up and change course before we compound our problems with of a continuation of the current failed strategy.  We need to isolate uncritical thinking, not healthy individuals who can contribute to the rebuilding efforts.

Dr Alex Starling is an advisor to and non-executive director of various early-stage technology companies.