‘To save a life’ we must end lockdown

By Hector DrummondCovid-19, Government, Health, Health fascism

I was going to add, in regards to my ‘Is Anything Worth Doing to Save a Life‘ post, that there is no doubt now that the lockdown is causing deaths. Objectors may say that it’s not causing many deaths, but it’s undoubtedly causing some. I suspect it’s causing a lot, but it’s almost inconceivable that it’s not causing at least some, given the gargantuan drops in A&E visits, the cancelled cancer treatments, the increased number of heart attack deaths that ambulance workers are getting to too late, the worried appeals by medical chiefs for people to start using medical services again, etc.

Now if, anything is worth doing if it saves at least one life, then we have to end the lockdown, because that will save some lives. Thus this stupid rule leads us into contradiction. To save a life we must both enforce the lockdown, and end it. This is basically the impossible position the precautionary principle puts us in, and the ‘better safe than sorry’ view as well. These are fundamentally irrational principles, and they lead to incoherence.

It would be more rational to say something like ‘Lockdown prevents more deaths than it will cause’. I don’t agree with that (because I think the lockdown is hardly saving anyone, and also because we have to take account of more than just deaths vs deaths, there are numerous other dimensions to this), but at least it’s a more grown-up position. It does seem to be more like the sort of view that the lockdown scientists have in mind. But they’ll never say anything like this explicitly, and nor will the government, and nor will most of the media, because they don’t want to even put the idea in people’s heads that the lockdown is causing deaths. But most likely it is. And if you say, ‘Where’s your hard evidence’, I’ll say in response, ‘Where’s your hard evidence that the lockdown is helping?’

Update: When I talk about the ‘Better safe than sorry’ principle, I don’t mean what your Mum tells you when she tells you to take an umbrella when you go out. That’s fine. I mean when it becomes the basis of public policy and involves enormous spending and intrusions into people’s private lives, all over something improbable.

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33 thoughts on “‘To save a life’ we must end lockdown”

  1. I’ve seen somewhere that the no of diagnosed cancer cases is 25% of expected numbers and no one is suggesting there’s less actual cancers occurring due to the lockdown.
    Given the significance of early diagnosis and treatment these missed diagnosis are going to cost lives, I’m sure someone has a model somewhere that can predict the higher deaths
    There’s a figure of every 2 mins someone is diagnosed with cancer in UK so that’s over 16,000 people a month at a higher risk of death

  2. Hector

    I am sure that your summary of this situation is correct. There has been a total loss of perspective with regard to normal deaths due to Influenza Like Illnesses (ILI).

    What worries me (and perhaps it shouldn’t?) is that all three of those we see in the MSM as our prime advisors have a connection to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the vaccine GAVI org.

    With Neil Ferguson and Dr. Whitty it is easy to verify with a Google search, but I have seen two people on the web suggesting that Patrick Vallance is to join the BMGF board. I don’t know.

    It just makes me uneasy. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. Perhaps Dellers could take a view.

  3. While “we should do anything to save a life” is a dumb argument and won’t apply to by situation where all of your available choices lead to people dying, I think there’s something dodgy about this:

    “it’s almost inconceivable that it’s [where ‘it’ seems to refer to the lockdown itself] not causing at least some, given the gargantuan drops in A&E visits, the cancelled cancer treatments, the increased number of heart attack deaths that ambulance workers are getting to too late, the worried appeals by medical chiefs for people to start using medical services again, etc.”

    If the ‘it’ referred to people’s reaction to COVID as a whole then I think that paragraph would be fine. But making ‘it’ specifically the legal restrictions of the lockdown, I’m not sure I can buy that. The way the lockdown has been implemented in the UK, it certainly doesn’t include any rule like “thou shalt not call an ambulance if thou suspecteth a heart attack” nor “thou shalt not offer thy patients their cancer screening”. It’s always been very clear that medical care has been an exception to the restrictions. I have no problem that the lockdown will result in deaths from suicide or domestic violence that would otherwise not have occurred, and saved lives from reduced traffic and industrial accidents too, but I think you’re right to identify the medical stuff as where most of the action is. And I’m not convinced that’s as easy to link directly to the lockdown nor would lifting the lockdown sort out those problems.

    Even before the lockdown was announced, patients were starting to avoid hospital because of fear that they could contract the disease there. That was not an unreasonable belief though the problem is determining how that risk weighed against the health benefits of attendance, which not all patients seem likely to have been able to calculate for themselves (I’m sure there were plenty where there was an order of magnitude better reason to attend than not, who nevertheless thought the risk wasn’t worth taking – I accept the argument that lockdown increased fear and may have contributed to skewing risk perceptions further, but even before the lockdown there was considerable alarm so this can’t all be laid at lockdown’s door).

    Moreover the cancellation of elective surgery and the reconfiguration of operating theatres as COVID wards was not part of the lockdown even if they occurred at similar times, nor will ending all restrictions about people going to work magically allow these operating theatres to resume their original function. If anything ending all restrictions now seems likely to prolong the period for which elective surgery is unavailable, because of both the increased demand on health services (if you’ve got only so much capacity available and now there’s increased demand for COVID then something has got to go somewhere) and the fact that without suppression, hospitals will remain high-risk places for COVID (which both puts off patients from attending, and renders things like chemotherapy or organ transplant unattractively dangerous for doctors to perform). I get the impression you might be using the phrase “ending the lockdown” as shorthand for something more like “getting back to life as near to normal as possible” rather than the narrower “end the legal restrictions on moving and meeting” but even in that wider sense it doesn’t seem possible for healthcare provision to just go back to normal, at least in the short term.

    https://unherd.com/thepost/imperials-prof-neil-ferguson-responds-to-the-swedish-critique/

    If you haven’t seen it yet, the UnHerd interview with Neil Ferguson was interesting, whether you like him or loathe him. He was quite upfront that he believed the lockdown had negative health consequences but he disagreed with the premise of “end the lockdown so that hospitals can get back to normal” for what seem to me to be clear and logical reasons. Apparently there should be some new research out soon from his group that looks at what longer term restrictions might replace the lockdown. The lockdown itself clearly isn’t going to go on forever but what replaces it will no doubt have many of the same issues and debates.

  4. The lockdown is likely to cause early deaths because of the economic damage and possible “austerity” we’ll be facing again. I don’t know if those in the media who were complaining about the effects of austerity last time have woken up to this yet.

  5. People are avoiding hospital for serious conditions because of the panic engendered by the government and the scientific advisors, who instead of being calm and putting this into perspective have stoked the fires of hysteria by having a lockdown.

    Sure people would have been worried about going into hospital even without a lockdown, but to nowhere near the same extent as they are now doing since the lockdown. A&E admissions in England went from 160k per week to 60k per week in week 14.

  6. Well it wasn’t austerity was it? It was simply spending money stolen from the future slightly less quickly.

  7. I didn’t consider it to be real austerity (at least for most people), hence the scare quotes. But many in the media called it that.

  9. I think there’s already a degree of regret at the top that they didn’t communicate more clearly “don’t hesitate to seek urgent medical help”. That failure to communicate has, with little doubt, cost lives. I still don’t think they’re getting it across well enough.

    Picking apart what’s due to the lockdown and what isn’t is tricky though. Not everyone who turned up to A+E historically really had an emergency and 111 usage is up, though I don’t know how much of that is people who should have used 111 in the first place now switching to a more appropriate method in place of attending A+E. Admissions, as opposed to attendance, figures are complicated by the fact some people are marginal for whether they would benefit from admission, and with COVID on the wards (and potentially pressure to keep beds free) it may well be that many people who last year would have been admitted were this year seen then sent home. The other problem is the correct counterfactual for “no lockdown” which isn’t “what happened last year” but “what would have happened this year if rates of COVID transmission had continued at a higher level”. In that scenario hospitals would have become increasingly dangerous places to visit and even if the effect wasn’t as immediate as the bringing in of lockdown restrictions, it seems a reasonable guess that panic over what was going on in overloaded hospitals would have ramped up and few potential patients would have wanted to enter what they saw in the news as a deathzone. Unfortunately there’s a high crossover between those who really do need to go to hospital and those who would be very vulnerable to COVID if they caught it there.

    Goodness knows if anyone will be able to unpick all these factors but it isn’t “obvious” that the reduced access to healthcare due to people being frightened specifically by the lockdown (not just who would have been frightened by the disease anyway) is greater than the reduced access in the no-lockdown situation due to deteriorating conditions in hospitals and greater fear of going near them. Writing as if the main cause of people failing to access appropriate healthcare at the moment is the lockdown, and removing lockdown right now will lead to non-COVID patients returning to hospitals, seems presumptuous to me. There will be deaths due to lockdown that are far easier and more persuasive to point the finger at with some degree of confidence.

    With or without lockdown, or whatever phased approach replaces it, I think we are going to see hospitals try to reconfigure the way they deliver services so that eg cancer screening can be done relatively safely. But there’ll still be patients worried about turning up for some time to come.

  12. Exactly so. The government’s statements and actions have had a devastating “chilling effect” on almost everything people used to say and do.

    MyBurningEars says that

    ‘The way the lockdown has been implemented in the UK, it certainly doesn’t include any rule like “thou shalt not call an ambulance if thou suspecteth a heart attack” nor “thou shalt not offer thy patients their cancer screening”‘.

    That may be strictly true in the literal sense, but many of us have not been hanging on every government pronouncement – especially in view of the profound doubt as to which of them are actually legally binding – and the overall effect of government actions and statements has been to put us all under a huge black cloud of fear, uncertainty and doubt. Which has long been known as a technique for inflicting paralysis, and compliance with any authority that seems to offer a way out.

  13. “Ferguson says that Sweden’s daily Covid-19 deaths are increasing…”

    In the immortal words of mandy Rice-Davies, “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”

    Nature knows of few forces so powerful as the desire of authorities to justify their actions.

  14. To avoid spending money stolen from the future it would be helpful if we all didn’t have to carry the dead camel known as “government”.

  15. Well, the lockdown continues. The “flatten the curve” narrative has surfed the second wave into “keep the curve flat”. Neil Ferguson and Piers Morgan still the most influential figures in the country, it seems.

  16. One might think that every government minister (and everyone else including local radio presenters and paid for advertisements) parroting the line ‘Help protect the NHS’ might just have been predicted to have the effect of making people feel less inclined to use the NHS, even for legitimate emergencies. Its not exactly surprising is it? You tell everyone repeatedly that they must behave in a certain way (ie the stay at home rules) in order to reduce the pressures on the NHS, its hardly surprising if as a consequence of those exhortations people also think ‘Oh I feel a bit iffy today, pain in my chest, its probably nothing, better not overburden the NHS with it’ is it?

  17. According the BBC:

    ‘But ending it too soon could lead to a second spike in cases and cause more deaths, “economic disaster” and restrictions being reintroduced, he [Boris Johnson] said.’

    To to avoid economic disaster that “could” happen we’ll continue to create an economic disaster that is happening right now. You couldn’t make this level of stupidity up.

  18. Could there be some long term benefits to the NHS from the reduction in usage? Putting the cancer, heart issues etc to one side, which is clearly a big issue, will the behaviour of many of using A&E as a GP surgery for minor ailments be ended post lockdown?

  19. It’s quite clear that hospitals have cancelled many screening and monitoring appointments. Warfarin monitoring is still open, but has been centralised, requiring extra transport. But several other appointments have been cancelled for elderly relatives, including cancer monitoring and vascular monitoring. The GP surgery is fenced off with a long coronavirus message encouraging the use of 111 (if you can get through) accompanied by “do not come to the surgery” instructions. Only if you listen carefully to the end do you get the idea that doctors will invite you for a proper consultation if they can’t manage your case by phone, and the opportunity to speak to the receptionist even to order repeat prescriptions or a phone consultation with a GP. Some will assume that their medication is simply no longer available. So I’m not sure that it’s correct to say that lockdown rules aren’t impacting proper health care.

    Leave aside the position of care homes, where it’s clear that there isn’t a well thought through general approach, and where many are now relying on skeleton staffing, so residents are simply not being found until it is too late to tackle their stroke or heart attack, and where the hospital may discharge an infected patient with little care for the consequences.

  20. The messaging and “mood music” point is a fair one and I think the government made a mistake in not making it clearer that people still need to seek medical help when appropriate. On the other hand, if people were dying in overloaded British hospitals in the same way as happened in Lombardy it’s naive to think the media would have stoked no fear or panic about that, and besides, even a government committed to no lockdown would face an overburdened health service and end up having to do some messaging about “don’t use health services for non-essential purposes” (which some people would misinterpret, as Jim said there’s a certain kind of chap who will cling to any excuse that validates “it’s probably nothing, no need to bother anyone with it”). If you think there shouldn’t have been a lockdown because of all the bad stuff that flows from a lockdown, you do still need to compare to a realistic counterfactual. Nobody being scared of hospitals, and hospitals returning to their full range of services, just isn’t one.

    And I did pick the second example about cancer services advisedly. Some health services are simply not being offered at the moment, not because of the lockdown but because of the pandemic itself. Ending the lockdown won’t bring them back. Refusal to enter a lockdown wouldn’t have saved them, or substantially aided the work being done on making them safe to provide and access. I think Hector’s original post is wrong to move from some of his examples of “look at all the stuff that’s ground to a halt and the health impact it will have” to “it’s the lockdown wot dun it, so end the lockdown”. It’s similar to when Greenies disingenuously tot up the casualties of Hurricane Katrina and the Australian bushfires to reach their “climate change kills” statistics. But it’s a waste as the central point of his argument about “doing anything to save a life” is obviously correct (it is a weak argument that barely deserves refutation but to be fair people seem to still be trotting it out, so a refutation isn’t totally unnecessary) and there are plenty of ways that the lockdown itself is clearly (even its proponents will admit) deeply harmful. His argument would have suffered no harm from focusing on them.

  21. My hospital had stopped all elective surgery and almost all outpatients work, and my GP had moved to telephone-only appointments (with suspected COVID cases told to use 111 instead, and in-person appointments only if deemed necessary as a result of the tele-appointment) well before the lockdown rules came in. These are all harmful restrictions on access to healthcare but would have happened lockdown or no lockdown. Getting these services up and running again will be challenging (some services have switched to smaller facilities which can only be accessed by people negative for COVID in the hope that this will render them safe for vulnerable people to use, for example, but there must be limits on how well that will scale) but I can’t see that work being easier in a counterfactual world where we never entered lockdown. The point about patients moving from hospital (where they would be at heightened risk of contracting COVID) so easily to care homes is an important but distinct one. Even one negative test result wouldn’t be convincing bearing in mind the rate of false negatives. I think in China patients were isolated in a kind of half-way house until they had tested negative multiple times before being sent back to anything like a care home. This is something the UK government really needs to examine carefully and urgently.

  23. That would require some modification of GP surgeries. At the moment GP/’Medical Centre’ are private businesses but only have one customer the NHS. So they are keener to promote whatever nonsense NHS/PHE wish to promote rather than provide what the patients really want.

  24. seems to me that we may have some definition issues, the govt response to the pandemic in general has been referred to as ‘the lockdown’ even though lockdown is a specific strategy within that response.
    Restricting access to healthcare may be a separate decision from the lockdown decision, but in the media and to the public there is not that level of distinction.

  27. @MBE

    The Gov and Media command bludgeoned into everyone is

    Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives

    Gov also ordering all over 70s not to leave home ever

    Then we see police shouting “Go Home, You’re Killing People” at those deemed ‘non-essential’

    Don’t pass the blame onto those brainwashed by Gov & Media Fear and Gov and Police orders

  30. That’s always how it is Rhoda, systems/organisations would always be perfect if it wasn’t for those bloody users/customers we had to deal with

  31. Good Lord! There is a “lockdownsceptics.org”! The peasants really are revolting.

    I would order the tee-shirt — except that the postman is not delivering parcels, and who wants to go to the Post Office to stand in a long line and deal with postal workers dressed like they are at a toxic spill?

    How long until the “independent” BBC starts running a daily count of the cumulative number of lives “saved” by the lockdown? They can probably get that number straight out of Fergie’s model.

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