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    Re: A matter of simple arithmetic Archived Message

    Posted by Sinister Burt on March 8, 2023, 2:25 pm, in reply to "A matter of simple arithmetic"

    "But then, with no consideration of the economic impacts, the public health technocracy began shutting down entire economies in the face of a virus which was only really a threat to the very old and the very sick. "

    I know the main article's not really about this, but: By my simple arithmetic, there were about 40,000 under 60s who died in the uk from covid - 4,000 of whom had zero underlying conditions (though there are a huge amount of adults with underlying conditions of one sort or another, especially as we get older - i bet most of us here have one or two, so i don't like the idea of dismissing those people who would largely not have died without having covid - so 40,000 it is).

    But even if only old and sick people died, as we went through endlessly at the time, it was not possible or desirable to isolate those people effectively, especially when we had the relatively easy alternative of lockdowns to chose instead (the earlier the better - late initial lockdown was our/(boris') first mistake, costing ~40,000 lives according to some study i can't remember (though i think they blame whitty/vallance for that one)). Relatively easy except for a bunch of oligarchs who didn't think their workers should get to stay home, and so funded a load of covid denial/minimisation early on (obviously not saying all 'denial' was funded by oligarchs, but a bunch of it certainly/provably was).

    The question should be how many more would have died without the lockdowns or if we did 'shielding'?
    This study suggests that shielding, as recommended by the GBD people/oligarchs etc, would have led to more deaths:

    https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/new-modelling-shows-shielding-instead-of-lockdowns-would-have-led-to-tens-of-thousands-more-deaths/

    Quote from the above:
    "...The research concludes that while shielding may have protected the vulnerable in theory, it required extremely restrictive conditions that were impossible to achieve in practice. For example, because shielding in real populations would have been imperfect, infections in the lower-risk population would have leaked through to vulnerable people who were shielding. In addition, if lower-risk individuals reduced social contact to avoid infection it may have been impossible to achieve herd immunity, meaning a second wave of infections would have occurred after shielding had ended. Even if herd immunity was achieved, care homes would still have been at risk of local outbreaks because immunity would have been unevenly distributed in the population.

    To be effective, shielding would have required those who were at higher risk to not only be rapidly and accurately identified, but also to shield themselves for an indefinite period, rendering the strategy impractical to implement. The modelling also suggests that in even the most optimistic shielding scenario, critical care capacity in hospitals would have been exceeded at least ten-fold at the peak of the outbreak. This is not to mention the huge healthcare burden associated with the large number of cases of long covid that would result from mass infection. Waning immunity, and new immunity-evading variants would only have served to make a shielding-only strategy even more untenable.

    Although vaccines are now available and have been successfully rolled out in many countries, modelling studies such as this are critical to determine whether shielding would have been a viable strategy for dealing with COVID-19, or, indeed, the next pandemic. Many countries have poor vaccine coverage and so the choice between shielding and measures that are more restrictive at a population level is likely to remain for some time. In future, new variants may continue to emerge that are able to escape immunity, which may require a renewed choice between lockdowns and shielding.

    In summary, the new study exposes critical weaknesses of shielding (or focused protection): even with the most optimistic assumptions, tens of thousands of lower-risk individuals would have died and critical care capacity would have been rapidly exceeded. With more realistic assumptions, shielding would have failed to protect the most vulnerable, achieving little more protection than an unmitigated epidemic."

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