The other day in a remote car park on Ashdown Forest I was sitting on a box two metres away from my workmate drinking a beer after work. A guy wandered up spouting a load of tosh about CoVid-19 all being a hoax and the lock-down as being unnecessary (I believe he thought he might have found some kindred spirits). Frankly we were pleased to see the back of him.
Anyway it turns out that in one thing he may well have been kinda right. According to Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford the progress of the disease, outside of a few specialist settings, e.g. care homes, is independent of the lock-down measures.
Her argument in a nutshell is that back in March the clearly seen exponential rise in mortality could be explained by a range of scenarios between two extremes. At one extreme the disease has a high mortality rate and, without social distancing, lock-downs, etc. would claim hundreds of thousands of lives. At the other extreme the mortality was much lower, the disease had arrived on these shores about a month earlier, and many fewer people would ultimately die, whatever the measures. Importantly in both cases and all in between the same mortality curve would have been predicted using the
SIR* epidemic differential equation model.
So just in case the mortality rate was at the higher end of the spectrum the lock down was justified.
Since then evidence has emerged from numerous European countries with a broad range of different lock-down strategies, including none at all, which shows that the mortality curves follow "like clockwork" that of the model. The various lock-downs made no significant difference outside of shielding the most vulnerable.
So the upshot of this is that providing we shield our most vulnerable until scientific discoveries permit some kind of medical treatment of the disease the lock-down probably has little effect on anything by now. So we might as well get ourselves up and running again!
If you haven't seen it before
this truly excellent 30 minute interview is I feel well worth the investment in your time.
Chris
*Susceptible, Infected, Recovered