Is the lockdown necessary?

I'm going to start with a spoiler alert, if only to save you scrolling to the last paragraph.  Yes, I fully believe the lockdown is necessary and, if I'm honest, started way too late.  My last week in work before the lockdown I was identifying students clearly unwell, and others that openly were stating that members of their household were self isolating because of displaying symptoms.  I sent a fair few students off campus and hopefully home during the week.  At least two such unwell students asked me to take assignments off them before they left - er, no chance.

I'd complained the week before to management about being asked to teach in classrooms with half the students clearly unwell - there wasn't any government advice in place at that time but common sense and a brief scrutiny of the world news was sufficient evidence to me that we shouldn't be cramming twenty plus students into rooms designed for sixteen with the corona virus spreading so quickly.

Social distancing isn't a problem for my wife and I - I've been practising it for decades anyway and my wife has been preparing for Armageddon all our married life so we really didn't need to worry about the idiots panic buying.  But it's clearly a problem for a lot of people, as locally and nationally people were ignoring the pleas to not visit places that are traditionally crowded.  I suspect many agreed in principle, but didn't think it applied per se to them.

It's easy to see why some might think that way.  Outside of the large cities most of us haven't experienced personally anyone definitely contracting the virus, let alone falling seriously ill.  That's going to change dramatically - today in the UK the death rate increased by 25% of the total to date in one day.  It's accelerating and it's not going to slow down until the lockdown takes effect in at least two weeks' time, possibly longer if people keep on flouting the rules.

The stats, horrible that they are, are far from useful.  Like many of you I'm frequently referring to the Johns Hopkins Covid 19 tracker website, watching the numbers ratchet up.  There's three key numbers on there - amount diagnosed, deaths and amount recovered.  None of the numbers are remotely useful when we think about them.

Take the deaths total - that should be useful as it records the known deaths associated with CV19, however we know that many of these deaths would have happened anyway, perhaps not on that date but within a reasonable time.  What we really need to know, if only to focus minds, is how many deaths are absolutely as a result of the virus, that the person who passed away would be with us and living a normal life if only they had avoided the virus.

The recovered statistic is almost certainly an underestimate.  Most countries aren't testing anywhere near enough to determine the infection rate, and most have put retesting people who did test positive to see if they have recovered on the to-do list.  Perfectly understandable, but if we want to be reassured that most of us will survive this then that statistic is the one most will look at.

The infected stat is, as suggested above, almost certainly meaningless as most people with symptoms are not being tested.  Front line staff dealing with patients aren't being routinely tested in the UK at the time of writing - that will change in the next week, but as well as staff in the NHS and other allied services being exposed to risk without sensible health monitoring, there's a risk that  some of them are passing on the virus inadvertently to vulnerable patients.

This pandemic, terrible that it is, is almost certainly the dress rehearsal for the pandemic to come that doesn't spare 80% with a mild cold but kills a serious proportion of those who contract it.  I wrote in Parallel Lives about the race to prevent such a pandemic in a future UK that was isolated from the world but was under terrorist threat of a SARS type infection.  Incredibly, the pandemic situation wasn't the worst event in the book, but there you go.

In summary I think the worst is yet to come, please play your part in containing the spread.  If not for yourself, if you're youngish and fairly healthy it should do you little or no harm, then for the vulnerable in your circle of influence - those you know and those you pass in the street. Stay safe and follow the rules.  If you never stray onto my blog again or ever consider reading any of my books that's fine, I just hope you and many, many more have that choice.  What all of us do in the next few weeks will determine how many people have the choice.