"Lock-down." It's become one of this decade's favourite words from everybody's 'favourite' authoritarians --and the go-to response to COVID-19. But Jeffrey Tucker wonders in this guest post whether, if doctors aren't panicking, then everybody else should be? And, since medical professionals aren't commenting on the political response to all this, then perhaps those of us who do care about freedom should at least be asking the obvious questions ....
And that’s it. This is what happened to South by Southwest, one of the most important events in the world in Austin, Texas, which has thus far not reported a single case of COVID-19. Based on last year’s numbers, It’s the end for:
- 73,716 conference attendees and 232,258 festival attendees;
- 4,700 speakers
- 4,331 media/press attendees
- 2,124 sessions
- 70,00 trade show attendees occupying 181,400 square feet of exhibit space
- 351 official parties and events
- 612 international acts
- 1,964 performance acts
Draconian, to say the least.
Making matters worse, a vicious and completely false report published by Variety said that the festival was aching for the city to make the call so that the festival could collect insurance money. This turns out to be entirely wrong: South by Southwest had no insurance against infectious disease. It was a smear and response to mass frenzy. After all, a petition on Change.org signed by 55,000 people had demanded the cancellation.
The city acquiesced to the mob. A grand and glorious conference was destroyed – the first of many this season.
Italy now has 16 million people under quarantine, which is to say that they are prisoners.
Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April.Americans have been quarantined on cruise ships and then forced to pay for their later hospitalisation. The government that quarantines you has zero intention to pay the costs associated with your care, to say nothing of the opportunity costs of missing work.
The press isn’t helping. The New York Times has cheered it all on, aggressively advocating that governments go Mediaeval on this one.
In six months, if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease “containment” over disease mitigation. (Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.)
The containment strategy was neither debated nor discussed. For the first time in modern history, governments of the world have taken it upon themselves to control population flows in the hopes of stemming the spread of this disease – regardless of the cost and with scant evidence that this strategy will actually work.
More and more, the containment response is looking like global panic. What’s interesting, Psychology Today points out, is that your doctor is not panicking:
COVID-19 is a new virus in a well-known class of viruses. The coronaviruses are cold viruses. I’ve treated countless patients with coronaviruses over the years. In fact, we’ve been able to test for them on our respiratory panels for the entirety of my career.
We know how cold viruses work: They cause runny noses, sneezing, cough, and fever, and make us feel tired and achy. For almost all of us, they run their course without medication. And in the vulnerable, they can trigger a more severe illness like asthma or pneumonia.
Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know.
Doctors know what to do with respiratory viruses. As a paediatrician, I take care of patients with hundreds of different viruses that behave similarly to this one. We take care of the kids at home and see them if the fever is prolonged, if they get dehydrated, or if they develop breathing difficulty. Then we treat those problems and support the child until they get better.Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports as follows:
On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1,099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.Slate’s piece on this topic offers more perspective:
This all suggests that COVID-19 is a relatively benign disease for most young people, and a potentially devastating one for the old and chronically ill, albeit not nearly as risky as reported. Given the low mortality rate among younger patients with coronavirus—zero in children 10 or younger among hundreds of cases in China, and 0.2-0.4 percent in most healthy nongeriatric adults (and this is still before accounting for what is likely to be a high number of undetected asymptomatic cases)—we need to divert our focus away from worrying about preventing systemic spread among healthy people—which is likely either inevitable, or out of our control—and commit most if not all of our resources toward protecting those truly at risk of developing critical illness and even death: everyone over 70, and people who are already at higher risk from this kind of virus.Look, I’m obviously not in a position to comment on the medical aspects of this; I defer to the experts. But neither are medical professionals in a position to comment on the political response to this; mostly they have assiduously declined to do so.
Meanwhile, governments are willy-nilly making drastic decisions that profoundly affect the status of human freedom. Their decisions are going to affect our lives in profound ways. And there has thus far been no real debate on this. It’s just been presumed that containment of the spread rather than the care of the sick is the only way forward.
What’s more, we have governments all-too-willing to deploy their awesome powers to control human populations in direct response to mass public pressure based on fears that have so far not been justified by any available evidence.
Based on the Italy and Austin, Texas, precedents, any mayor of any town anywhere can right now declare a state of emergency, cancel events, shut malls, and close parks. Who is to stop them from shuttering stores, restaurants, schools, and churches, and quarantining whole neighbourhoods? [After all, they did it all so eagerly here in Christchurch after the earthquakes.]
For this reason, we have every reason to be concerned.
Are we really ready to imprison the world, wreck financial markets, destroy countless jobs, and massively disrupt life as we know it, all to forestall some uncertain fate, even as we do know the right way to deal with the problem from a medical point of view? It’s at least worth debating.
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Jeffrey Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
10 comments:
A rock and a hard place really.
Here’s Joanne Nova’s view of this.
the additional problem of balancing deaths from the disease against deaths from economic disruption causing food and medicine supply problems.
“No. You are not the only one thinking this way. I see now how many people see it like that. It’s a false choice.”
“Our options were:
1. Quarantine and save people AND The economy (with some inevitable major cost).
OR
2. NO Quarantine and kill hundreds of thousands of people AND The trash the Economy.”
I think someone will only assume they are the options when they over-estimate the state's ability to stop the virus, and under-estimate the negative effect of that attempt. By the same rationale (and seemingly incorrect) assumptions you could justify any piece of draconian legislation - including for instance limits on fossil fuel consumption in the hope it will reduce climate change.
The comparison to Christchurch earthquake response is a good one - not because it was a quarantine as such, but the fact their no-go CBD red zone had negative impacts out of proportion to the actual danger. Individuals wanted to take the (generally very minor) risk to retrieve their possessions, but in many cases weren't allowed to.
It's a very basic lesson, but one that most seem to need constant reminding of. In evaluating any action you need to consider both the positive and negative effects. Bureaucrats, by nature of the incentives in their position are only focused on one side of that equation.
I think the difference is not in overestimating the state (She doesn’t) but in their estimation of the virus. The writer of the above article thinks that the virus is a nothing burger, whereas Jo considers it to be a very grave threat that could lead to hundreds of thousands of dead Australians. The only thing she really wants the government to do, is close the border for all non-essential travel, which would stop the immediate importation of the virus.
I’ll find her plan and paste it here. It’s interesting.
We stop the flights til:
1. We get data and understand the enemy. How bad IS this virus?
2. We get rid of all cases within our nation by standard isolation procedure. Starve the virus. No more free bodies to feed it.
3. The rest of the world copies us (or does it with us) and sooner or later one by one we open up the flights to each nation as it gets rid of the infection. We’re talking weeks.
4. We were lucky with SARS. As I said from the start, that was easier because there was no asymptomatic infection. Once we knew this one could spread asymptomatically all that has happened since then was utterly text book predictable.
5. Yes, the deadly exponential curve has been stupidly and recklessly unleashed. People are going to die that didn’t need to. But every day we put off doing what we should have done at the start more people will add to that horrible tally. We can have a big pile or a bigger pile.
6. It’s not a case of aiming to keep the infection rate lower than the point where our hospital system collapses. Surely we must do it. There is no single more important priority right now. Virtually no cost is too much to stop the death rate going from 0.5% to 2% or worse because we can’t find enough ICU beds?
7. Australian citizens – bring them home with a 2 week quarantine. There have been no infections in Australia from the Wuhan rescue flights. None from the Diamond Princess.
8. Then after the calm — Then we will need a two week quarantine for flights from countries that have the virus. When the odd incident occurs — as they will — we go straight for isolation and tracking. No holds barred containment. And by then, we might have antivirals. The virus might have mutated. We might have antibodies or CRISPR something. Gene therapy. Stem Cells.
Ok - so it's predicated on the assumption that stopping international flights will stop the spread of the virus dead in its tracks. I'd need to defer to experts to be certain, but that seems highly unlikely to me. Once the a virus is out, it's out.
Not dead in its tracks, but it would bring it to a manageable level. The virus requires bodies in order to replicate. Starve it of bodies, and it dies. The CCP could have managed that early on when the virus was first brought to their attention. But communism being communism, it probably just got filed on a desk somewhere, working it’s way to the bottom of the stack. Wuhan flu is communism’s latest gift to the world.
I note the World Health Organisation is quite against border controls, "Travel bans to affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming from affected areas are usually not effective in preventing the importation of cases but may have a significant economic and social impact."
NZ has been shut down without being given the reasons or coherent rationale.
W.H.O recommends
What WHO says is illogical. It’s a no-brainer that if you restrict entry it will slow the spread of the virus.
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