Why We Have To Stay At Home (It's Not What You Think)

Want to know why your movements have been restricted, your business closed and your financial future rendered precarious?

25 words or less?

If someone had to design a virus specifically to embarrass the Health Services of developed nations, they would have designed SARS-Cov-2.

Interested in the details?

SARS-Cov-2 transmits, it is held, reasonably easily. It seems to breed in the throat, not the lungs, so it gets out easier. It is said to last on surfaces for up to three days. Carriers are held to be infectious for up to two weeks, compared with three days for a regular flu. The early studies suggest that half the people who get infected won’t notice and most of the rest of the people who get it will have moderate symptoms. SARS-Cov-2 seems to kill people with immune systems compromised by chronic conditions usually associated with older age. Those high death rates in Italy, Iran and Spain are partly telling us about the poor health of the elderly population in those countries. Overall this is a picture of a virus that really wants to spread, but not to kill. This isn’t the Spanish flu.

Now here’s the Big BUT: it’s looking like the small proportion who need hospitalisation will take 18 days (plus or minus) to die and 22 days (plus or minus) to recover to the point they can go home. Compared with three for a regular flu or pandemic virus. To deal with SARS-Cov-2, hospitals will need six times as many beds as they would need if the numbers are the same as any other flu-based pandemic.

No hospital has that many spare beds. Modern hospitals are highly focussed and productive, churning out specific treatments with a minimum of skilled medical staff and equipment. Such organisations are acutely sensitive to any deviation from their standard operating assumptions.

SARS-Cov-2 is just such a deviation. Faced with a virus that might fill their always-nearly-full hospitals in a week, the Health Bureaucrats panicked. Not only would their precious buildings be full, but the staff would get infected and have to go home for a couple of weeks. Good luck running a hospital with ten percent of your staff at home and no agency nurses and doctors available.

That’s why protect the NHS is in the slogan, before save lives. In such slips are the priorities made clear.

The Health Bureaucrats needed a way to keep their hospitals from getting over-crowded. The lockdown is to reduce the traffic accidents, sports injuries, drunken brawls, industrial accidents, and other causes of visits to the A&E. That keeps the beds clear for all those SARS-Cov-2 cases which aren’t going to appear anyway.

Never before in peacetime had the UK been locked down. This time they could make it seem plausible. The UK’s broadband internet network made it possible for the Government to believe that many people could be sent home to work without disrupting the economy. Once the Government had done that, an hysterical media fed shock-horror stories by activist academics would push through the rest of the shutdown. No high-speed broadband, and we would all still be at work, just as we were through the previous pandemics.

And that’s how we got here. Where are we going?

After Easter about a third of the UK’s smaller businesses will start to put more than three-quarters of their staff on furlough. By mid-May half those people will be short a week’s money while those who earn more than the median wage of £2,500 / month will get shorter faster. By the end of June, those businesses will start to go broke, and their ex-employees will go on some kind of unemployment benefit. Nobody can live on that. By July or so, without an announcement about an end date, even the largest companies will look at furloughing their staff. At that point we turn off the lights.

So the question is: how much of our future, will the politicians allow the Health Bureaucrats and media to sacrifice, to keep the hospitals clear and ready for a wave of people who never were going to come through the door?

I have no idea.