Johns Hopkins University on the UK Lockdown

Prof Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University, in the US, Dr Lars Jonung, from Lund University, Sweden, and Jonas Herby, special adviser at the Centre for Political Studies (CEPOS), recently completed a study that showed, to exactly no-one's surprise, that during the first wave of the pandemic (March - June 2020, but they don't say specifically) 1,700 lives were saved buy the lockdown measures. They say that Government-imposed lockdowns were un-necessary, because people would have adjusted their behaviour.

In other words, the Government didn't need to impose a lockdown, because the people would have imposed their own. This was pretty much what happened in Sweden.

Sweden, by the way, has one million more people (10m) in it than London (9m). The UK has 63m people. One of those countries is not like the other.

What would have been the economic damage of leaving the people to decide for themselves, but with Local Government continuing to charge the Business Rate, and landlords continuing to charge rent? It does not take much of a loss of business before a cafe or cinema can't pay rent and business rates, and it does not take much more before the balliffs or the bank come thundering in. Railways must run, or trees will grow through the tracks, so public transport would have needed subsidising. I don't know what the numbers would look like, but I do know that much of the economic activity in the UK relies on low wages, debt, and overdrafts.

What happens if a nurse decides she doesn't "feel safe" going in for her shift? Or a policeman? Or a supermarket lorry driver? Or a sewage plant maintenance man? Or the people who run your local pharmacy? Would employers be able to sack workers who "didn't feel safe"? With every other Government in the world telling people there's a killer virus on the loose? Even if employers could "hibernate" concerned workers, who would replace them? Would businesses lay off people in anticipation of a loss of income? And what do those people do for money, since employment has dropped?

You can feel the chaos already.

But... divide the workforce into two, with "non-esssential" workers forced to "work from home", and the "essential" workers are, by contrast, required to show up at the hospital, depot, supermarket, bus garage, sewage plant, power station, and so on. Declare an emergency and Councils can be made to hold back on the Business Rate, landlords on rents (some of the better ones, not the De Walden Estate), while furlough can be paid to keep people in money...

The correct comparison is what the figures would have been if the UK had carried on as usual, with white-collar workers adopting in-the-office schedules and working from home otherwise. Businesses, shops, cafes, restaurants, gyms, swimming pools, cinemas, theatres, and the like all open as usual. No restrictions. Anyone who gets the symptoms, stays home for five days. (We should be doing that anyway!) The Government makes it clear that: a) you cannot sue anyone if you caught the Virus on their premises; b) you will be sent to Re-Education HR for an "assessment" if you claim to be that scared of getting what is actually a bad case of the flu that almost everyone will survive.

And someone would have needed to shut those whining, hand-wringing journalists up. Let's not forget, it was Piers f******g Morgan who bullied the Prime Minister into making the Police enforce lockdown, which the Police did not want to do.

My guess is that even a part-time working-from-home / office regime would hit the town-centre businesses the same way it has now, a lot of marginal business would still have closed, and many managements would have used the opportunity to rationalise.

If the Virus had struck in 2010, nobody would have been working at home, because the internet / broadband infrastructure was just not good enough. But in 2010, people still had their own desks in the open-plan offices, and more space around them, compared to the crammed offices of 2019, so they would not have adopted working from home with the same enthusiasm. A curfew on social life would have been impossible to justify: if it's not safe to go to the movies, it's not safe to go to work. Maybe some restrictions on the number of people in social spaces could have been imposed. We would have worn masks in public spaces (but not offices), but not as a badge of our virtuous compliance, but as a nuisance just to keep the b****y Government happy. A lot more people would have had a bad few days, and then enjoyed subsequent immunity. The kids would have stayed at school. Families would have been able to see each other, and attend funerals and weddings as they should.

We cannot use the Swedish figures as a proxy for "no lockdown" because the Swedes put themselves into a self-imposed lockdown and the population density is lower. What we do know is that almost nobody died solely from the Virus: they died - often painfully and tragically - because they had other conditions, and the Virus was one too many. This was known from the start. Because of that, the additional deaths would have been smaller. In fact, from what we know already, if the transfer of older people into care homes had been done with the slightest bit of care, there may have been fewer deaths.