Andrew Bolt: Why we should look to Europe’s pandemic reaction
Europe’s second wave of coronavirus should reassure us that it’s time to stop the mad panic of ruinous shutdowns like those imposed by Victoria. This virus is not as deadly as the “experts” led us to believe, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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The evidence is in and we can stop this mad panic. The coronavirus isn’t as deadly as we were told, and gets less deadly by the day. Check out Europe. The first wave terrified us, with scenes of Italian hospitals overwhelmed and reports of huge death tolls in France and Spain, too.
Within weeks, Australia had copied France, Spain and Italy in going into shutdowns.
But Europe’s second wave should now reassure us.
Europe now has almost as many confirmed infections as it had in the first wave, but this time very few deaths.
What’s more, the deaths are minimal even though countries such as France and Italy have refused this time to reimpose the ruinous Victoria-style shutdowns.
Perhaps some of this is explained by more testing now picking up more infections.
More likely is that that we are seeing Australia’s own best future here — a way of living with the virus without bans like those in Victoria that cause more far more harm than good.
It seems that as Europe relaxed its restrictions the predictable happened: more younger people went out to work and to bars and parties, and many became infected.
But almost all quickly recovered from a virus that overwhelmingly kills the old and frail.
Meanwhile, older people are now more careful, or better protected and treated.
Less positively, many of the sickest may possibly have died in the first wave.
Studies are yet scarce, but Public Health England supports this hypothesis.
It found that 61 per cent of confirmed infections in March were of people aged over 60, who now make up just 11 per cent of cases.
The tailing off of deaths in Europe — much like we see each year with the flu — suggests two things.
First, we focus too much on suppressing infections, when we should instead just stop deaths — above all in nursing homes, where more than 75 per cent of Victoria’s dead became infected.
Second, we again let ourselves get freaked — as with global warming — by expert scaremongers with dodgy “modelling”.
This started with the World Health Organisation, which falsely claimed 3.4 per cent of people with the virus would die.
Next came modelling from Britain’s Imperial College that shocked the world.
It claimed that even with social distancing and hospital beds to treat all the sick, “we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in (Britain), and 1.1-1.2 million in the US”.
Australian National University experts in March likewise warned that at least 21,000 Australians would be killed. More, said one of the Morrison government’s deputy chief medical officers: between 50,000 and 150,000 of us would die.
Instead, the death toll so far is about 800. That’s even after the catastrophic bungling of the Victorian government, and after adding sick people who died with the virus to those who died of it.
One of the most damaging scares was reported in March in the Medical Journal of Australia — modelling claiming we’d run out of intensive care beds by April 5.
The government’s Chief Medical Officer agreed we faced “a horrendous scenario” — a daily demand for intensive care beds of more than 35,000.
That started a mad scramble by governments to free up hospital beds.
Sick Australians’ elective surgery was cancelled, and the number of intensive care beds was tripled to 7000.
Another fake scare. Just 15 of those 7000 beds are today used by infected people.
Why didn’t more experts call out these alarmists?
Professor Emma McBryde, an epidemiologist at James Cook University, learnt what happens to those who do.
She pointed out that the prediction that our ICU beds would be overwhelmed was based on a mathematical error in the modelling, and was punished for it.
She tells me she was placed “on the outer”: “I would probably rather my left arm be removed than what’s happened to me.”
I sympathise. The Prime Minister called me “hideous” and “immoral” for noting that bans hurting millions of healthy people were a crude and cruel way to stop very old and sick Australians from dying months earlier.
But now Europe suggests there is indeed a better way.
Let the young and healthy decide for themselves if going out — with social distancing — is worth the danger of getting a virus that is serious but will almost certainly not kill them.
Let governments focus instead on protecting and curing the old, and tracking and quarantining the sick.
This can work. In fact, it’s working already. Just look.