US election: Joe Biden will be off to a poor start if he locks down US

Putting economies into hibernation has not worked and costs lives in many other ways.

US president-elect Joe Biden in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday. Picture: AFP

“Nothing to fear but fear itself.” Whereas Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to disperse the gloom hanging over the US economy in the Depression, his Democratic successor risks prolonging hysteria, at great cost to the US and the world, by perpetuating the myth authoritarian health edicts can eradicate the coronavirus. It’s the biggest risk of a Joe Biden presidency which, facing a Republican-controlled Senate, should prove relatively uneventful otherwise.

“We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality, or relish life’s most precious moments … until we get this virus under control,” the president-elect said in his acceptance speech, repeating a favoured argument of lockdown zealots, which denies any trade-off between deaths from COVID-19 on the one hand, and “the economy” and everything else that matters on the other. It’s a denial that is patently ­untrue.

Cases and deaths from COVID-19 have accelerated in the second half of the year as the US economy has surged, rising 33 per cent at an annualised rate in the third quarter. The jobless rate has dropped rapidly from 14.7 per cent in April to 6.9 per cent in October.

And it’s a denial that gives false hope at enormous cost. The virus is now endemic in the US, Europe and many parts of the world. If Victoria has managed to eradicate the virus, at huge cost, it’s because there wasn’t much virus around in the first place.

More than 10.2 million Americans have officially been infected and more than 100,000 a day are testing positive, a big understatement given about 40 per cent of cases are asymptomatic. The World Health Organisation estimates 780 million people, about 10 per cent of the planet, have been infected, making ­demands for contract tracing look like hubris on steroids.

Taking a sledgehammer to economic activity and civil liberties every few months, however popular, is a recipe for disaster. Yet the Biden COVID plan to “get the virus under control” will pressure US states to double their testing and have lockdowns when coronavirus cases reach certain thresholds. It stipulates nationwide mask mandates, and a nationwide pandemic dashboard that Americans can check in real time. It would be better termed a panic dashboard.

Trying to control the virus by fiat has failed abysmally in Europe, South America and Israel. Nations that introduced lockdowns earlier in the year, such as France, Spain and Britain, to “flatten the curve” have ­reverted to them once again.

And countries that have made masks compulsory in the northern hemisphere summer have endured major COVID outbreaks, even bigger than the first wave.

The masks have proved as effective as burkas at stopping the virus in the Middle East, and just as dehumanising. Basic scientific method would conclude masks are not sufficient to stop a coronavirus outbreak. But reason has been another casualty of the pandemic.

Announcing the first lockdown in March, Boris Johnson said Britain would “come through stronger than ever”. “We will beat the coronavirus and we will beat it together,” he went on. “Day by day we are strengthening our amazing NHS with the time you buy by simply staying at home. We are increasing our stocks of equipment.” Why, then, lockdown 2.0?

Former prime minister Theresa May asked the British government last week for a cost-benefit analysis for lockdown 2.0. No government will ever provide one because it would reveal how ridiculous are the assumptions required to make them stack up.

Consider the US where, of the 300,000 “excess deaths” this year up to October, two-thirds have been attributed to COVID-19.

“Adults aged 25-44 have experienced the largest average percentage increase in the number of deaths from all causes from late January through October,” the Centres for Disease Control said last month, referring to an age group we know is barely ­affected by COVID-19. Lockdowns are killing people — additional untreated heart attacks, for instance — as hospitals lie empty of anyone but COVID-19 patients. And this reckoning doesn’t include more cancer deaths from missed diagnoses that won’t show up for years.

In Sweden, which has refrained from any sweeping ­national lockdown, excess deaths are near zero this year, according to Stanford medical expert Jay Bhattacharya.

In July the WHO warned the fear-induced economic collapse would push 130 million people in poor countries to the brink of starvation. Last week, it warned missed tuberculosis diagnoses would cause between 200,000 and 400,000 more deaths in developing nations.

What we’re seeing is what economists call lexicographic preferences, where consumers ­demand any amount of one particular good or service more than any other. In this case, the service is the eradication of all COVID-19 deaths. Politicians know they will be blamed only for COVID-19 deaths, and policies follow accordingly. Leaders should try to diffuse rather than sustain such fear.

Thankfully, there is a circuit-breaker, one hopefully not too far away. A vaccine is the only way the political class can extricate itself from this destructive cycle of populist lockdowns, border closures and obsessive testing of people who aren’t even sick. A vaccine doesn’t have to work very well or even be widely available. What’s critical is the announcement that a vaccine does exist, to reassure ­people everything is OK again.

In the 19th-century parties of the left rightly demanded universal public education. A literate population could question authority, especially church dogmas. Now, supposedly more educated, we are expected to defer mindlessly to experts on fundamental liberties when the evidence is clear that masks and lockdowns are dubiously helpful on balance.

In October last year, the WHO said “contact tracing (and) quarantine of exposed individuals” were not recommended under any circumstances, even for bad influenza ­pandemics. “The evidence base on the effectiveness of masks, border closures and lockdowns in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions,” it said. No doubt in years to come, when researchers and governments pick over the facts, such conclusions will hold again.