Covid-19 lockdown - the key that locked us up has been lost

I’m the principal of a UK creative agency. Each week in the last month we have furloughed more people and are experiencing what is clearly an untold tale of lockdown madness and challenges. The lockdown period we have experienced to date has been by far the most traumatic thing the business has encountered in 12 years, and provides without doubt an existential crisis for us and some of our clients. From the start I doubted lockdown was the correct approach to the pandemic . The more I see the more certain I am that the overall societal harm from the lockdown is many-fold worse than the virus itself.

The government is apparently confident that the economy will ‘bounce-back’.?I don’t think that there is any chance of that at all. Bankrupt businesses tend to have a dead cat like bounce. In the UK by early May 2020, more than 50% of adults now have their salaries paid for by the state. This is insane and obviously unsustainable.

So as a business-person I am going to buck the trend of no dissent with the ‘Stay indoors. Save lives’ narrative in the media and social media, and argue that the only way to end the lockdown madness is to end the lockdown now.

The lockdown has had no effect on the progress of the pandemic. Nowhere in the world has the curve of infections been impacted by a lockdown rather than distancing. The example of Sweden has been the proof here, where the overall impact of the virus has been lower than the UK despite no lockdown. Against the earnest willing for Sweden to fail for denying the global groupthink norms, the curve the viral infection followed there is absolutely identical to places like the UK which went for the full lockdown.

The UK lockdown was a huge but understandable mistake to make with the by then already utterly discredited Neil Ferguson advising the government with ludicrous doomsday scenarios of half a million deaths, and the situation apparently out of control in Italy.

But instead of correcting this wrong and winding the lockdown in as soon as possible, the UK government is painting the most negative picture possible in order to justify a very protracted lifting of our incarceration, and?the draconian lockdown approach it took (or as someone put it “Finding a new role for the lockdown”). This negative picture is also driven by?legislation that introduced new rules about recording death, so that a doctor (who through new emergency laws is thereby indemnified by the NHS against any claim of negligence during lockdown) can enter Covid-19 as the cause of death when there is no actual evidence of it at all. This will have the effect of treating excess deaths caused by the lockdown not the virus, as Covid-19 deaths. This is why the UK appears now to have overtaken Italy in the Covid-19 death toll and to have the highest death toll in Europe.

The worst thing about this is that when in a year’s time the normally only truly accurate way of assessing the impact of a viral epidemic – excess deaths – is looked at it, it will be impossible to separate real ‘deaths from Covid-19’ from all the other excess deaths caused by the lockdown, and those who couldn’t or didn’t’ access the medical resources they urgently needed.

What I find most shocking (along with the British public’s apparently supine acceptance of it) is the obvious moving of the goal posts. Whereas we were told the lockdown was implemented to save the NHS, the key that locked us up will not now unlock us. Having ‘saved’ the NHS (the 8,000-bed capacity Nightingale hospitals have slipped like a sinking liner beneath the waves of media perception without a trace) we now have 5 tests to pass before we are liberated, some so ambivalent that many believe they have all already been met, some believe that some never will be.

In addition, the public’s perception has been so shifted by government propaganda about the deadly virus that “is life-threatening to people of all ages” (inaccurate and untrue), that we have a nation which polls suggest is pleading for more lockdown, and frightened to send their children back to school (there has been 1 [one] under 9 years old fatality in the UK from Coronavirus. Children are almost universally unaffected and there is no known case of a child passing the virus to an adult worldwide).

With the media obsessing about testing and tracing apps, ‘social distancing’ on airplanes to make travel safe (prize for the most inane Covid-19 thought to date?), the mission seems truly to have crept from ‘saving the NHS’ to avoiding anyone in Britain getting the virus again – i.e. ‘complete safety’ with the phrase ‘staying safe’ now reaching absolute meaninglessness.

I don’t recall this being the drill for previous and just as deadly flu pandemics. This virus avoidance is not only unattainable, according to the world’s most reputable epidemiologists it is undesirable!?“I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. . . Damage caused by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor” – Michael Levitt, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford.?“Older and vulnerable people should have been advised to stay at home, but the virus should have been allowed to run its course through the rest of the population. We should have encouraged the spread of the virus among children to protect the elderly. Get out and spend time outdoors not indoors, respiratory viruses don’t spread outdoors and UV light kills them.” - Professor Knut Wittkowski, head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design for 20 years.

The most insane thing is that the economic catastrophe that we are heading for is not ‘caused by Coronavirus’ as reported uniformly across the mainstream media daily. But by the lockdown that governments imposed. They chose the lockdown, and they are choosing to protract it for far longer than a scientific approach would indicate.

So I am predicting that in a year or two the following will be clearly apparent (some are already more or less):

• The 8,000 bed capacity emergency ‘Nightingale’ hospitals in the UK will have treated 54 patients.
• Governments completely over-estimated the threat of the virus and under-estimated the scale of economic collapse lockdowns would cause.
• Neil Ferguson (yes the ‘Pantsdown Professor’ who broke his own lockdown) the key UK government scientific adviser will finally be fully discredited not only (as he was before the Coronavirus) by his own peers, but by an enquiry that includes all his other loopy predictions for swine fever, foot & mouth disease etc.
• We will discover that most infections happened in hospitals and care homes. The otherwise sick were right to avoid hospitals – they stood a very high chance of contracting the virus there.
• In the UK hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses will have been bankrupted?and others burdened with unsustainable debt, with millions of job losses. Slowly these businesses and jobs will be replaced, but the associated burden of misery will be massive and last a decade.
• GDP will see the sharpest ever recorded decline, taxes will have risen sharply, printing money and cost-push will drive inflation to a level unseen for decades.
• Half the pubs in the country won’t re-open, or will re-open until shut through by then absurd ‘stay safe’ ‘social distancing’ rules.
• Pointless politically-motivated international quarantines will provoke further tit-for-tat quarantines and finish off vast swathes of the travel and hospitality industry not already destroyed by the lockdown.
• The lockdowns that took place will be shown to have had no effect on the lifecycle of the virus.
• ?Lockdown will have caused more non-Covid-19 ‘excess deaths’ than the Covid ones.

It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, it is not microbes, it is not cancer, but man himself who is his greatest danger: because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes. – Jung

Let’s get people back to work and life. And please forget about the ‘New Normal’ – it’s a life not worth living. #coronavirus #corvid -19 #lockdownsceptics #endthelockdown

https://lockdownsceptics.or g