Are we all irresponsible?

As most countries in Europe have announced or are gearing for a new prolonged lockdown, again based on modelling and presentations prepared by the same bright minds that had it wrong the first time on, they are occulting the fact that the pandemic is actually stabilising on a global scale.

The figures are very simple: in spite of the new surge in Europe and the late start of the pandemic in many other countries in the World, we are still significantly below the death rate of registered in the spring.

The global peak in death rates was reached mid-April, with more than 8K / deaths a day for around 80K /new cases a day. A scary 11% death rate that was obviously overstated as testing capacity was too low, but still extremely significant.

End of October 2020, the number of new cases reported daily is approaching 550k. Number of daily deaths is in between 6 to 7K / day. In absolute numbers this is still a very heavy price to a pandemic that already took its toll everywhere.

But we have also to look at the figures for what they are:

·     This is a 1.1% death rate, much closer to the traditional flu death rate, steadily going down since its peak in April.

·     It’s not only the relative figure that is going down: actually, the total number of deaths in most of October has been lower than the average in between mid-July and September, although at that time, the number of daily new cases stabilised globally around 300K cases. 

The conclusions are clear: in the present surge, more cases don’t mean more deaths. And although the number of hospitalisations is growing, the quasi linear scenario modelled by the different entities are not taking into account the above, neither the fact that physicians all over the World have better learned how to treat the disease. 

We know now that ventilation is the last resort. We also know that blood micro-clotting is what is damaging the organs and creates a hyper immune reaction. We also know that a combination of antibiotics as well as potentially some steroids and other common drugs, non-experimental and non-lethal (not even taking into account the very controversial chloroquine) can reduce significantly the need for hospitalisation. 

We know all this but at the contrary of  the “1st wave”, where they reacted too late, the governments in Europe are now over-reacting and are pushing their economies towards an unknown chaos that may still have an impact long after we have even forgotten about the virus.

This pandemic keeps demonstrating the total lack of mid to long-term view that we could expect from our governments and their only antidote has been to revert to growing restrictions on liberty as if we, citizens, were responsible for their own failure. 

The question is if we are going to make them accountable for the disastrous future they are laying out for us or are we going to simply accept to keep being treated as irresponsible entities?