IF NEW ZEALAND’S THE ROLE MODEL THEN WE’RE IN STRIFE
ADAM CREIGHTON
There must be a better way to protect the vulnerable without smashing the economy
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
If social media is any guide it is our intelligence, rather than our health, that has been dealt a heavier blow by the coronavirus pandemic and the vested interests that benefit from it. The debate about how to respond to the virus has been undermined by widespread ignorance and the plethora of fallacies that surely call for compulsory teaching of logic in schools.
Top consulting firm McKinsey revealed the extent of the ignorance on Tuesday in survey evidence that found young people in Australia were more than twice as worried about the coronavirus impact on their own health as those aged over 75, who are at far greater risk. Almost 40 per cent those aged 25 to 44 were “very or extremely” concerned about their health. Almost half of that group also said they had been “emotionally affected” by the pandemic, compared with 8 per cent of the over-75s.
In light of six months of data on the coronavirus, such beliefs make little sense. They raise serious questions about the quality of education and the insidious role some of the media have played in fuelling the biggest erosion of civil liberties in our history — without accompanying evidence or cost benefit analysis — and a recession whose long-terms impacts can only be guessed with trepidation.
There are almost eight billion people in the world and six months into the pandemic barely any young have died from the virus.
Based on Swiss data published in respected medical journal The Lancet last month, the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 for under those aged 20 to 50 is one in 10,870, or about the same as being hit by a car.
Young people should be far more worried about the collapse in education, their inability to travel and enjoy their lives, and their highly diminished job opportunities and incomes that the Treasury and Productivity Commission have recently laid out.
For those aged up to 44, the coronavirus is less of a threat than dying from a random accident each year, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics.
“Population-wide estimates of the infection fatality rate (0.64 per cent) mask great heterogeneity by age and point towards the importance of age-targeted interventions to reduce exposures among those at highest risk of death,” the Lancet authors wrote.
Alas, age-targeted interventions weren’t top of mind in the Victorian government, whose decision to move into stage four lockdown is an incredibly high-stakes gamble. If no vaccine emerges — or no vaccine with side effects mild enough that people are willing to take it — what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions with all the attendant social and economic costs that will last years?
New Zealand is held out as a role model, but it’s a small, remote country. Its biggest industry, tourism, has been ruined, and at some point its citizens may want to come and go.
The debate is as rancorous as it is littered with fallacies; beyond trusty ad hominem, the straw man, post hoc, appeals to pity and bandwagon fallacies are the most prominent. No one seriously advocates doing nothing; indeed, individuals naturally take their own precautions, without government having to do anything except provide information.
The question is whether a civilisation that put man on the moon a half-century ago could have come up with a more targeted way of protecting the elderly and vulnerable than causing a downturn so serious forecasting has become impossible.
Indeed, with six months’ more data, reacting in August similarly to how China, Spain and Italy reacted in March — as Victoria has
— surely ignores our improved knowledge and treatment since.
For instance, we now know that herd immunity tends to cut in at 20 per cent, not the 60 per cent feared, and certainly not 100 per cent — the favoured level of fearmongers who mindlessly multiply infection fatality rate by populations. Meanwhile, the belief A causes B simply because B comes after it in time has proved more contagious than the virus itself.
Observing a decline in deaths or case numbers after a government took a sledgehammer to its economy says nothing about the effectiveness. Pointing to New Zealand in rapture proves nothing.
In fact, there’s no reliable relationship between lockdowns and viral trajectories across countries.
“Full lockdowns and widespread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality,” the authors of another recent Lancet study looking at Europe and the US found.
Then there’s good old appeal to pity. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on Tuesday described the deaths of three people in their 90s and older on Tuesday as “tragedies”. He either doesn’t understand the word or has lost all sense of proportion. It should go without saying, but the chance of dying in one’s 90s is naturally elevated. In any case, what about 1.5 million deaths a year of children in Africa and Asia from vaccine-preventable diseases? They won’t be getting those vaccines in a depression.
That brings us to the bandwagon fallacy, thinking something is correct because everyone else seems to. Perhaps frustrated Sweden’s death toll petered out at 5700 rather than the 90,000 it was warned to expect, proponents of draconian responses say “serious long-term health effects” warrant extreme precaution. The virus has been endemic only since March; how can there be any strong evidence of long-term effects, which by definition mean years?
Economists have been guilty of their own bias, an obsession with gross domestic product - an obsolescent, abstract statistic with little connection to anyone’s life - to determine whether lockdowns have costs.
China has enjoyed strong GDP growth, but many Chinese are incarcerated or worse if they disagree with their government. There’s more to life than GDP.
One could try to work out the dollar value of freedom of movement, physical association, by asking how much people would pay for it. But that somehow defeats the point. Transfixed by the supposedly existential menace of the coronavirus and the “long-term” health costs, not enough are focusing on the long-term costs that aren’t captured by GDP.
If no vaccine emerges … what is the point of another six weeks of draconian restrictions?
