Lockdown During Lent

Today the Pope called all people of goodwill to pray the Our Father at noon.

I hope you joined in.

Lent begins when the priest marks your forehead with ash, and says, Remember man, thou art mortal.

None us is exempt from a life without death and a world without suffering. Yet, we hope for Easter.

This Italian priest believed this.

Will the lockdown work?

Here is a picture from London during theirs:

Can we do better? I’m not sure.

Lockdown must be seen as a balancing act. There are risks and rewards. Shutting down an economy causes deaths in and of itself. I hope the experts are taking this into account.

Yesterday I reported on Italy’s ray of hope that their quarantine is working now after death rates were reduced on two consecutive days. Then they had their worst day.

This does not bode well for a lockdown.

Many global leaders have been basing their policies on this study, which suggested that without radical quarantine, the virus would kill 2.2 million people in the US and 510 000 in the UK.

To add some more confusion into the mix, Oxford has now released a study which comes to a contrary conclusion. From the UK’s Evening Standard’s report:

The coronavirus could have infected as much as half of the the UK’s population, according to researchers at the University of Oxford.

Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford, led a study into the infection rate of Covid-19 across the country…

The new model from Oxford University suggests the virus was circulating in the UK by mid-January, around two weeks before the first reported case and a month before the first reported death.

And the research suggested that less than one thousand of those with Covid-19 became ill enough to need treatment in hospital, with the vast majority developing mild symptoms or none at all.

This means it could have had enough time to have spread widely, with many people in the country acquiring immunity.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Professor Gupta said testing was needed to assess the theory.

Oxford’s research represents a very different view to the modelling at Imperial College London, which influenced government policy to tackle the spread of the virus in the UK.

“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” Professor Gupta told the same newspaper.

If this study is more reliable than the previous one, most global policies could be wrong. Quarantine of the vulnerable, sick, and elderly would be the only necessary precaution.

Of course, SA remains unique because of our seriously high level of vulnerable population.

But it is worth knowing that advanced countries like Sweden and Singapore have applied different, less radical policies - with no disaster yet.

In short, we need more data - quickly.

Stay in the loop. Later in the week, I will look at some history to find some wisdom for today - which towns and countries did well during HIV and Spanish Flu outbreaks, and which did not.

I still want to stay on top of how the epidemic should shift economic policy, and I am also going to give you my list of the best books and films to read and watch over this time.

Of course, I will also continue to collate data for you so you can have a cogent summary in one place of what is going on.

Love to all.