One of the most potent core beliefs of the covid activists — those who want to see more done on a grand scale to control the virus — is that, one way or another, we can manage our way out of covid. Whether the action is sharper and harder lockdowns, or bigger and better mandatory masks, or more frequent and wider ranging testing, the core belief is the same: it is by concerted managed effort that we will control the virus. Dr No, ever the sceptic, has his doubts. Might it be that while all this action makes the activists feel better in themselves, the stark reality is that they are blind hamsters running ever faster in their wheels, oblivious to the fact that however hard or fast they run, they will never get anywhere? Could it simply be that there is no grand scale managed solution to covid, and the pretence that there is lies somewhere between foolish folly and reckless hubris?

Six or so months into covid, we can see that the large scale managed solutions fall into three main strands: mass testing, social control and vaccine development. All three operate or will operate at a national level, and all three involve colossal costs. They are, by any standard, colossal attempts to manage our way out of covid, so let us take a canter through the three to see how they are shaping up to the challenge of delivering us from covid. Are they working as intended, or are they drawing us ever closer to an endless unwinnable war against an invisible enemy, a biological Vietnam against a virus that can never be beaten?

Lets start with mass testing (and so, indirectly, track trace and isolate). To date, it has been an abject failure. Despite hundreds of thousands of daily tests, the posidemic — a term Dr No suggests is the most accurate one to describe an increase in positive test results — is resolutely on the rise. Posts on this blog have detailed the many inherent flaws in PCT tests, but there are wider flaws too. The social and financial consequences of a positive result create counter incentives, and folk inevitably modify their behaviour to suit. Those forced to give contact details provide false details. Those with symptoms know that if they test positive, their lives will be disrupted, and so simply decline to be tested. Add in the amateur and sloppy collation and presentation of covid test statistics, and what we see is a creaking engine that generates all heat and no light.

Ah, say the activists, Operation Moonshot will fix that, pointing to a beguiling recent ‘Perspective‘ in the NEJM that claims cheap rapid testing is just the ticket to get us out of this covid mess. But it won’t. Putting aside the logistical fantasy and fantastical costs of testing every person in the country on a weekly basis, which if it were ever to come about would gridlock the country in days, and the excoriating nightmare of false positives and negatives given the price paid for cheapness and rapidity is lower sensitivity and specificity, we already know that regular cheap as chips rapid testing doesn’t work. The White House used regular, most likely daily, rapid testing, and look what happened — the now infamous White House Outbreak (if there was one: perhaps it was faked, to create the myth of an invincible president —  which takes managed ways out of covid to an entirely new level — but lets assume it did happen). The reality is that routine rapid testing has all the flaws of the current PCR based regime, and then adds some gratuitous flaws of its own.  

Ah, but tests will get better, say the activists. Maybe – but don’t forget the false positive problem. Let us imagine a cheap rapid test that has 99.75% specificity — current ones have around 98% specificity (in symptomatic people with the flawed PCR as the gold standard, see link above), so 99.75% is a substantial, and most likely unachievable, improvement — and then run Operation Moonshot on a UK that just happens to miraculously 100% covid free. Not everyone gets a test, so lets say 60 million get tested (as a benchmark, so far, we have to date done just under 25 million tests in total). If we do that, we will, through false positives alone, get 150,000 positives. As a benchmark, the government reported 13,864 positives yesterday (Friday). If we test everyone once a week, as Operation Moonshot proposes, we will, assuming the false positives get randomly distributed, get around 7,500,000 positives — that’s over 10% of the population — over the course of a year, even when the UK is 100% covid free. This is the hubris of mass testing: not only will it fail to provide a managed way out of covid, it will perpetuate the ‘pandemic’ indefinitely, even if there no circulating virus.

The second strand, social controls through social distancing and its coercive cousins has similar operational flaws, but that’s just the start of the problems these troubling draconian measures have. If a test swab is a ‘little scratch’ on the back of a single throat, then the collective effect of social controls, on society as a whole, on normal life, is nothing short of a stab in the back, repeated time and time again. You can only stab something in the back so many times before it dies, and that is what these relentless repeated on-off controls will do. They will kill not just the economy, but our whole way of life, our place among our family and friends, the arts, the very things that we hold most dear. Even if the measures were to succeed in the narrow aim of controlling the spread of the virus — and the evidence remains equivocal at best, with Dr No inclined to the view, such as it is, that the measures have little or not effect, with other factors such as seasonality and natural immunity accounting for the rises and falls in case numbers — then, if ever there was a case of the cure being worse than the disease, then social and coercive controls to fix covid must surely rank as one of the worst.   

Lastly, we come to the third, most technological of all, strand, a vaccine, and therapeutics in general. This fix, Dr No accepts, is not inconceivable, but rather than following blind faith in technology, Dr No suggests a small but potent dose of realism. The fact is we have never before developed a safe effective vaccine for a coronavirus, partly because of events — both SARS and MERS one way or another fizzled out, removing the incentive to develop a vaccine —  and partly because of biology. The coronaviruses, and the immune responses they provoke, are somewhat ephemeral. The virus mutates, making it a changing target, and furthermore it appears immunity, as for example with the common cold, can be short lived. Another factor working against the arrival of a universal safe and effective in the field vaccine is that older people, those most at risk from the virus, tend to mount a less robust immune response to vaccines.

The omens are not good. The MRC’s Common Cold unit failed, despite over forty years of operation, to find a cure or develop a vaccine for the common cold. Other respiratory viral infections, notably influenza, which kills thousands if not tens of thousands a year, are notoriously tricky to vaccinate against, and even more generally, seasonal virus vaccines are always uncertain. We have no vaccine against the respiratory syncytial virus (getting on for half a million infections per season, with getting on for 100 deaths) or any of the common cold viruses. Put frankly, there are no precedents for a safe, effective — as in prevents infection in a significant majority of recipients — vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. That doesn’t of course rule out the possibility of getting a vaccine, but it does counsel a healthy dose of substantial realism as we assess out chances of having a vaccine soon, if ever.

There is no current rational sensible managed way out of covid. Instead of indulging ourselves in these hugely expensive hubristic fantasies and follies that we can somehow manage our way out of covid, perhaps the time has come to accept that we are going to have to learn to live with covid — not a counsel to do nothing, but to live with it, sensibly and realistically. The virus is already endemic, and appears to be seasonal — meaning, if so, that the current rise in positives, admissions and deaths isn’t the dreaded second wave, it’s the expected seasonal rise. Rather than an ever more fevered pursuit of the impossible Holy Grail of a managed exit from covid, perhaps we need more of that quaint British mastery of the art of muddling through. That way we can avoid the dystopian nightmare of a managed and ever more controlled new normal, and get back to the old, familiar, imperfect but oh so human normal normal.           

Comments

  1. dearieme Reply

    When I was a lad reading about the Second German War I didn’t understand why Bomber Harris was so dismissive of what he called panaceas – but I do now. The panacea for Covid was test, test, test; then more ventilators; then Nightingale hospitals, then lockdown; then – what? – test and trace; then …

    Whereas what could usefully be done is (i) improve the NHS’s infection control in hospitals (that’s a joke, of course, since there’s no sign that this government or any previous one can or could achieve any such thing), (ii) long term, build what used to be called infectious disease pavilions to keep Covid patients out of general hospitals, (iii) do whatever admittedly imperfect things can be done to protect care homes, and the free-range old and ill, (iv) tell everyone to take vitamin D, (v) that may be about it, apart from the now customary limit size of groups, keep your distance, keep washing your hands, and wear a mask indoors if you are planning to cough, sneeze, shout, or sing at other people.

    Have I missed anything important?

    I will volunteer something I don’t understand – why have so many doctors and nurses been standing around doing nothing for months? Ministerial fiat? NHS incompetence? Public fear?

    • Mike S Reply

      Oh, foolish me. Climate change. They already think they can manage the weather. Isn’t it true that whenever governments try to manage the unmanageable they ALWAYS make it worse.

  2. dr-no Reply

    dearieme – covers most bases. Interesting (possibly, possibly not, in the Chinese way) post today from a GP on lockdownsceptics.org

    The Year the NHS Failed the People of Britain

    It doesn’t answer your question, but it is an insider view. All Dr No might add from behind the sofa is that at times he finds himself recalling a report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists a good few years ago called New Ways of Working. Dr No called it New Ways of Putting Your Feet Up because the key feature of the report was that all routine work would be done by CPNs, so the psychiatrists could concentrate on more complex patients (who turned out to be inexplicably rare)…

    Mike S – there are interesting (this time no need for Chinese options) parallels between the was climate change has become a religion, and dissidents recast as heretics, and the way emerging science on covid has evolved. Such angry insistent polarisations are never good in science.

  3. Tom Welsh Reply

    “The fact is we have never before developed a safe effective vaccine for a coronavirus…”

    It’s a side issue, but I do wish people would stop using “we” in such contexts.

    Who is the “we” referred to? The human race en masse? But those who contribute, even slightly, to such research efforts amount to perhaps one in a million humans.

    It would be more precise, and make better sense, to state who exactly it is that has been trying to develop vaccines. And those who now wish to do so.

    We would certainly learn some facts to our advantage.

  4. dr-no Reply

    Tom – as it happens, Dr No tried not to get his ‘we’ and ‘they’ mixed up in this post, even more than he usually does. Here, in the example you quote, Dr No means mankind in general, all of us, a shorthand for a global effort over time by the various groups and individuals that have been involved in the efforts. Using ‘we’ is less cumbersome than something like ‘None of the groups that have ever tried’. The point of the sentence is to establish has never to date been a successful coronavirus vaccine. That said, most of the time, precision in writing is better than wooliness.

    The point about who is making the vaccine, and why (how much to save humanity, how much for good old fashioned £££/$$$) is an important one (and you are already no doubt aware of the past activities of certain advisers), but that is another matter to the one covered in this post (hubris).

  5. JohnF Reply

    I get confused, and should be grateful for your clarification.

    On the one hand we are told that coronaviruses (and others?) are constantly mutating, which is one reason we are unable to target them for vaccination (they tend to mutate into milder forms which spread more easily).

    On the other, everyone is saying that this Sars-COV2 virus is permanent and we will have to live with it as though it will always be in its present form – is this virus not also mutating/likely to mutate? If so, what makes it different from other viruses?

  6. dr-no Reply

    John – a good question. The two scenarios don’t have to be mutually exclusive. A virus mutates, possibly to make itself less lethal, so it survives/spreads more (simple Darwinian effect, if the host stays alive, virus gets to spread more), and also (though probably not, or a less strong Darwinian effect), making it harder to target with vaccines (viral antigens change, so vaccines no longer targets the virus as well). At the same time, the virus is permanent/here to stay or in epidemiological terms endemic in its present general form as SARS-CoV-2, even if it is undergoing mutations. So on one level it is permanent, on another it is changing. Both ‘flu and the common cold viruses follow this pattern. Both are permanent (always with us) but both also mutate.

  7. dearieme Reply

    In this morning’s Times:

    More people died in Scotland during a flu epidemic at the turn of the 1990s than the first wave of coronavirus, official figures show. …

    In 1989 the seven days to Christmas Eve was Scotland’s deadliest single week since records began in 1974, with 2,400 deaths, which was 1,092 more than the five-year average. …

    This is far more than the 1,978 people who died in the worst week of the coronavirus pandemic — the second week of April — which was 878 above the five-year average.

Leave a Reply to JohnF Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *