CORONA---Flatten This

          It is nice, I guess, that a few commentators and politicians are finally starting to question the wisdom of “flattening the curve,” but where were they six weeks ago?  Four weeks ago?  Last week?

          It’s not like the basics of the strategy were concealed from us.  “Flattening the curve” always meant spreading out the incidence of corona infections over a longer period of time, not reducing the overall number of infections or deaths.  The horrific vision presented to us was that our doctors and nurses and hospitals would be facing an enormous number of cases all at once, would be overwhelmed by the task, and would not have enough manpower or equipment (e.g., ventilators) to help all those stricken.  By spreading it out over months, there was a hope (more hinted at than expressed), that those who fell ill would get better treatment and that some of them would survive who otherwise might not.  There was also a possibility (again, rarely stated), that delaying the onset of some cases might allow time for new treatments or a vaccine to be developed, so that those whose crisis was delayed by flattening the curve would have a better chance of survival.  No promises, you understand, but that was the idea.

          The price to be paid for this flattening was not discussed at all, though it quickly became clear it would be large.  Rapidly, as increasing numbers of cases were trumpeted on television and on the internet, the screws were tightened.  “Large gatherings” were banned, and that was the end of baseball and basketball and hockey and tennis and golf and collegiate sports and concerts and theaters and weddings, and backyard parties and schools and colleges and bowling leagues.  Then restaurants and bars were shut down.  Then all “non-essential” businesses, parks, beaches, walking trails, swimming pools, basketball courts, and so on.

          As all this was happening, where was the public discussion?  Where were the debates?  Where was the Senate?  The House of Representatives?  State legislatures?  Where was there even a single soothing, rational voice suggesting that the benefits of flattening the curve needed to be weighed against the costs?  Where was Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Mitch McConnell or Rush Limbaugh or Ben Shapiro?  Or anybody?  Where was there a voice pointing out that there was no evidence flattening the curve would reduce the toll of the virus, and that putting 30 million people out of work and destroying tens of thousands of businesses would kill a certain large, predictable number of innocent human beings, so maybe we should take a day or two to think about what we were doing?

          There are lots of people and lots of politicians who want to think lockdowns will save lives, but there was never any evidence that flattening the curve would reduce the suffering and death produced by the coronavirus.  How could there be, since limiting the number of cases was never the purpose, and since shutting down an entire society and an entire economy had never been tried before?  As we are learning, there still is no evidence that the lockdowns are working to reduce the effects of the virus, despite the press’s hysterical condemnation of American states or other countries (e.g,, Sweden), that decided to rely on the self-regulating processes of men acting freely and cooperatively rather than invoke the heavy boot of edicts and orders and snitch-lines and policemen.

          A study was published April 8 by the Israeli National Council for Research and Development by its Director, Isaac Ben-Israel, indicating that the virus has followed a constant pattern across many countries, regardless of the response of the government:

           “It turns out that a similar pattern---rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth week and declines from the eighth week---is common to all countries in which the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies: some imposed a severe and immediate lockdown that included not only “social distancing” and banning crowding, but also an economic shutdown (like Israel); some “ignored” the infection and continued almost a normal life (such as Taiwan. Korea or Sweden), and some initially adopted a lenient policy but soon reversed to a complete lockdown (such as Italy or the State of New York).  Nonetheless, the data shows similar time constraints amongst all these countries in regard to the initial rapid growth and the decline of the disease.”

This is what has happened, and is happening, in Italy, Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Israel.  The numbers of new infections follow the same pattern everywhere.

          In other words, the benefits of flattening the curve are still largely theoretical, as they have been from the beginning.  Will some be saved by spreading out the stress on the healthcare system?  Maybe.  Will the delay in the onset of the disease for some allow time for life-saving treatments to be discovered?  It’s possible.

          But the costs of flattening the curve are real and substantial and do not depend on computer models.  We know that poverty kills, through homelessness, substance abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, poor health, and suicide.  And we know that when unemployment rises from 3.7% in 2019 to 30% in 2020, people will die.  All these correlations in mortality have been studied for decades.  For an individual, unemployment increases the risk of premature death from all causes by 63% (approximately, of course---different studies produce slightly different results).  Every person thrown out of work by our governments is put at risk.

          I’m not going to attempt to present you with a number of deaths that the strategy of flattening the curve will cause.  I wouldn’t know how to do so, and the uncertainties attached to such a calculation would make it irresponsible to present any such number.*  But let’s just look at just one cause of death and its links to unemployment.

          The link between unemployment and suicide has been known for decades, and the rule of thumb usually cited is that for every 1% increase in the rate of unemployment, the number of suicides goes up by 1%.  Based on this formula, an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry concluded that the economic crisis in 2007-8 produced an additional 4750 suicides in the United States.  In the world of suicidologists and others who study such things, this was a completely non-controversial finding.

          Suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S. most years, and in 2017 (a “normal” year for U.S. suicides), this meant that 47,000 Americans killed themselves.  If, by flattening the curve in 2020, we increase the unemployment rate by 25% (from 3.7% to somewhere near 30%), we will increase the number of suicides by 25%.  That 25%, applied to a “normal” suicide total of 47,000, means there will be an additional 11,750 self-inflicted deaths this year.  And that will be only part of the cost directly attributable to flattening the curve.  I’m not even estimating the number of people who will drink themselves to death or be killed by their spouses or by other opportunistic infections or medical problems that don’t get treated.  (We are beginning to hear plenty of stories about people who die at home from heart attacks, strokes or other serious problems because they were afraid to go to a hospital or did not know where they could get treatment in an emergency.)

          There is an additional cost we may pay by shutting down society and flattening the curve, though at the moment, we can only speculate on how large it may be.  This is the issue of herd immunity.

          Normally, when a very contagious disease sweeps through a population, everyone who survives it emerges with antibodies that protect them from being re-infected.  Eventually, so many people have these antibodies that the disease becomes unable to “find” new victims and sustain its presence in the community.  It becomes dormant.  It may re-appear a hundred years later (e.g., the Black Plague), to attack an entirely new population, but the people who survive the first epidemic, even the ones who never got the disease and developed the antibodies, are safe.  The herd has become immune.

          By flattening the curve, we may be interrupting this natural process and allowing our population to remain vulnerable to coronavirus indefinitely.  It may come back, in other words.  In fact, it may become endemic, meaning that it never goes away.

          Anticipating the screams from my critics, let me point out I am not recommending that everyone intentionally get infected, and I am NOT suggesting you take your cancer-ridden 86-year-old grandpa to an NBA game.  Keep him home and protect him.  But it is a wonderful thing for everyone if a large proportion of the population gets the virus and develops the antibodies and doesn’t die.  If we can achieve herd immunity, we may not see the damn thing again for a long time.  This is why the most short-sighted thing we have done is close schools and colleges.  The chance of children and 20-year-olds dying from coronavirus is almost zero, and the advantage of having an immune population for the next sixty or seventy years is immense.  Besides, if we don’t expose healthy young people to the possibility of coronavirus, what do we do next year when it comes back?  Unless we plan to close schools forever, it was foolish to do so now.

          (There’s even a more important reason not to close schools, which is that quarantining healthy people puts them at risk.  It is only by regular exposure to germs that we build a strong immune system.  Isolation only weakens and degrades the protection that our bodies achieve by fighting off microorganisms.  There is a hilarious, and true, YouTube video of George Carlin describing how swimming in the Hudson River’s raw sewage as a child protected him for life from the ordinary run of diseases.)

          I am writing this article to present the argument that “flattening the curve” by shutting down schools and businesses and locking everyone in their homes will kill far more people than simply educating the public and suggesting measures people might take to protect themselves and, especially, the most vulnerable among us.  To me, it has been clear from the first moment that the strategy would have lethal effects and that it was the sort of bone-headed idea that only lifelong bureaucrats and other politicians drunk on power could come up with.  After all, it was never supposed to save lives and it was never supposed to reduce infections.  The only purpose was to render the cases we were destined to encounter easier to deal with.  And the cost?  Many thousands of innocent lives and a return to the privations of the Great Depression, only worse.

          But what if I were wrong?  What if Isaac Ben-Israel and the Israeli NCRD is wrong?  What if locking down America to flatten the curve did save some lives?  What if people were saved because peak demand was reduced at critical moments and we had the resources to save everyone who was savable?  What if innovative treatments emerged that rescued some of those who got the virus later on, and who got the virus later only because we had flattened the curve?  And what if the herd immunity issue turned out to be a non-issue?  What if flattening the curve saved enough lives to balance out the buckets of blood and treasure we would pay by shutting down society?

          Who would benefit from this grand bargain?  Assuming the flattening of the curve would NOT cost more lives, who would it serve?

          Well, the first group of beneficiaries would be the health care establishment, especially the government healthcare establishment represented most prominently by 52-year bureaucrat Anthony Fauci.  What was the result of choosing the absurdly catastrophic computer models relied on by Fauci, our government, the news media, and left-wing governors around the country?  New hospitals!  A hundred thousand new beds!  We need 50,000 ventilators!  Let’s park a hospital ship in New York Harbor!

         

          The beds?  Well, never mind.  The ventilators?  Well, let’s just put them in a warehouse---I know we’ll need them really soon!  And the Hospital Ship Comfort?  Back to Virginia, matey.  Ahoy!

          But that’s just money being pissed away, something the governments in America do every second of every day. Down the drain, yes, but it’s just money.  It’s what you get when you allow doctors and scientists to make government policy, and there’s a lesson to be learned there, but that’s a discussion for another day.

          But it’s the other tradeoff that’s more troubling and more sinister.  Forget the money being wasted.  Let’s look at the lives this strategy will cost.  And for that calculation, let’s assume there are lives to be saved from flattening the curve.  Let’s assume there are a lot of them.  Let’s assume there are ten thousand people saved by the lockdowns and the panic and the end of our freedom to make a buck, go to the beach, eat in a restaurant, and see a baseball game.  Who are they? Who gets saved?  Well, guess what?  It’s Woodstock Nation.  The most optimistic scenario for “flattening the curve” is that it will extend the lives of ten thousand Boomers (and some who are older), for an additional five or ten years.

          They will pay no price for this, of course, or not much of one.  They won’t lose their jobs because they don’t have jobs.  They are doing fine on their pensions and 401(k)s and other investments and Social Security.  Those who ran businesses gave them up a while ago.  Some of them will pine for the Stanley Cup playoffs but, hey, we all have to make sacrifices.

          So who will pay the price?

          Well, remember the suicides?  And the addiction and the homelessness and the unemployment?  The price for extending all those Boomer lives for a few years will be paid by the Millennials and the Gen-X crowd.  They are the thirty million unemployed.  They are the entrepreneurs losing their dreams, and all their savings, right now.  They are the divorces.  And for the ones who actually die in this meltdown (and we know they will, though we will never know their names), they are the ones who had every reason to expect fifty or sixty more years of happy, prosperous life.  But to protect the elderly and those near death, the young must be sacrificed.

          This is the bottom line for flattening the curve.  It is the farewell present from the Me-Generation to their children and grandchildren.  Saving the lives of the elderly by trading them for the lives of those forty years younger is the final, most narcissistic, binge of the Boomers.

Copyright2020MichaelKubacki    

                 * I will leave that sort of “science” to the Dr. Fauci’s of the world.  On March 11 of this year, Fauci famously testified to Congress that the fatality rate for coronavirus cases (a subject on which he had virtually NO information), was ten times that of the seasonal flu.  As we have learned since, it now appears that Fauci’s fatality rate was too high by a factor of a hundred.