According to the comments the article was cross-posted to a UK doctor's blog,
Dr. Kendrick's blog (which I haven't visited). So I'd like to comment on this
article from the point of view of a UK resident, as I am.
The first thing to note is that in the UK, with a supposed lockdown imposed
(now lifted), the number of deaths from Covid-19 so far is 46,596 [1]. That's
in a country of almost 70 million [2]. The article above reports about 6,000
deaths in Sweden so far. We can look at different ratios and statistics, like
per capita death rate (for the entire country) or case fatality ratio, etc,
and we must of course accept that "death from Covid-19" sometimes means "death
with Covid-19" and sometimes "death by Covid-19". Finally, we can note
that the majority of the people who died were of a certain age and had
underlying issues so they may have been dying already anyway.
The fact remains that more than 45,000 people is a big number of people to die
within a couple of months. It's a much larger number of deaths than 7,000 and
it's not a number that justifies sitting around doing nothing. Not for policy
makers, not for doctors, not for the general population.
Of course the article makes the point that the situation in Sweden is now much
better than in other places, because Sweden did not impose a lockdown like
those other countries. So, in theory, without a lockdown the UK would have many
fewer infections thanks to heard immunity. But, what would be the cost of
acquiring this herd immunity? If more than 45,000 people died under lockdown,
how many would have died without it? Of course this is a difficult question to
answer- but it stands to reason that we would see more deaths, perhaps many
more [4]. How many peoples' lives saved justify a lockdown? 50,000? 100,000?
10,000?
To be honest, I can't get my head around this dreadful arithmetic.
Epidemiologists and perhaps some doctors also are used to thinking of case
fatality rates and population-level statistics, but the fact still remains
that even a thousand people dead from a single, possibly preventable cause, is
something that the majority of the population of any country would accept as
intolerable. See for instance the recent explosion in Beirut which killed
"only" 135 people (last I looked). And yet, this seems to be considered by
everyone as a great tragedy (certainly by the press, always obsessed with body
counts, but by everone else also). If we accept that everything should be done
to avoid losing 135 people in an explosion, shouldn't everything be done to
avoid losing more than 45,000 people in a disease outbreak?
[3] This all is before looking at excess deaths in the UK in the months of the
lockdown, which I won't do because I find the way these are measured and
reported a bit confusing (e.g. I've found excess mortality plots for the last
five years - but that's a short time and there may be much more variation over
10 years, say, or 35, so I'm not sure we learn much by looking at those
plots).
[4] Again I'm not going to try to quantify "how many more would have died
without lockdown" because we simply don't have the data for accurate
estimates. Some estimates have been derived, notably the estimates from the
Imperial Colledge modelling team, but there's no way to rely on them with any
certainty.
The first thing to note is that in the UK, with a supposed lockdown imposed (now lifted), the number of deaths from Covid-19 so far is 46,596 [1]. That's in a country of almost 70 million [2]. The article above reports about 6,000 deaths in Sweden so far. We can look at different ratios and statistics, like per capita death rate (for the entire country) or case fatality ratio, etc, and we must of course accept that "death from Covid-19" sometimes means "death with Covid-19" and sometimes "death by Covid-19". Finally, we can note that the majority of the people who died were of a certain age and had underlying issues so they may have been dying already anyway.
The fact remains that more than 45,000 people is a big number of people to die within a couple of months. It's a much larger number of deaths than 7,000 and it's not a number that justifies sitting around doing nothing. Not for policy makers, not for doctors, not for the general population.
Of course the article makes the point that the situation in Sweden is now much better than in other places, because Sweden did not impose a lockdown like those other countries. So, in theory, without a lockdown the UK would have many fewer infections thanks to heard immunity. But, what would be the cost of acquiring this herd immunity? If more than 45,000 people died under lockdown, how many would have died without it? Of course this is a difficult question to answer- but it stands to reason that we would see more deaths, perhaps many more [4]. How many peoples' lives saved justify a lockdown? 50,000? 100,000? 10,000?
To be honest, I can't get my head around this dreadful arithmetic. Epidemiologists and perhaps some doctors also are used to thinking of case fatality rates and population-level statistics, but the fact still remains that even a thousand people dead from a single, possibly preventable cause, is something that the majority of the population of any country would accept as intolerable. See for instance the recent explosion in Beirut which killed "only" 135 people (last I looked). And yet, this seems to be considered by everyone as a great tragedy (certainly by the press, always obsessed with body counts, but by everone else also). If we accept that everything should be done to avoid losing 135 people in an explosion, shouldn't everything be done to avoid losing more than 45,000 people in a disease outbreak?
_______________
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom reports a 2020 estimate of 67,886,004.
[3] This all is before looking at excess deaths in the UK in the months of the lockdown, which I won't do because I find the way these are measured and reported a bit confusing (e.g. I've found excess mortality plots for the last five years - but that's a short time and there may be much more variation over 10 years, say, or 35, so I'm not sure we learn much by looking at those plots).
[4] Again I'm not going to try to quantify "how many more would have died without lockdown" because we simply don't have the data for accurate estimates. Some estimates have been derived, notably the estimates from the Imperial Colledge modelling team, but there's no way to rely on them with any certainty.