Well, it is the New York Post! I was more interested in the interviews (which are most of the article) than the quasi-opinion parts.
I didn't realise they had a (potential) outbreak on Apollo 8, for example!
Well, it hasn't happened before, anywhere, in modern times, and then suddenly most of the countries of the world have done it, simultaneously. There has to be some reason for that - and it can't be the virus itself, as there's nothing particularly unusual about it that hasn't happened a number of times already in the last 100 years. I think everyone has to draw their own conclusions as to what is happening here.
Yes very interesting for Apollo 8. Having seen how many people got close to the recent astronauts heading up to the ISS, I'd say there was a fair chance they could have caught it - with potentially very bad consequences.
Anyway my conclusion is that it
is the virus itself, and it has a very dangerous combination of a relatively high fatality rate and high ability for asymptomatic individuals to spread it. The evidence that it's just "a bad flu" generally seems to come from comparing fatality rates
with lockdown for Covid-19 against those without lockdown for other viruses, i.e. a false comparison. I think there
is something particularly unusual about it.
We didn't lockdown for SARS, MERS or Swine Flu. Nor did China. They did for this, and the reaction in the West at first certainly wasn't "Oh we'd better do the same if it comes our way". Quite the reverse.
And the Chinese government is driven by
very different considerations to western governments. We've seen lockdowns across different cultures too. What is in common in all these cases? The virus itself.
I'm being a bit of a broken record, but Sweden didn't overwhelm their hospitals. We built the Nightingale hospitals for exactly this purpose, one of the few things this government has done right. If the extra capacity was needed, it was there in time to be used.
Yes you're quite right about Sweden. But it's not a direct comparison for many reasons. (They probably have better hospital provision for a start).
I'll do my broken record bit now. We now have a far less harsh set of restrictions than when the lockdown started, and we still seem to be just about keeping R at 1. That says to me that unless herd immunity is now playing a big role,
if we'd started early enough, we could have done this all along. It doesn't mean though that if we hadn't taken much more drastic action to pull R right down when we
did have a lockdown, we wouldn't have had a lot more deaths.
Now maybe it spreads even more than people think and we have a much higher immunity level. Good news in a way, but perhaps yes the lockdown was too severe.
But this is all with hindsight - you can only make decisions based on what you know.
And as for the Nightingales...maybe...the hospitals were (and are) there but it was never clear to me how they would get proper staffing for them. I hope we don't find out. It worked in China by pulling large numbers of staff from other parts of the country, so far as I know. So perhaps we could now fire up one Nightingale to deal with a local outbreak. But all of them at once?
Fascinating discussion this, anyway.