Six months....impossible, page-132

"he seems to be implying that the economic and health consequences of enforced lockdown are worse than the illness, and seems to be implying that this is because of misreporting of case numbers around the world. "

No, I said that the consequences of enforced lockdown could be worse than the illness.

And that, if it turns out that case numbers are indeed significantly under-reporting the real number of infections, then it will become inevitable that the discussion that will need to be had at some stage is one of a trade-off of the lesser of two miseries: the misery of long-term lockdown vs the misery of a targeted [*] lifting of the lockdown.

And if the former is worse than we think, and the latter is less worse than we first thought, then surely it makes no sense to prolong the despair of many to prevent the despair of few.


"I would argue that the death tolls around the world don’t lie and Australia’s outlier numbers are because of intervention and not anything else."

But the real intervention only commenced over the past week or two. Before that it was more tokenism: Restaurants and coffee shops were only shut down 10 days ago, many schools were still open and people were still mixing in closer proximity in large numbers and not observing social distancing protocols a week ago.

Given the 10-to-14 day incubation period of the virus, it means that case numbers we have been seeing in recent days relate to infections of the virus before the most of the interventions kicked in. The real beneficial outworking of the most stringent measures will only be seen in coming days/weeks.