Lockdowns are beyond the pale

I’ve come to the conclusion that lockdowns are beyond the pale. Restrictions should only apply to those at higher risk of (dying with/of) COVID-19, and those who interact with them. This is common sense, since “… mental health experts warn the lockdowns have seen an increase in self-harm and indicators that could ultimately result in suicide.

Government data released earlier this month showed the number of children ending up in the emergency room after self-harming has risen by a third.

Youth mental health service Orygen’s head of suicide prevention research, associate professor Jo Robinson, said mental health practitioners had been “extremely concerned” there would be an increase in suicides.

“The fact that we haven’t seen increases so far, it’s really heartening. But I don’t think we should let our guard down,” she said.

“I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.

Orygen’s Pat McGorry told a Victorian parliamentary inquiry today that authorities are predicting a 15 to 25 per cent increased risk of suicide and are expecting the need for mental health care for young people to increase by almost a third.

He said even in April and May, there was a doubling in the prevalence of distress and mental ill-health.

Professor Robinson said modelling predicted increases in suicides towards the end of the year, due to concerns about financial difficulties and a lack of access to education and employment.

“These things are key risk factors for future suicide… we want to be able to respond in order to ward off increasing rates of suicide into the future,” she said.

“It wasn’t so much that there were concerns about increased suicide during the course of the acute phase of a pandemic.

“But I think there are still some real concerns going forward about what … the medium and longer-term impact of the pandemic might be on people’s mental health.”

Ian Hickie, co-director of the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, said with the social dislocation and economic fallout from Victoria’s second wave, he is still expecting to see a spike in suicides.

“We still think we’re going to see, over the course of a 12-month period … and then subsequent years, in the order of 30 per cent increase [in] suicide rates,” he said.”

Time to re-open our economy again for good, because “economies are not about businesses, and unions, and shops, and goods and services. The economy is about people; their plans, their expectations, their relationships. For all the talk about competition, the economy is about co-operation. The economy is not a machine that can be switched off and on at will.”

Small business owners embody the Australian way of life — they are hardworking, take risks, create prosperity for others and have a stake in the success of their local community. Yet Victoria’s small businesses have been hammered by the lockdowns and they will continue to suffer while Andrews pursues his fanciful elimination strategy. NSW is the ‘gold standard’ for COVID-19 management according to ScoMo, but Prof Gigi Foster has a better approach:

“I would first say that I have never explicitly said that we should do exactly what Sweden did. That has been a misinterpretation in the press. I think we should look to what happened in Sweden and we should learn from their mistakes. One of their mistakes, and their biggest one in my view, was that they failed to protect the elderly and the vulnerable population enough. We can learn from them by having a conversation with people in Sweden and asking, ‘How in fact did you mishandle this initially, and what have you learned?’, so that we can apply those lessons here in Australia in our old-age homes, in our hospitals.”

I may have at one point supported Stage 3/4 lockdowns, but not anymore, it’s beyond the pale to me now. Whilst I won’t get into the nuance of dying with vs dying of COVID-19 (an interesting point about inflationary reporting), if you look at the average age of those who die with/of COVID in Australia, it more or less aligns with the Australian life expectancy rate. Which begs the question: what is Stage 4 in Victoria really trying to acheive?

First it was about flattening the curve, now it’s about elimination. NZ tried elimination, and that wasn’t successful for long. If and when a vaccine comes, I’m not convinced there’s a point to it (and now I can’t see the point of herd immunity), since they’ve been known cases of re-infection. I’m not entirely convinced by the Swedish approach either, but it’s worth learning lessons from them.

Harsh lockdowns have short and long-term mental health consequences, and the private sector economy cannot be turned on-and-off on command without devastating short and long-term economic and mental health consequences. I begrudgingly prefer NSW Stage 2 restrictions as the balance here seems more or less, right.

I don’t like picking on old people / people with weaker immune systems, but if we want to flatten the curve long-term, shouldn’t restrictions only apply to those who are at higher risk of dying with/of COVID-19 death, and those who interact with those at higher risk? The rest of the population should be left to keep the economy going (economy is ultimately about community), whilst practicing social distancing, good hygiene practices etc.

“You can forgive the early response of all governments to the horror of a novel virus. Plagues are in the front rank of human threats. In February and March little was known about COVID-19 and the worst was rightly assumed. Australia’s leaders reacted quickly, worked in unison and chose to buy time; to lock their populations down while health systems were fortified with a timetable set for easing their way out.

That was a sensible, defensible plan. Now there is no nation plan and that is as indefensible as Victoria’s panic-stricken response. Because now we know much more about the disease and, while it is a serious illness, it is a whole lot less frightening than it is made out to be…

No matter how hard the death of anyone under 50 is spun, it is so vanishingly rare among Australia’s body count as to be close to zero. If you are a woman, it is zero. In Australia there is a far greater statistical chance that someone under 60 will die in a car accident.

COVID-19 mostly kills the elderly, especially if they have an existing chronic disease. That is not an argument to let them die but it should guide government responses.

Of the 816 Australian deaths the vast majority, 606, were in residential aged care. So if you are going to throw a ring of steel around anything it should be around aged care homes, not Melbourne. The rest of the population should be liberated to get on with their lives while taking sensible health precautions.

Governing should be about balancing risks against costs and only fools and sophists make arguments based on false choices. The debate is not between what we are doing and doing nothing. It should be about what response delivers the greatest good for the greatest number. The Victorian solution punishes the many for the few. It preferences the very old over the young, mortgaging the future of the entire school and working age population. It is hard to imagine how you could design a policy that is more profoundly unfair or damaging to a society.

If the argument is we must do everything in our power to protect the elderly, then we are already doing well. Federal Health Department data, first published in The Australian, shows there were almost 1000 fewer deaths in residential aged care in the first seven months of this year than in the same time last year…

So, why is it a crime for someone to die of COVID-19 in care but it’s OK if they die of absolutely anything else?

This disease has revealed the character of our leaders and hammered home some uncomfortable truths about us as a people. As a nation we seem comfortable with authoritarianism and too many relish the role of prefect.

And nowhere in this often-opaque democracy has a less transparent court system, bureaucracy, police force or government than Victoria. The people there have been badly served, even as some revelled in the servitude. Its systems of power have combined to deliver the wanton destruction of its vibrant society. Its government has condemned its people to a poorer future, to higher unemployment, more poverty and less opportunity.”