Ringfencing without protection

Well they’re doing it in Victoria – isolating outbreaks and dealing with them as ‘hotspots’ while letting the rest of the State return to normal and – what’s most important – full, effective, potent functioning.

The thing is, always was, the lockdown tactic crippled the State ostensibly in order to protect it.

Easily seen, or more easily seen, perhaps, by thinking of it as a miitary attack by paratroopers.

To make the analogy more exact perhaps paratroopers armed with insidious anti government propaganda so’s you’re not just frightened of the paratroopers but you’re frightened of them spreading their creed, undermining your nation, your government that way.

That’s the sort of thing places like China and North Korea are frightened of so it’s quite realistic really.

So imagine it; there they are, parachuting in here and there, destroying and spreading their infectious creed. What’s the Army going to do? How is the Army going to deal with it?

By ordering everyone in the nation to stand still, stay in place, don’t move – most important – don’t work ! ? By bringing the nation to a standstill. By destroying businesses by the thousand. By destroying gainful employment, jobs, by the thousands and diminishing the nation’s available wealth?

Nonsense. Total nonsense. The Army would do nothing like that. Quite the opposite it would want the nation going into top gear, working and interacting as never before.

And it would isolate outbreaks and ‘ring fence’ them just as Victoria is doing now.

And outside of that fence there’d be intense scurrying activity as when a thousand ants congregate around a morsel on the ground or as white blood cells congregate around infection.

Activity would increase everywhere.

And the activity would penetrate the ring fenced areas of infection and bring to bear all appropriate measure to fight back and control the situation.

Such as: to drop the analogy and get to the point – isolating and protecting the elderly and infirm. Which action by itself would reduce the expected mortality rate by 80% (given that they’re not isolated and grouped together with the infection in their midst. Surely that doesn’t need saying? But it does. That is exactly what they did in New York and other places – virtually deliberately infected closely packed groups of highly susceptible individuals. No. Don’t do that. )

And therefore – reduce by 80% – that’s a major and most important step. But I hear no mention of it after an hour or so of listening and watching coverage (which is incessant) of the Victorian actions.

The corollary of the 80% reduction, of course, is that the threat to the rest is much reduced and that’s a great psychological benefit and practical benefit in consideration of physical measures that ought to be taken.

Four Covid Choices/Paths

Seems to me there’s only four ways:

  1. The natural way: we all get Covid until herd immunity develops.
  2. The science way: we wait for a vaccine.
  3. The prayerful way: we pray for it to go away of itself.
  4. The hideaway: we ‘lockdown’ and hide until our civilisation dies. (also known as the ‘dieaway’)

We are currently – in Australia – devoted and committed to the fourth way, I think, that’s right isn’t it?

And while we are slowly dying there’s of course many who pray for it to go away and others who pray for the scientists to get a move on.

But generally we are committed to ‘hideaway’ and ‘dieaway’ as witness the recent events in Victoria where some Covid was detected and immediately there’s lockdowns and panics left right and centre.

Lets look at the four ‘ways’. Starting with the last first:

4. The hideaway/dieaway: Originally adopted as a way of slowing admissions to clinics and hospitals so’s the medical infrastructure would be able to cope it has morphed, unspoken and undeclared into a system seen as ‘fighting’ the virus and ‘beating’ the virus and keeping Australia virus free.

Hence the panic when there’s a case found. No cause for panic in the original scheme – quite the opposite, cases were meant to be continual and current and fed into the system in manageable stream. No cause for panic there if a case is found. It is expected.

But now it’s a cause for panic because it means the system isn’t achieving this undeclared objective: freeing Australia of the virus.

And it costs: in human lives, in human suffering, in collapse of our economy in the wide sense, meaning every part of the nation is in danger of rusting away.

3. The science way. This may work or it may not. In 50 years they’ve never managed to make a vaccine for the common cold, which is a corona virus. And as with the flu a vaccine may well turn out to be specific for only one strain and require a remake every year and even perhaps for every location.

2. The prayerful way. Nice if it works. Some viruses seem to ‘disappear’ in the warm months: flu for instance. But they haven’t gone away. They just don’t flourish well enough to cause symptoms. It seems very unlikely this will ‘go away’.

  1. Suffer the virus and let it run until herd immunity is reached.

This is the one thing totally abhorred, that they want to avoid at all costs, this is the fearsome monster the world is deathly frightened of to where it will happily freeze into place slowly die in place rather than have happen.

But they never tell us exactly what the threat is. We glean bits of information by dribs and drabs, a little here a little there. And we have to thread our way through the misinformation, the misdirection. Like ‘authoritative’ sites informing us that there’s, say, 8 million cases and half a million death.

They don’t say it, they leave it for you to figure out, but that’s a 6.25% death rate isn’t it?

Certainly would be a fearsome thing if that were true. But it is not true. Not even the wildest establishment mouthpieces claim anything like that any more.

Realistically death rates are estimated/calculated to be a median of 0.26%.

And the virus does not spread to the total population but is calculated to only spread to less than 50%.

Australia: 25,000,000 people.

50% = 12,500,000

0.26% OF 12,500,000 = 32,500

32,500 deaths if the virus ran wild in Australia and treatments don’t improve.

But: Dr John Ioannidis says the deaths are so heavily weighted towards the elderly and infirm that in Switzerland, for instance, only 2.5% of the deaths were under the age of 60.

And 69% of the deaths were over the age of 80.

So that if the elderly were protected by quarantine for a month while the virus spread then the expected death toll would be 31% of 32,500.

And that is: 10,075

Most of whom would be between 60 and 80 years old.

2.5% of the deaths being below 60. That is: 812.

So there’d be 9263 deaths between the age of 60 and 80.

And the more of the elderly you protect the more you lower the death rate.

So that’s what the real situation is. That’s the monster.

The size of that monster has to be measured against the size of the monster we’ve made for ourselves with our ‘stop the world’ policy.

There’s deaths occurring because of the policy, directly attributable to the policy.

There’s much suffering and hardship.

There’s damage to the nation itself in these economic, real life, workaday terms.

And there’s the fact that many of the casualties of Covid would be casualties anyway, if not of Covid then of pneumonia or some other such fatal illness they may have.

So it is hard to weigh it up.

But it sure seems certain that it ought to be weighed up. Match that monster against our own home grown monster.

To decide if we should continue.

And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most didn’t decide out of sheer sympathy and humanity that we should continue. In order to save those possible 32,000 lives, or 10,000 lives, or whatever it ends up being after taking all measures to save as many as we could.

Because it sure seems terrible to say let it be: let them die, let the virus claim them if it will.

But at the end there’s this one last factor to remember: the virus will not go away. They don’t. So the slow death lockdown has to continue forever as best we know.

Australia has to remain quarantined and with the nation in suspended animation right into the foreseeable future if we don’t let the virus in.

Unless. Unless there’s a third way. Perhaps we could have the best border controls we can manage – and within the country go on with life as normal but being ready at any time to spring into action and quarantine and deal with areas of infection if they happen.

Contain new sources. Stop them spreading widely.

Is that possible? And if it is why not do that now?

And maybe that’s what’s going on in Victoria.

They’re practicing to see if this ‘third way’ is going to be viable.

Who knows – perhaps they even knowingly let the infection in just to make for a live test.

I wouldn’t put anything past them. There’s not many of us would these days, is there.