A thread about what we should do next in the pandemic. Perhaps there's a clue in this fantastic piece from @freddiesayers about Sweden and its more liberal approach to lockdown. Why does this article matter so much? unherd.com/2020/04/jury-s…
2./ It's @unherd 's job to question conventional wisdom. But the original thinking really is urgently needed because much of our media is moving as one mass of the dumbest wildebeest. We've never stood more in need of journalistic rigour than right now.
3./ Policy needs to be driven by evidence that's interrogated rather than reflex views that pass for commentary. Here, for example, is the Indy's knee-jerk coverage of Sweden's approach where words like 'massacre' and 'catastrophe' compete for space. independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…
4./ In fact as @freddiesayers points out the curve in Sweden has not been as dire as critics' predictions. And Sweden has done something we didn't do: protect its economy. And in the long run as many lives may depend on that as anything else. Let me tell you why.
5./ I've made many films about infectious diseases. It's always the poor that suffer most from them. I've also made films about major economic disasters. And guess what happens when you make people poor? You make them ill too. Poverty also kills.
6./ My first 'crash' film was about how a single vast hedge fund nearly brought down the banking system in 1998. LTCM was founded by financial experts including two Nobel Prize winning economists who invented a beautiful mathematical formula that reduced risk; until it didn't.👇
7./ Like a virus moving through a population financial risks can be hidden. LTCM's problems started when a seemingly insignificant problem emerged from an unlikely place, the Thai property market. Risks snowballed. Right now countless versions of this are likely playing out. 👇
8./ LTCM revealed the interconnected nature of modern finance. If this institution was allowed to fail a domino effect would bring down many others. Central banks avoided that and we were insulated from the impact. Who knows what horrors they are trying to avert as we speak. 👇
9./ Governments faced a similar dilemma just 10 years later in 2008 during the next financial crash I covered, this triggered by Lehmann Brothers. This time the financial links between institutions were so pervasive something even worse loomed: A collapse of the monetary system.
10./ In secret briefings Congress members were told ATMs were about to run dry. We couldn't be insulated. Not only would all our pensions and savings be wiped out, countries might not be able to raise debt to finance their operations (like welfare). And then there was credit.
11./ Almost everything we import from essentials like pharmaceuticals or food depends on credit lines issued to shipping companies. At one stage it looked like the system of credit itself might stop. The conseqences of this then (as now) would be terrifying 👇
12./ A Great Depression may be what we face if we keep our economies in severe lockdown for many months. As companies fail risk will multiply. The end result could be mass unemployment, and in some countries potentially starvation. It's no accident the Nazis emerged in the 1930s
13./ This contagion has to weighed against the damage of COVID-19 itself. Of course it would have been ideal if every country had been able to follow the South Korean model of testing and tracking contacts. We wouldn't face this dilemma now if they had. But was that possible?
14./ Listen to most of the UK media and they insist it was. But South Korea developed a pandemic strategy based on their experience of previous coranavirus outbreaks including in 2014 with MERS. This is a great piece about just how organised they were. latimes.com/world-nation/s…
15./ In mid December they even ran a full rehearsal of their strategy and had thousands of test kits ready to be distributed at a moment's notice. This Radio 4 show explored some of the other things we could have learned from them. Or should have. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00…
16./ But we didn't. By Feb 28th when someone fell ill in the UK who wasn't connected to any other known case that meant the virus was circulating widely. We could have thrown our resources into mass testing to try to stamp out the virus. But we couldn't. We didn't have the kits
17./ Each test requires a kit, swabs, pipettes, access to a PCR machine and 3 different chemical reagents. The UK is very far from the only country short of all of these. Look at France. Ireland which has tested more widely has taken up to 10 days to give results to those tested.
18./ That's contact tracing in name only. In South Korea results were in an hour. Ireland has also been forced to develop its own reagent manufacturing to cut logjams. Most countries are valiantly struggling and making do as best they can. irishtimes.com/news/science/i…
19./ I'm not exonerating the British government. It certainly didn't help that Boris was still cheerfully shaking hands well into March and saying so. But even if we did make mistakes the question is whether we might now make an even worse one. And that would be...
20./ ...underplaying the scale of the economic disaster that might soon engulf us. Just as media commentators were largely silent months ago when they claim the govt was asleep at the wheel...they're now failing to explore the consequences of this looming economic crisis.
21./ Sweden may not be our ideal model. But maybe we take its liberal lockdown and mix it with German levels of testing? We know whatever we do we'll have to do much more testing (faster) to monitor outbreaks and trace contacts. As for vaccines? Don't hold your breathe.
22./ I filmed the process of trying to create a vaccine for zika. $300M was spent but it ended in recriminations and unsolved technical challenges. Despite that and despite predictions the disease has largely disappeared. You can watch the film here. amazon.co.uk/World-War-Zika…
23./ But here's the thing. A vaccine is only going to be possible IF there is some sort of significant immune response in the human body. A vaccine mimics a successful immune response. And IF there is that then we should build some natural immunity into our lockdown release.
24./ It would never (should never) have been our strategy to rely on herd immunity for COVID-19. But we are where we are now and some immunity may play a significant role in getting us out of this hole. As well as helping us avoiding the nightmare of total economic meltdown.
25./ Then we can focus our attention on ensuring the best possible care for those who fall ill and properly isolating the vulnerable as much as possible until we find a permanent solution. The idea we'll be able to do those in the ruins of our economy - now that is heartless.
