Are we too scared to end the lockdown?

Vincent J. Curtis

17 July 20

The Hamilton Spectator today ran an op-ed headlined, "Revocery: it will take a lot more to get out of lockdown than it took to get in."  It was written by Laura Duncan, a part-time Assistant Professor, and Michael H. Boyle a Professor Emeritus at McMaster University.  Both of them are researchers at the Oxford Centre for Child Studies.  The thesis of the work was that people have been so scare mongered at the beginning of the lockdown and throughout in order to maintain it, that it will be hard for the government to justify restoration of normalcy.

Note: the expertise is in one of those "-studies" programs, and they are writing outside their realm of expertise.  The following is a kind of rebuttal.

The article by Laura Duncan and M.H. Boyle contains the seeds of its own destruction.  The lockdown should be ended entirely immediately, and let the people, each in their own way, figure it out.  Let them choose to go or not go to a restaurant, go or not go into a bar, get their hair cut or not, wear or not wear a mask. At this point, the lockdown is unjustified, undemocratic and unconstitutional coercion.

The word the authors were hunting for is ‘fearmongered,’ and they’re right.  People have been fearmongered to the limit of their endurance.  Research in the United States has demonstrated that life-years lost as a result of the lockdown is far greater than life-years lost from Covid-19 deaths.  Keeping the lockdown on only causes the disparity to worsen, and only fearmongering keeps the lockdown on.

The purpose of the lockdown was to flatten the curve, and it was flattened months ago.  Now we’re being menaced by “cases.”  This is a pandemic, we’re going to get “cases,” and locking down only slows the rate of getting new cases. We’re going to get them, it’s just a matter of when.  So why lockdown?  The people who are getting the cases now are healthy people who are practically unaffected by the infection.

The lockdown has been counter-productive since mid-April.  End it now, and let people get on with their lives.

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