Lockdown # 5 England and Wales

 Discussion

This paper does not prove that the peak in fatal infections in England and Wales preceded lockdown by several days.

 Indeed the failure to undertake the sampling that could have gathered data to directly measure infections early in the epidemic means that it will never be possible to be certain about timings, 

given the severe biases in clinical data other than deaths and fatal disease duration. 

What the results show is that,

 in the absence of strong assumptions, the currently most reliable data strongly suggest that the decline in infections in England and Wales began before lockdown.

 Furthermore, such a scenario would be consistent with the infection profile in Sweden, which began its decline in fatal infections shortly after the UK, but did so on the basis of measures well short of lockdown.

This is wrong, the Swedes instituted a comprehensive program of restrictions that 8/10 Swedes followed at the beginning of the epidemic. True the were not lock downs.

These facts have implications for the policies to be adopted in the coming autumn, particularly given the peculiar ethical issues associated with lockdown. 

For example, plausible estimates of the life loss burden from an unmitigated COVID-19 epidemic in the UK are about 2 weeks per person1.

 A plausible lower bound on the UK life loss from the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath is 7 weeks per person2.

The economic shock from lockdown is substantially larger than 2008. 

I disagree, the USA was late on following guidelines.  Lockdown did help but reopening was too quick.  Now we will have a much worse economic depression as Lock down will have to be re-instituted.

Similarly the implied willingness to pay to save a life year from COVID-19 appears to be an order of magnitude higher than the usual UKNational Institute for Health and Care Excellence threshold used for any other disease

Unbelievable, putting a price on life.  

Who are these people?