It was absolutely sickening to see massive anti-lockdown protests in London (and smaller ones elsewhere, including in my city) yesterday, even as harrowing scenes are coming in from India where lax lockdown measures and a series of mistakes by the government(s) and wrong assumptions about herd immunity have contributed to what is rapidly becoming a public health calamity.
Seriously, I've had it with people who still push false narratives about the impact of lockdowns. Even the website lockdownskeptics.org barely mentions what is happening in India right now in an almost absurd level of denialism. Indeed, the fate currently befalling India utterly destroys their central point, which is exactly why they are refusing to mention it.
India has vaccinated 3.5 times more people than the UK, and is second only to the US in terms of the number of vaccinations it has administered, and yet, this still translates into just 8.5% of the population who have had at least one dose, and vaccination numbers are dropping for a number of reasons, not least that healthcare providers are under unprecedented strain at the moment.
Thus far, most countries (with the exception of Brazil and India) that have faced large numbers of hospitalizations have managed to cope, but only at the expense of onerous restrictions on day-to-day life that have succeeded in stopping those numbers from becoming overwhelming. India is providing the clearest example yet of a country that has gone beyond that limit, and now urgently needs help in providing oxygen, drugs, beds and basic care for a rapidly growing number of people. Positivity rates in some places is 35% or higher. A cursory glance at the 'official' statistics on cases and deaths in India makes it fairly obvious that these numbers are almost certainly much lower than the actual numbers.. for cases and deaths to be on a par with other countries that have seen sizable outbreaks, this would suggest that the official numbers from India on Worldometer, for example, are understating the ground truth by a factor of at least 10...
Meanwhile, back in the UK, a group of prominent lockdown skeptics have written to the government demanding an end to lockdown and basic public health measures such as social distancing and a requirement to wear a mask. While I don't entirely disagree with their main point - that such restrictions ought not be needed once the vaccination rollout has reached a significant level - it still seems to be making some strong assumptions about the longer term effectiveness of the current vaccines, not to mention the risks posed by variants that the vaccines may not be as effective against. If anything, I would have thought recommending social distancing and mask wearing was a wise thing to do, even beyond their set date of June (when lockdown restrictions are scheduled to be mostly lifted anyway!).
The timing of their letter is a bit embarrassing, as it must have been written and checked by the multiple signatories over the course of several days, if not weeks or even months - and hence publishing it now just as India falls into the grip of a horrific overload of Covid cases is, well, quite staggeringly poorly timed.
