Don’t worry, the experts are going to protect you. You are in good hands.
The media and experts are now saying it point blank: the lockdown will stay in place until a vaccine or effective treatment arrives.
The results of key drug trials out next month could see the lockdown fully lifted by mid-summer, leading doctors believe.
More than 120 drugs are being investigated as a treatment for coronavirus.
These could provide a much quicker route out of the crisis than waiting for a vaccine, a paper published today claims.
The authors, from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, said if any of the drugs are even moderately effective it would transform the profile of the pandemic and the way politicians tackle the virus.
…
The paper – by Dr Michael Pelly, HIV specialist Professor Anton Pozniak and international finance consultant Guy de Selliers – sets out a three-phase plan for a return to normality.
This would see the lockdown lifted far quicker than Government advisers envisage.
The authors propose that with hospital admissions falling, the easing of restrictions could begin in two weeks.
Further rules could be lifted following drug trial results in early June, with a full end to the lockdown by mid-summer.
In a paper for the think tank Radix, the authors wrote: ‘Treatments could be identified much sooner than a vaccine and maybe as soon as weeks.
‘This would have very significant implications for the Government’s approach and it must start preparing now for the advent of such treatments to take full advantage.’
They acknowledge no single treatment will be a ‘silver bullet’.
But they believe any drug that can fight the infection, even with modest success, would help get Britain moving again.
And Dr Pelly pointed out that HIV had been ‘completely changed’ as a disease through the development of treatments, without scientists ever developing a vaccine.
He said: ‘In the short term antivirals may give us the option we need.
‘We can’t live in lockdown for ever. In the long term we need a vaccine, we need drugs for early disease, we need drugs for late disease, we need the whole gamut.’
Don’t forget that the initial argument for the lockdown was that they needed to avoid overcrowding the hospitals with too many infections at once.
They never said that people needed to stay locked up until a treatment for the disease was ready.
The hysteria is wearing off, and people are realizing that this virus was not that big of a deal. Telling people that they are going to be forced to live like prisoners in their own homes for 18 months is almost guaranteed to result in an uprising.
But telling them to wait just two more weeks, and then telling them that they need to wait just an additional two more weeks, and then, again, telling them that they need to make one final push and wait an additional two more weeks, only to then say that the lockdown must be extended for an additional two more weeks, is a better long-term strategy.
By now, it’s clear that they plan to continue extending the lockdown little by little, and so they are attempting to pretend that the reason that the lockdown is in place is to keep people “safe” until a treatment exists.
Why they want us locked in our houses like this is anyone’s guess. But there is no one who can at this point make a genuine argument that it has something to do with public health.