TRIGGERnometry - ＂Lockdown Was an Overreaction＂ - Professor Karol Sikora

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00:00:30.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissy and this is a show

00:00:40.780 for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our fantastic guest today

00:00:46.900 is a consultant oncologist and a professor of medicine at the university of buckingham

00:00:51.700 professor carl sakura welcome to trigonometry thank you very much it's a great pleasure to

00:00:57.160 have you here. COVID-19 has obviously been a huge factor in the life of this country and in fact

00:01:03.800 the world in the last few months. Before we get into that, tell everybody a little bit about who

00:01:09.400 are you, what's been your background, how are you here today? So I'm an oncologist, someone that

00:01:15.060 treats cancer with chemotherapy and radiotherapy and did medicine, went straight into academic

00:01:22.280 medicine, oncology, and went to the States for a couple of years at Stanford. Fantastic experience

00:01:28.120 in the States. Came back here and have been a consultant in the NHS for 40 years. I started

00:01:33.960 young as a consultant. Now I'm very old. So I've been through the whole thing. And then of course

00:01:37.960 COVID came out of nowhere. I'm really out of nowhere. In February you can see it building up.

00:01:43.160 I said it's not going to happen. Nothing's going to happen. It's all back to normal by Easter.

00:01:47.480 And of course, we know it wasn't back in the room. It's continuing now. Here we are in the autumn.

00:01:54.300 The leaves are turning brown and we're still dealing with COVID daily.

00:01:58.640 I said myself, it's just the flu. So I know how you feel.

00:02:02.180 But the thing we really wanted to ask you about, there's a thing that's been bothering us.

00:02:07.220 And we exchanged some emails and we talked about this, which is that it seems like the consequences of the lockdown

00:02:13.520 are not being given as much weight and attention as the consequences of the coronavirus itself.

00:02:19.740 So people don't seem to be thinking about the fact that the lockdown leads to economic problems

00:02:25.780 and economic problems lead to social problems, to medical problems, to health issues.

00:02:30.380 And are we right to feel that those consequences are not being properly looked at

00:02:36.980 when we consider the balance of the actions that are being taken?

00:02:39.900 I mean, when I look at it, it looks to me constantly as though the politicians are making it up as they go.

00:02:45.560 They don't have a long-term strategy, and nor do their advisors.

00:02:50.520 There are probably too many advisors.

00:02:52.340 These SAGE committees would hear about 40 or 50 people.

00:02:56.200 They like to get consensus.

00:02:57.420 If you have a committee who wants to get consensus, I've seen it in the NHS over the years,

00:03:01.680 they want consensus.

00:03:02.920 So you don't really get leadership.

00:03:05.240 You just get a sort of democracy of votes, and then people discuss,

00:03:09.720 and then you all go down one route and it changes.

00:03:12.580 It's like watching birds flying around in groups and swarms of birds

00:03:17.240 and they suddenly change direction and they all go the other way.

00:03:20.560 And that's what we've been seeing with this.

00:03:23.300 Whether the decisions at different time points are going to prove the correct ones,

00:03:27.420 you won't really ever know.

00:03:29.500 I mean, you summarised it well.

00:03:31.800 There's the health, there's the economy, but there's also COVID versus other health.

00:03:37.200 And that's sort of been forgotten about.

00:03:38.860 And that was the reason that I joined Twitter, to point out, hey, we can't stop everything.

00:03:44.160 We can't stop cancer being treated.

00:03:46.380 And not only that, we can't stop the diagnostic process for cancer.

00:03:50.180 So what's really important is to think of it.

00:03:53.640 COVID is one box.

00:03:55.580 Other health is another box.

00:03:57.340 And if you spend a lot of time on COVID, you won't have the other box for other specialties.

00:04:02.840 And not just cancer, but heart disease, mental health, all these things.

00:04:05.940 And then at the other end, you've got the economy, which loops around back into health because social destruction, the fabric, unemployment, mental health, poverty, deprivation, child abuse.

00:04:20.640 They're all connected in that. It's not they're not isolated.

00:04:24.180 And so ruin the economy and you get different health problems.

00:04:29.520 And Carol, we've been talking about COVID.

00:04:33.700 And at the start, there was the stat of half a million people are going to die if we don't do something.

00:04:40.700 How dangerous is it as a disease?

00:04:43.160 Is it, as some people say, that for most people, it's absolutely fine?

00:04:47.320 Do you risk long-term complications if you get it?

00:04:50.280 How virulent is it?

00:04:52.040 That is the great puzzle, Francis.

00:04:54.320 So if you take the cruise ships, they were the best studied.

00:04:57.440 the cruise ship, and there was an aircraft carrier, a French aircraft carrier, and an American

00:05:03.340 battleship all got infected. Roughly the same statistics. High levels of infection,

00:05:11.280 thousands of people on the ships got infected. Very few people died. And the cruise ship that

00:05:17.600 was stuck in Yokohama Harbor, if you remember in April of this year, it was a luxury cruise ship,

00:05:23.260 And the average age of the customers was 72.

00:05:26.440 So these are old people. 1.00

00:05:27.920 And yet there were very few deaths, something like 10 deaths altogether out of 700 people infected.

00:05:34.020 Not only that, you've got people that get infected, clearly,

00:05:37.480 when they have a PCR test or the virus is present, the virus genomic material is present.

00:05:42.900 And yet they've got no symptoms at all.

00:05:44.740 No fever, no shortness of breath, nothing.

00:05:47.360 No loss of smell and taste, which are the key features of COVID.

00:05:52.000 And yet they've definitely been infected.

00:05:54.200 So it's a huge puzzle.

00:05:55.920 And the real problem for public health, normally you go chasing the disease.

00:06:00.680 So if you take cholera, you look for people with diarrhea, you isolate them,

00:06:04.760 make the family wash their hands, you go to the source of where they're eating from,

00:06:09.440 they're drinking from, and try and see where the cholera was coming from.

00:06:14.480 They're ill before they get the infection, and then they become ill.

00:06:18.760 With this, you get infected and you don't become ill in many cases, so it's very difficult to go tracing it.

00:06:25.540 And so you do have to have, in fact, a good test for the disease.

00:06:30.760 What we've seen just this morning, Matt Hancock has announced that he's going to enlarge the testing program.

00:06:36.860 You know, this should have been done three months ago.

00:06:39.280 You really want to find out where it is.

00:06:41.360 But we do seem things have changed.

00:06:44.180 They've definitely changed since we started in April.

00:06:46.760 the peak was obviously March then peaked in April in terms of severity of disease now people are not

00:06:55.980 going to hospital and it's a slightly younger age group is being infected but we're testing

00:07:02.140 everybody the more you test the more you find so especially if you target your testing so if you

00:07:08.020 go to hospitals you go to Leicester you go to Oldham Rotherham places like that knock on doors

00:07:13.080 shall sticks up people's noses are much more likely to be positive yeah now and also if we

00:07:19.820 convert to saliva testing we just tested all our staff with saliva testing just yesterday for the

00:07:24.900 first time that is a such an easy way of doing it because it's not at all intrusive it doesn't have

00:07:30.720 any ethical issues you know people don't like having a stick up their nose and it requires

00:07:36.380 someone you don't have so much skill to do it but you have to be able to do it and the other risks

00:07:42.860 of sticking sticks up people's noses, they splutter at you.

00:07:46.400 If they're infected and they're spluttering, this is not good for you.

00:07:49.700 So you have to wear some sort of protective clothing,

00:07:52.840 and that looks frightening, especially for children.

00:07:55.000 So collecting a sample of spit into a tube is a lot less invasive, basically.

00:08:01.240 And one of the questions that I wanted to ask is,

00:08:03.860 obviously as we ramp up the testing, one of the things we are doing

00:08:07.260 is uncovering lots of people, as you say, who have been infected,

00:08:11.040 who we weren't aware of before.

00:08:13.820 Is one of the consequences of that not an indication

00:08:17.640 that this disease is a lot less lethal than we thought?

00:08:20.940 Absolutely.

00:08:21.940 And the fact, you know, hospitalisation is a key to death

00:08:25.040 because if you don't get admitted to hospital, you're unlikely to die.

00:08:28.280 That's usually how.

00:08:29.260 Sure, there have been deaths at home and care homes and so on,

00:08:32.480 but most people that die go to a hospital.

00:08:35.760 Most people not only go to a hospital,

00:08:37.620 the ones that are going to die go to intensive care and then they die.

00:08:41.040 So that's the pathway.

00:08:42.940 So if no one's going into hospital, that means something's different.

00:08:46.280 There are several explanations for that.

00:08:48.220 The nice explanation, which I like, is that the virus wants to be kind to us.

00:08:53.160 That sounds like medically verifiable.

00:08:55.460 It's got a little white flag.

00:08:57.200 It's waving a little.

00:08:58.180 On the end of those little spikes that you can see in the kids' diagrams,

00:09:02.460 you've got a little white flag saying, I want to be friends.

00:09:05.100 But evolutionary-wise, that's not a bad strategy for the virus.

00:09:08.460 That means it will stay with us forever.

00:09:10.440 Now, we may not like the sound of that, but, you know, the common cold virus is staying with us forever, and we've adapted to it.

00:09:16.600 The flu virus is staying with us, and we've adapted.

00:09:19.420 Why not coronavirus too?

00:09:21.560 Coronavirus 1, which is the SARS virus way back from 2003, 17 years ago, it's still around, even though it doesn't trouble society.

00:09:31.340 And that's the great puzzle, how these viruses can insert themselves into us.

00:09:36.820 You know, I tried to involve a philosopher at Oxford on the philosophy of why does the virus exist.

00:09:42.820 He wasn't too interested.

00:09:44.580 No, no, it's not.

00:09:45.900 And does the virus have a soul?

00:09:47.920 Can it tell between good and evil and all this sort of stuff?

00:09:50.740 Of course not.

00:09:51.480 It's a little bag.

00:09:52.580 It's the simplest form of life.

00:09:54.940 Well, and even whether it's alive or dead is contentious.

00:09:58.940 I think it's alive.

00:09:59.840 It borrows life.

00:10:01.740 On its own, it doesn't do anything.

00:10:03.520 It's in a bunch of chemicals.

00:10:04.860 Once it gets into a cell, it hijacks living processes that we have to become alive, basically.

00:10:10.600 And then it comes out again and reverts to being dead.

00:10:13.620 I know people like that.

00:10:15.600 You're talking about me.

00:10:17.760 But, Carol, just for people watching at home who are not medical experts,

00:10:25.100 compared to, let's say, the common, the flu, which kills a lot of people,

00:10:29.920 as as we now discover most medical professionals of course would have known that anyway but

00:10:36.400 ordinary people don't think of the flu as this great killer but it does kill a lot particularly

00:10:40.700 old and vulnerable people every winter especially compared to the flu the coronavirus as it is now

00:10:47.680 is it more lethal less lethal about the same do we have any sort of idea about that it's about

00:10:53.060 the same and that's the problem with it all you know and the other thing we haven't come to yet

00:10:58.640 is vaccination. We have a vaccine for the flu, but it's never very good. It's 50% effective.

00:11:05.280 And we make a lot of fuss. Some people have it, some people don't. And if you're over 60,

00:11:11.620 you get it free. For a healthcare professional, you get it free. And if you're vulnerable as a

00:11:17.620 young person at your young age, you'd also get it free. But we forget that the flu kills more

00:11:23.400 people and this has killed this year and we don't but it doesn't happen in quite the same way the

00:11:29.400 other similarity is the age difference that you know flu like Covid too is an age related that

00:11:37.800 the average age of someone that's died this year with Covid is 82 that's the average 82 exactly

00:11:45.640 it's the same with flu younger people 70 year olds um they get over it it's people with bad 0.91

00:11:52.760 lungs, previous infections that die from flu in hospital, that don't respond to the antibiotics

00:11:59.600 basically, happens every winter. And we accept that. Flu is winter related. That's one of the

00:12:06.200 big differences. COVID is not. It seems to go just even throughout the year. So as we go into winter

00:12:14.040 now, the biggest worry is that we get a second wave. I don't believe there will be, but just

00:12:19.840 imagine you get a big spike of infection around the country at the same time you get the flu and

00:12:26.240 so you get people with chest infections you can't tell the difference you've got older people some

00:12:31.780 with covid some with pneumonia because of the flu and you'll start with a whole lot of patients and

00:12:37.460 the nhs shuts down and that's the disaster and there was a very gloomy prediction report from

00:12:44.880 say, two weeks ago, predicting 85,000 deaths in the second wave and moving into winter

00:12:51.800 plashes.

00:12:52.640 And, you know, the top echelons of the NHS, they have to plan for that sort of scenario.

00:12:58.660 You have to plan for it, which would involve closing down cancer and everything again.

00:13:03.560 It would also mean, for society, closing down a lot of other things, schools, shops, pubs,

00:13:11.260 the rest of it.

00:13:12.220 And of course, that would have huge economic disaster if we had to shut down again.

00:13:17.720 So I think, you know, that's the disaster scenario, which epidemiologists like, by the way, from Ferguson downwards.

00:13:24.120 Ferguson was the half a million deaths predictor at the beginning.

00:13:28.080 And so Neil Ferguson and his colleagues.

00:13:31.200 He was slightly distracted when he was working on, as we now know.

00:13:34.100 Their importance depends on how gloomy they can be.

00:13:37.040 Right. If a politician hears, he's going to have half a million deaths to answer for, he's going to wake up and say, OK, come in here.

00:13:43.600 Tell me what I have to do. If he says, no, it'll blow over.

00:13:46.620 It'll only be 40,000. It'll all blow over and it'll all be 82 and above anyway. 0.89

00:13:51.060 And, you know, all this sort of thing. Well, that's not too bad.

00:13:54.320 We'll just ride with it. So it's it's it's very difficult.

00:13:58.460 And I've noticed the epidemiologists love it.

00:14:02.040 They they they phrase the whole thing. This is not a prediction.

00:14:06.320 This just could happen.

00:14:07.660 And I remember seeing a very funny cartoon where, you know,

00:14:12.480 it's got four boxes, and the first box is, you know, predict gloom.

00:14:19.260 I'm wrong.

00:14:20.600 They cheer.

00:14:21.480 They say, I saved you from the gloomy prognosis.

00:14:24.240 If it happens, I've told you so.

00:14:26.060 That's what happens.

00:14:27.000 If you predict no gloom, it's all going to be okay, and it goes bad,

00:14:31.280 you're fired.

00:14:32.040 So what can an epidemiologist do?

00:14:35.020 they're just body counters basically so it's it's a very strange scenario so the doctors the

00:14:41.340 actual treatment doctors like me say come on you can't do that you've got to be more realistic and

00:14:46.780 otherwise the implication of gloomy epidemiology is you shut things down you build nightingale

00:14:52.780 hospitals completely wasteful in terms of money and not thought so obviously we'll talk about the

00:14:58.740 second wave potentially and the second lockdown but let me just get something clear in my head

00:15:04.480 because I have a confusion that I know from listening to our viewers

00:15:08.360 is shared by many people, which is this.

00:15:11.100 We were told that the first lockdown, the purpose of the first lockdown,

00:15:15.620 was protect the NHS, crush the sombrero, whatever Boris Johnson said, right?

00:15:22.820 And it's about preventing the NHS from being overwhelmed.

00:15:26.700 We achieved that overwhelmingly.

00:15:29.940 The NHS is not overwhelmed.

00:15:31.160 The Nightingale Hospitals, which you just mentioned,

00:15:33.700 were essentially unused, saw almost no patients.

00:15:38.160 At the moment, the numbers of people in hospital, as you say, are very, very low.

00:15:43.560 And yet we continue to have what you might describe as quite restrictive measures,

00:15:48.640 people wearing masks indoors, social distancing.

00:15:51.980 There's certain things that you can't do, et cetera, et cetera.

00:15:55.440 If the rationale for all of these measures was to protect NHS,

00:15:59.220 why are we still doing all of this stuff?

00:16:01.180 No, it was to start with.

00:16:03.420 There's no doubt. Before Easter, Easter was about the 8th of April, and as we came up, the worry was, what happened in Italy, the health service nearly got overwhelmed.

00:16:14.480 It was overwhelmed. There was prioritization of younger versus older people in intensive care and so on.

00:16:20.500 We never got overwhelmed here. There was one hospital declared an emergency in northwest London, Northwick Park Hospital, and that's just a redistribution.

00:16:29.560 Too many people pitched up in the emergency room at the same time.

00:16:33.600 It's easy to solve.

00:16:34.720 You just go somewhere else.

00:16:35.860 You take them in ambulances somewhere else.

00:16:37.860 And so that was solved.

00:16:39.100 The problem we've got is that the problem then was you couldn't predict what was going to happen.

00:16:44.320 And so the logo, the strap line of, you know, protect the NHS, save lives, stay home, was the line that frightened everybody.

00:16:56.040 That was the line to keep people.

00:16:57.540 And, you know, older people especially were doing it because they thought they were protecting other people, protect the NHS, which implies protect them.

00:17:06.080 And, of course, cancer patients didn't come forward.

00:17:08.640 During that period of April and May, 45% reduction in the number of people having heart attacks.

00:17:14.440 Now, it can't be that it was a 45% reduction.

00:17:17.680 It's just that no one came because they suffered chest pain and didn't do anything about it.

00:17:21.820 The attendance, the emergency rate, if anything, has dropped to 50% of what it normally is.

00:17:26.860 That's because people won't get out on Saturday night.

00:17:28.800 That's why.

00:17:29.940 They didn't want to get out there.

00:17:31.220 They didn't want to go have knife fights, drug deals.

00:17:33.880 Exactly.

00:17:34.880 But as you move forward, now it's about trying to protect the whole system

00:17:41.680 from winter pressures coming.

00:17:44.440 Because the same measures of social distancing, hand washing,

00:17:47.820 mask wearing, protect you from other infections like flu.

00:17:50.980 So it's a bit of both now.

00:17:53.260 The real truth, constantly, is nobody knows what's going to happen.

00:17:57.320 Neither me as an oncologist and not the epidemiologist, nor my infectious disease colleague.

00:18:03.940 They really don't know what's going to happen.

00:18:06.280 And to me, there are really three options now the virus has got.

00:18:10.340 It can fizzle out, which is the great option.

00:18:12.560 We all want a fizzle here.

00:18:13.820 We want it just to go weak and learn to live with us, and we'll just cope with it, and that's fine.

00:18:19.520 The second option it has is local spike.

00:18:22.200 And that's what we're seeing, which are politically quite damaging, because, you know, you get this rivalry in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and trying to show that they're coping better and so on.

00:18:33.660 And, you know, when you do see a local outbreak, it's not like we're really doing that drastic measures.

00:18:40.400 We may make confusing rules.

00:18:42.780 You can't socially go and visit grandma, but you can go to a pub with grandma and have a meal in the pub.

00:18:48.520 So this makes no sense.

00:18:50.040 and what you really have to do if you really believe in in public health strategy you have

00:18:56.760 to shut the town down you have to cut off the roads put roadblocks around it close the railway

00:19:02.220 station so that's it that's what we did i'm from russia that's that way yeah exactly that's what

00:19:08.400 and what they did in italy it's one of the police roadblocks everywhere you couldn't go from north

00:19:12.620 to southern italy so no you go back uh and we haven't done that anywhere in old and all these

00:19:18.720 other places, all the Manchester suburbs that are hot. So the third thing for the virus is

00:19:25.820 the full-blown second wave. When it really comes back, the higher peak that you can't squash with

00:19:32.280 hospital admissions and intensive care flooding the system. Now, it's clear that nobody really

00:19:39.360 believes that third option is going to happen. And it probably is between the two, fizzling out

00:19:44.420 with a few local spikes, and we can cope with that.

00:19:47.280 And it's the same pattern around Europe.

00:19:49.580 The difficulty is how serious you have to take things.

00:19:53.680 Like, beginning of this week,

00:19:56.140 I remember seeing the story about the Zanchi

00:19:59.420 and the Chewy flight that came from Zanchi to Coventure to Cardiff,

00:20:05.060 and 11 people were infected on it, testing positive.

00:20:09.200 What do you do about that?

00:20:10.480 Do you suddenly close down Greece?

00:20:12.080 Do you make quarantine for everybody?

00:20:13.620 it's it's very difficult there's no right or wrong answer my own feeling is you just ignore it and

00:20:19.320 you just leave it carol what i'm getting at and i think this is a question a lot of people's minds

00:20:23.900 is you've said that the average age of death for a patient a covid patient in this country is 82

00:20:29.620 we had a period which was the summer and late spring yeah when the nhs was not overwhelmed

00:20:36.800 are we not overreacting with everything that that we're being forced to do particularly given that

00:20:42.680 there's a cost to the reaction yeah the cancer people who are not coming in to get a diagnosis

00:20:48.140 the heart attacks that are going and treated mental health alcohol abuse drug abuse child

00:20:53.040 abuse all of these things are exacerbated by people being forced to isolate there's a lack

00:20:58.360 of communication between different generations all of these things cause a problem have we not

00:21:03.340 overreacted i think we have and i think if you're taking it as a doctor we've certainly overreacted

00:21:10.260 putting too much emphasis in healthcare on COVID and removing it from the other things.

00:21:15.580 In terms of the economy, I think we've already discussed the fact that economy and health are intertwined.

00:21:21.740 You can't separate the two.

00:21:23.600 And if the economy goes down the tubes, then even people that are currently in deprivation areas,

00:21:29.540 they're going to be worse off.

00:21:31.120 They're not going to be healthier.

00:21:32.420 They're not going to...

00:21:33.020 Carol, there's a question that I really wanted to ask you.

00:21:36.360 So you're an oncologist, you're a cancer specialist.

00:21:38.360 what effect has this had on people having cancer treatments people being diagnosed with cancer

00:21:45.040 what are the real world implications of this so for people with cancer that we've known at the

00:21:50.480 beginning say you had cancer in April has it really impacted we've tried to minimize the

00:21:56.200 impact so if you're on chemotherapy or radiotherapy you got it if you're about to have surgery

00:22:01.080 except in the period in March and early April most people got it the biggest impact

00:22:07.700 which is still ongoing is on people that have got symptoms they've gone to the doctor and they

00:22:13.700 haven't really been got into a diagnostic pathway so that you only diagnose cancer by taking a

00:22:20.160 little bit of tissue called biopsy from wherever the cancer is in four common areas breast lung

00:22:25.600 prostate and colon so you've got to get in that which means doing some technique some image

00:22:32.060 ultrasound, CT scan, MR scan. And there's been a complete shutdown of all the diagnostic pathways

00:22:40.200 for far too long now. The first three months you could perhaps excuse, but some of them are still

00:22:46.280 not operating as normal. One estimate last week suggested 15 million people were actually waiting

00:22:52.600 for a diagnostic test. The problem is a lot of people have diagnostic tests and only a small

00:22:58.000 proportion thank goodness have cancer but we don't know which they are in there so um if you

00:23:03.520 take ct scans you screen maybe 100 people and only 12 or 13 will actually have cancer in there but

00:23:10.000 there's no way of prioritizing them that's so we've tried to fast track people with cancer

00:23:14.980 like symptoms but it's not like that the other problem for the nhs which is peculiar to this

00:23:20.320 country is that it's undercapacitized anyway for diagnostic tests so in france if you need a ct

00:23:26.860 scan because you've got a cough or coughed up a bit of blood, you'll get it by next week. It'll

00:23:31.180 all be sorted out by next week. Here, you may take three months. And that's normally, that was 2019

00:23:36.460 before all this happened. And so now, because of the huge backlog, if you have cancer but don't

00:23:42.940 know it, it's going to take longer to diagnose. And the danger in that is it gives cancer the

00:23:48.080 opportunity to spread. And whilst we're very good at treating localized cancer in the four main

00:23:53.340 organs, but anywhere else you have it, we're not so good if the disease starts spreading. The

00:23:58.860 outcome, the prognosis, goes down, and the treatment gets more difficult, more arduous for

00:24:05.600 the patient. So chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy, all these things which we can do,

00:24:11.400 but the prognosis is much worse if the cancer spreads out of the primary organ. And so that's

00:24:17.480 the impact of this five published papers in the uk looking at trying to quantitate that impact

00:24:23.800 and they vary from 20 000 excess deaths because of the delay to 50 000 excess deaths already and

00:24:30.460 that's the the worrying feature and we're still not back to normal uh again that our health

00:24:37.160 minister said we were nearly back to normal i would dispute that if there are 15 million people

00:24:41.700 waiting, but this is not normal, even in the NHS. You know, there aren't 15 million people in France

00:24:48.880 waiting for a diagnostic. We've really got to speed that whole thing up. And the other thing,

00:24:54.840 of course, it's not just the big diseases. There's all sorts of other diseases that we need to look

00:25:00.040 at. I mean, children with deafness, they've just been ignored. People with, you know, things that

00:25:05.800 we say, well, they can just wait, just put it on hold. Deaf children, for example, that need

00:25:11.600 hearing assessment, people with painful hips, painful knees, not urgent because they've had

00:25:17.640 pain for years, they need a hip replacement, just they'll just have to wait. The waiting list

00:25:22.080 at the best of times is often more than a year anyway. Now it's going to be two or three years

00:25:28.940 before they get the NHS to get them the operations. A lot of pain and suffering is caused by the

00:25:34.740 virus, not directly, but the indirect effects on our health service.

00:25:39.960 broadway's smash hit the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise is coming to toronto the true

00:25:47.000 story of a kid from brooklyn destined for something more featuring all the songs you love

00:25:51.760 including america forever in blue jeans and sweet caroline like jersey boys and beautiful the next

00:25:58.160 musical mega hit is here the neil diamond musical a beautiful noise now through june 7th 2026 at

00:26:05.260 the princess of wells theater get tickets at murbush.com but the number that i found staggering

00:26:12.860 there is you said that between 20 to 50 000 excess deaths as a result of the virus purely from cancer

00:26:19.980 is that correct that's correct why is this not a bigger scandal i know i keep saying everybody

00:26:25.980 it is a scandal and you know the the reason it's such a variance that 20 how can you not know

00:26:33.100 whether it's 20,000 at one end or 50,000.

00:26:35.960 And the reason is the only way to know will be next year.

00:26:39.740 And when we look back on it all,

00:26:41.100 you'll be able to look and see how the cancers behave.

00:26:44.060 We can't do it now.

00:26:45.480 We can make predictions.

00:26:46.580 And all these things are predictions for delay.

00:26:48.680 So if the delay is only one month,

00:26:50.600 it's not going to make that much difference.

00:26:52.440 If it's six months, that'll be the other end.

00:26:54.540 That'll be the 50,000 end.

00:26:56.520 And the 20,000 is about four months delay.

00:26:59.940 Altogether, the mass of cancer in this country is very simple.

00:27:04.240 There are 360,000 new patients a year, about 30,000 a month, and that means 1,000 a day.

00:27:11.420 At the moment, the cancer diagnostic rate is running at about half of that.

00:27:15.440 So it's running at about 500 a day.

00:27:17.460 So it's not that the other 500 aren't getting cancer.

00:27:21.220 COVID has suddenly prevented cancer and everyone's not getting it.

00:27:25.680 But it's just hiding the fact that these people haven't been able to get the diagnostic necessary to work on it.

00:27:32.620 So half the people who need to be tested for cancer are not getting tested.

00:27:37.460 Well, they're in the queue.

00:27:38.660 Yeah, but they're not getting it now.

00:27:40.740 They're not there now.

00:27:41.640 And they don't know it, of course.

00:27:43.440 So certain things are picked up.

00:27:45.860 So mammography, which are breasts, that's really picked up.

00:27:50.400 And because it's simple, it doesn't generate any aerosol.

00:27:53.860 aerosol. There's no touching involved necessarily, so it can be done. Your flow of patients isn't

00:28:00.380 affected by it. At the other end, you've got endoscopy, which involves putting a tube down

00:28:05.540 in the mouth or into the back passage. Down into the mouth, people are going to cough and splutter.

00:28:10.700 It generates aerosol. You've got to wear full protective clothing for the operator. You've got

00:28:16.160 to clean everything between each patient, disinfect the whole place. So instead of doing 10 endoscopies

00:28:22.940 a morning for example would be the average endoscopy list you're down to three or four a

00:28:27.420 morning so and yet you've got a backlog for for four or five months backlog so it's very difficult

00:28:33.580 at a slow pace what's the solution right you just have to work harder work longer and do what it

00:28:38.940 takes and and change the processes you know industry a pub just change the way it works

00:28:45.120 they want the revenue um you know i'm a little bit uh and a public private private sector is much

00:28:51.880 more efficient going to change public sector has the luxury of time and luxury well there's no

00:28:58.860 incentive to do anything we can discuss the problem set up a committee do a working party

00:29:04.120 write a few papers a piece of work is a paper in the nhs it's not actually doing anything

00:29:09.480 and once you've got that you know what you need it's difficult to get rid of the backlog plus

00:29:16.420 the fact the staff feel uh you know during the whole covid thing there's a lot of effort and it

00:29:22.860 was sort of i hate to say it but it was it was fun it was different from normal people pulled

00:29:27.600 together it's a great spirit and they were recognized by the public and all the heroes

00:29:32.960 the banging of spoons all that stuff great that's all gone and so now people are beginning to

00:29:40.140 complain they've been on a list they've been told to come back next month and nothing's happening

00:29:45.680 GPs, you know, the problem there is a lot of GPs just shut up shop.

00:29:50.080 They don't like me when I say this, but it's true.

00:29:52.800 Some work through.

00:29:54.600 But when you look, we have a health service at primary care base.

00:29:57.840 Why didn't they take control of the whole pandemic in reality?

00:30:01.840 All the testing should be done in GP surgeries.

00:30:04.480 It should be done in the car parks of GP surgeries.

00:30:07.220 I mean, why should people go up to Aberdeen if you live in Sussex for a test

00:30:11.720 and have a swab put in your nose when there's a perfect network

00:30:14.680 of primary care doctors, nurses, healthcare technicians in these places.

00:30:19.900 So I think that's probably what we have to get back to.

00:30:22.560 And why is it that it's now taboo to criticise lockdown,

00:30:28.160 to criticise the government's handling of it,

00:30:30.680 to even say that maybe our reaction was overblown,

00:30:33.840 especially when there's numbers of the excess deaths that you've just quoted?

00:30:38.960 I mean, if we were in a dictatorial state, we'd all be arrested.

00:30:42.280 they'd be breaking the doors down.

00:30:44.600 The Polic side would be at the gates out there

00:30:47.780 and breaking you down.

00:30:48.860 But you say that.

00:30:50.020 There's footage of this pregnant woman 0.98

00:30:51.680 being arrested in Australia.

00:30:53.520 I know. I've seen it.

00:30:54.940 I think that's the overabuse of power.

00:30:59.040 And I think that's...

00:31:00.140 On the whole, in Britain, we've handled it very...

00:31:03.460 I must say, I think the police have handled it

00:31:05.560 as well as they could.

00:31:07.200 If there was good footage,

00:31:09.680 it would certainly be on mainstream media.

00:31:11.520 and we haven't seen it.

00:31:13.500 And a few people got arrested.

00:31:16.560 People with raves and so on,

00:31:19.500 no one's too sympathetic about that.

00:31:21.600 What you do object to is,

00:31:23.740 there was one, I saw something right at the beginning

00:31:26.480 when we were in proper lockdown,

00:31:28.180 some little old lady was made to open a shopping bag 1.00

00:31:30.800 at a police checkpoint to see if she'd really been shopping. 0.97

00:31:33.720 That just seems ridiculous.

00:31:35.640 If you allow people to go shopping, 0.76

00:31:37.480 you just have to assume they're going to take

00:31:38.900 their own responsibility where they've really been shopping

00:31:41.320 or gone to visit someone.

00:31:42.820 It's not policeable, this whole thing.

00:31:45.460 And I think that is an abuse of power.

00:31:48.320 And I'm sure reading about a police

00:31:51.540 that broke up a child's birthday party somewhere,

00:31:54.480 this is just not what police want to do.

00:31:56.700 You imagine, you're hands up, you're surrounded.

00:32:00.140 We've got tear gas wagons, we've got water can

00:32:02.880 and we're going to bust up your party.

00:32:05.160 There's a little five-year-old girl in tears.

00:32:07.800 This is not how we handle it here.

00:32:09.920 And on the whole, it's been handled really well, I think.

00:32:12.700 The difficulty is that the politicians maybe get a kick out of power,

00:32:17.220 and it's the taste of power you don't normally have.

00:32:20.360 Emergency regulations always give people more power than they.

00:32:23.740 Public health guys, the same.

00:32:25.440 Imagine some overzealous public health inspector in a council.

00:32:31.100 His moment of glory, you can come and put a black cross on your door, 0.76

00:32:34.120 and that's it, you're finished.

00:32:35.540 You know, even yesterday at the hospital, I was going around the straight mandible hospital and I was not wearing my mask properly.

00:32:48.540 This is a confession. I don't normally make confessions on TV, but I'm telling you.

00:32:52.540 And it was just after my nose was visible. And this very nice lady, a nurse in a sister's uniform came and showed me her card. 0.88

00:33:02.540 an infection control nurse.

00:33:04.960 I said, yes, your mask is not on your nose.

00:33:08.160 I thought you'd put it back.

00:33:09.340 I said, thank you.

00:33:10.180 And she walked off. 0.99

00:33:11.040 I thought, brilliant.

00:33:12.100 Imagine if she could get, you know, you are surrounded.

00:33:15.920 Put your mask on, you'll be arrested.

00:33:18.700 Well, we joke about it, but sometimes in my more paranoid moments,

00:33:22.780 I think, are we going to arrive at that point?

00:33:26.360 No, I think we're going to get out of it before we get there.

00:33:28.980 Well, let's talk about that, Kurt, because you've said repeatedly

00:33:31.780 that you don't think there's going to be a second wave.

00:33:35.600 Isn't there some evidence that this is a sort of seasonal disease

00:33:38.640 that is likely to make a comeback?

00:33:40.440 Or have all the people who are going to sort of get it and die from it

00:33:43.560 already got it and died from it?

00:33:44.940 Well, the two things are the main bulk of vulnerable people

00:33:51.080 already suffered and gone, and that's one thing.

00:33:54.880 And the second thing is the virus changing to be more amenable

00:33:58.980 to live with us and not to cause severe infection and cause the lung damage that results in death

00:34:05.520 via intensive care units and so on. So we really just don't know. And time will tell. The next few

00:34:13.120 weeks are critical. As we increase testing and as we increase risk, schools going back does increase

00:34:20.700 the risk. But, you know, it's the first week's too early to tell. We'll know by the end of next week

00:34:26.440 how many schools have to shut because of it hopefully none and then as we go forward as

00:34:32.300 more and more offices open especially in london we'll see if you look at the last few weeks

00:34:36.840 london's become we just take london because that's where we are now but i'm sure it's the

00:34:41.920 same for all major cities um it's opened up and we've not seen any change i mean nothing's happened

00:34:48.940 basically certainly the emergency rooms are empty which is the best indicator of severe disease so

00:34:54.900 I think we're going to go forward with that.

00:34:57.920 Now, we've kept mentioning, we may as well talk about it now, I guess, the second wave concept.

00:35:02.800 The second wave comes from influenza, where we talk about Spanish flu.

00:35:09.280 It wasn't in Spain, really.

00:35:10.640 It was in France and Germany and Britain, but it's called Spanish because Spain was a neutral country in the First World War.

00:35:17.000 And therefore, the military and the censorship in the countries at war meant they couldn't talk about their military strength being wiped out by flu.

00:35:28.080 More people died of flu in the First World War.

00:35:31.060 More servicemen died of flu in the First World War than by enemy action, which is amazing.

00:35:35.940 I only learned that relatively recently.

00:35:38.060 So when we move forward with the Spanish flu, the first wave killed about 5 million people,

00:35:45.820 and the second wave, 50 million people.

00:35:48.060 So that was just massive, which, if you remember, well, you don't remember, nor do I.

00:35:53.420 The population of the world is a fraction of what it is now.

00:35:57.620 50 million people in 1918, in a massive percentage of the total population.

00:36:03.020 If you take the age group, it was tragic.

00:36:04.760 and so

00:36:06.360 the second wave

00:36:08.660 then there was a third and fourth wave

00:36:10.500 and it's to do with the fact

00:36:12.700 that winter came along

00:36:13.920 and because flu is a winter disease

00:36:16.840 that just produced the right

00:36:18.940 conditions for the flu

00:36:20.160 this isn't 1918

00:36:22.140 we've got better technology

00:36:23.700 we've got antibiotics now

00:36:25.920 which they didn't have then

00:36:27.160 and of course it's

00:36:29.280 COVID-2

00:36:31.540 which isn't seasonal

00:36:33.140 on the whole. It's constant throughout. So we're not so worried about it in winter. We are worried

00:36:39.220 about, of course, getting overwhelmed by winter pressures, which is due to flu, coming at the

00:36:44.900 same time if we can't get rid of the CoV-2. If you look at countries that are a little bit further

00:36:50.580 along, so there are three countries that opened up at mid-April, 14th of April, and that was

00:36:58.260 was Austria, Czech Republic, and Denmark.

00:37:01.520 They all opened at that time.

00:37:03.480 When I say opened, they opened schools,

00:37:05.280 they opened pubs, restaurants, all of a sudden.

00:37:07.740 And we look at what's happened there.

00:37:09.780 There has been a rise, but rather like here,

00:37:12.740 it's a slow rise and it's now coming down again.

00:37:15.520 And the predictors is that they've got away with it.

00:37:19.180 Certainly no second wave in hospitalisation,

00:37:22.320 which is the key thing.

00:37:23.300 That's all that matters in reality,

00:37:25.520 especially if the rise is due to better testing and more frequent testing picking up people

00:37:32.160 can i put to your hypothetical and it will take some time to sort of set out but we've said that

00:37:37.960 the initial lockdown that we've had and the other responses were a bit of an overreaction i think

00:37:43.100 that's fair to say if there is contrary to your predictions which we believe but but if you if

00:37:50.280 you're not right and there is a second wave what would be the appropriate response to that given

00:37:56.660 everything that we have talked about with francis where it's hard to say what's done more damage

00:38:01.780 covid or the lockdown what would be the right reaction in that situation as long as the

00:38:06.600 hospitalizations are not going as long as people are not getting out we just carry on just keep

00:38:11.500 everything open keep the schools open keep workplace open obviously pubs shops restaurants

00:38:17.280 as normal life goes on.

00:38:20.080 And every week or two, we're adding to it.

00:38:23.480 We're adding the risk.

00:38:24.560 I mean, probably the last thing to go

00:38:26.420 is spectator sports and things like opera.

00:38:30.160 I mean, just because you're generating aerosol

00:38:33.160 when people sing,

00:38:34.500 and you've got a crowd in front of you.

00:38:36.400 Similarly, if you play at Wembley,

00:38:38.660 a football match with a crowd,

00:38:40.620 you're generating a lot of people shouting,

00:38:42.680 standing up and so on.

00:38:44.080 And you can't get away from that.

00:38:45.900 You can hardly ask the audience to shut up.

00:38:48.400 There's no shouting.

00:38:49.600 You're going to wear a plaster around your mouth for the whole of the match. 0.62

00:38:53.840 So we have this ridiculous vision of football where you've got artificial applause. 0.97

00:38:59.240 I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous to watch and listen to. 0.72

00:39:03.620 And sometimes it gets out of sync with where the ball is.

00:39:06.620 That's the strangest thing.

00:39:08.020 But I think moving forward, what will happen is that society has already got used to it.

00:39:16.200 People of all ages have got used to it.

00:39:18.220 There's an extreme with older people. 0.94

00:39:20.320 A lot of people are frightened.

00:39:22.400 And that's partly the government's fault.

00:39:24.660 They frightened them right at the beginning for this protect the NHS, which was unnecessary.

00:39:29.840 And that means they're too frightened still to go back to normal society.

00:39:33.740 And we've got to get back to normal.

00:39:35.300 But, again, you get the gloom and doom, but it's time you see them everywhere.

00:39:41.080 Good Morning Britain, ITV, morning television, daytime television.

00:39:46.440 I've been on a couple of times now, and their resident doctor, he's always predicting in two weeks there'll be the second wave.

00:39:53.420 He said that a month ago, and luckily it's not.

00:39:56.140 But let's say that there is, and there are more hospitalizations, and we start to see that coming back.

00:40:01.120 What should the government do in that situation?

00:40:03.640 OK, so that would be the doomsday scenario.

00:40:06.800 Yes.

00:40:07.200 Which if hospitalizations go up, ICU admissions go up, 85,000 deaths happen, just like the gloomy epidemiologist prediction, we would have to take action.

00:40:17.480 Now, can we do it without lockdown? That's the question. Can we just blast away?

00:40:22.180 Sweden did it without any lockdown. Well, it's not true they did it without lockdown.

00:40:26.500 They did it with social distancing and they did it with hand washing and all those.

00:40:30.860 And Sweden is a very, very disciplined country.

00:40:34.880 I mean, the whole of Scandinavia is very disciplined.

00:40:39.260 We're not so disciplined.

00:40:41.080 We're freer spirits, I guess.

00:40:43.820 We're more revolting against the sort of things we've been talking about.

00:40:50.060 We don't like it.

00:40:51.120 And so imagine if you really locked down this part of London

00:40:55.040 and put the roadblocks up.

00:40:56.400 You're legit.

00:40:57.340 I mean, you can't get out of your flat.

00:40:58.960 You can't leave your studio.

00:41:00.600 This will be terrible.

00:41:01.900 So I think what will happen if we do get a lot of hospitalisation,

00:41:06.640 there will be a sort of a balance.

00:41:07.820 It will never be as bad as it was in April, March, April.

00:41:11.780 But we may see some.

00:41:13.680 Now, the other thing we may see is local, more serious local lockdown.

00:41:18.940 What's curious, the Leicester, which we've well studied now,

00:41:22.380 not a blip in hospital admissions in Leicester.

00:41:25.200 So you can see the classic dome-shaped curve for infection in Leicester

00:41:29.560 going up and going right down again now and look at hospital admission just flat throughout the

00:41:34.600 whole thing so totally different if you look at leicester way back in in march and april when

00:41:40.560 the missions went up and the numbers went up so something different happening so i i think

00:41:46.900 it's a hypothetical question as you say constantly but it's likely uh that it's not going to happen

00:41:53.360 but if it did happen we'd have to reconsider the strategy i mean polishes would have to look

00:41:58.060 and how they could do some sort of local shift in policy.

00:42:02.640 And Carol, I know that you are not a psychiatrist,

00:42:06.140 but I do want to talk about...

00:42:08.140 I did half a day.

00:42:09.240 I did half a day.

00:42:10.680 You want some personal help.

00:42:12.440 Yeah, I do.

00:42:13.100 I'm a comedian.

00:42:13.900 We're all unhinged to one degree or another.

00:42:16.160 But we don't seem to be talking about mental health enough

00:42:20.100 when it comes to the lockdown, I feel,

00:42:22.820 and the impact it has had on people and the public as a whole.

00:42:26.420 I read a stat that apparently, according to the National Office of Statistics,

00:42:31.800 that depression has more than doubled.

00:42:35.600 One of the problems with mental health,

00:42:39.100 and we do ridiculous small amounts when you're a medical student,

00:42:42.800 then you forget it until something happens,

00:42:45.020 and you've got a mad patient and you're stuck trying to work out what to do.

00:42:48.940 The problem with mental health is so difficult to measure the severity.

00:42:53.340 So depression is a great example.

00:42:55.580 someone comes in i'm depressed doctor so what do i do how do i measure how serious this person is

00:43:02.040 or someone says i want to kill myself so you get into the suicide conversation so how can you assess

00:43:08.160 is it serious i remember there was a lady about when i was a young doctor i did general practice

00:43:14.200 for several weekends and i'd go out and the lady about to jump off a build from the the high ledge 1.00

00:43:20.300 above a pub in Whitehall,

00:43:23.160 the White Cross, the Silver Cross,

00:43:25.800 the Silver Cross in Wales.

00:43:27.360 And I phoned up 999

00:43:29.140 because I couldn't handle it myself.

00:43:31.680 And I said, well, how serious is it?

00:43:33.260 I said, well, she's sitting on the ledge.

00:43:37.000 I've been called as a doctor

00:43:38.300 and we need to get help.

00:43:39.360 We need to get an ambulance

00:43:40.220 and probably the fire brigade here.

00:43:42.360 But it's very difficult to assess how serious.

00:43:45.000 So when you say depression's gone up,

00:43:47.360 if you ask people, how do you feel today?

00:43:49.540 and you give them a scale, a linear analog scale,

00:43:52.540 mark here, or number of smiles on a thing.

00:43:55.860 So there's the number of smiles, lots of smiles,

00:43:58.120 you're not depressed, or the other way around.

00:44:01.060 Lots of sad faces, you're depressed.

00:44:03.060 Lots of happy faces, you're not depressed.

00:44:06.240 It's a very crude measurement of the reality of depression.

00:44:10.340 But I think very good indicators of suicide rate going up,

00:44:13.760 that's pretty extreme, child abuse going up,

00:44:16.420 because it is a form of mental aberration, if you like,

00:44:19.340 It's not normal family to beat children up or to harm children.

00:44:24.940 And then the other thing is how many people actually got admitted

00:44:28.460 to mental institutions, sectioned, the compulsory, detention, much fewer.

00:44:34.840 And the reason for that, of course, is the whole system is broken.

00:44:38.120 People weren't called. Psychiatrists weren't called.

00:44:42.860 Psychosocial workers weren't, psychiatric social workers weren't called

00:44:46.760 to go and section people.

00:44:48.320 So, again, when this is all over, probably not till September, it may not be over.

00:44:56.040 Well, we're in September now, aren't we?

00:44:57.480 We are, you're right.

00:44:58.620 I was forgetting.

00:44:59.460 We've moved on.

00:45:00.440 When I say when it's over, when we can actually collect all the data, just like cancer, you can look at mental health of the nation and look through it.

00:45:08.240 And what will be fascinating is to compare it with other countries, to start looking at the same thing in other countries.

00:45:14.580 who've handled it differently, the timing's been different,

00:45:17.800 the enforcement's been different.

00:45:20.520 And, you know, I have a granddaughter that lives in Peru,

00:45:23.260 and that's a military police state.

00:45:25.560 It's strictly enforced.

00:45:27.060 You can't go out without a permit and that sort of thing.

00:45:29.660 People stop you, and you get fined if you do.

00:45:32.700 And so we've never had that here.

00:45:34.680 And that generates its own mental health problems.

00:45:37.600 Essentially, feeling locked up for six months is not a good feeling.

00:45:41.600 But, yeah, so that's the problem with mental health.

00:45:47.080 And there's also a question that we talk about stats and data,

00:45:50.880 we talk about excess deaths, but then it came to the fore

00:45:54.320 that actually the data that has been used by everybody isn't even reliable.

00:45:58.860 I think the worst one has been the deaths.

00:46:02.460 Public Health England, which has met its own demise over this whole issue,

00:46:07.120 it was only pointed out two months ago

00:46:09.240 The death figures were greatly exaggerated, and it was a simple error.

00:46:14.720 What they were doing, if you'd been tested positive,

00:46:17.460 you were flagged up on one register as positive,

00:46:20.880 and then if you died and the computer matched the two,

00:46:24.060 wherever you'd had your test in positive, you were called a COVID death.

00:46:28.600 So if you walked out of the hospital having been tested positive,

00:46:31.480 got hit by a bus, you'd die from COVID? 0.88

00:46:33.320 If you died of terminal cancer, you died with an axe in your head 1.00

00:46:37.800 because your wife didn't like you anymore. 1.00

00:46:40.740 Talking about my future there.

00:46:42.340 Yeah, exactly.

00:46:43.440 You got all these things. 0.96

00:46:45.380 And so the number, it was ridiculous. 0.79

00:46:47.900 And so then they tried to say,

00:46:49.080 well, let's do it 60 days after testing positive.

00:46:52.420 And then, so there was the 60-day death.

00:46:54.960 And then they made it 28 days,

00:46:56.740 which is much more realistic.

00:46:58.360 If you test positive, you die within 28 days.

00:47:00.820 It doesn't get you up from being run over by a bus,

00:47:03.580 but it's less likely.

00:47:04.780 It's more likely to be COVID than other things.

00:47:06.900 but none of it was based and no one understood that even the health minister didn't understand

00:47:12.520 that when he was quoting these deaths they weren't based on the reality and at one point

00:47:17.880 at four weeks ago they had to change the number downwards it was embarrassing it appeared on the

00:47:23.280 WHO website and it said Britain 46,000 a week ago and now only 41,000 deaths so where have the 5,000

00:47:32.840 gone. Well, they're wrongly attributed to COVID. That was a little byline there. So measurement is

00:47:39.160 key because if we are going to make comparisons, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and us,

00:47:47.360 we need to make sure we're comparing apples with apples and not apples and oranges. So we've got

00:47:52.060 to get these numbers. The same with the infection rate. We've got to make sure we're comparing the

00:47:57.080 same thing. And, you know, if you go and collect people in London where the infection rate is

00:48:02.660 probably about one in 60,000 of us has it.

00:48:05.220 So you never find someone, one in 60,000.

00:48:08.020 The chance of you finding someone this afternoon

00:48:10.220 down the commercial road that has COVID is almost zelch.

00:48:14.700 But if we go to an area where you know

00:48:17.100 there's a lot of people that are positive

00:48:19.060 just in the last few days,

00:48:20.820 then you're much more likely to find it.

00:48:22.720 There may be one in every 20 people that's got COVID.

00:48:25.540 So put nose swabs up, collect saliva, you'll find it.

00:48:29.300 So it can bias the numbers.

00:48:32.660 whichever way you want to so looking at everything that's happened there's been mistakes makes

00:48:40.860 there's been good decisions made what do you think should be the lessons learned that we have so far

00:48:47.200 from this whole episode i think the first lesson is to strengthen public health communication i

00:48:54.500 i had no idea as a as a consultant that this was really going on till about february and i thought

00:49:00.800 would just blow away. I mean, I couldn't believe what happened in the end. And so we've got to

00:49:07.120 prepare for the same thing happening again in exactly the same way. And we've got to prepare

00:49:12.300 for it in a way that doesn't involve lockdown. Can we do it without locking down all services,

00:49:18.120 and including health services? Can we do it in a way that maintains the emergency function for

00:49:23.880 an infection without closing down the system the second thing is is much better public education

00:49:31.700 about what to do and and then the third thing is the politicians probably should stay out of it

00:49:40.120 i mean it was dominated by the boris you know these boris or some other deputy of boris is

00:49:47.220 standing in the centre, flanked by his undertakers,

00:49:51.280 Chris Whitty and the chief scientists often,

00:49:55.000 dressed in black suits and black ties

00:49:57.920 as though they're the executioners of the country.

00:50:00.860 And I think it's not a political thing.

00:50:03.240 He needs one guy to take control of it

00:50:05.860 and say this is a spokesman for the medical profession

00:50:08.360 like Anthony Fauci did in the States,

00:50:10.500 although him and Trump are just bizarre to watch,

00:50:13.480 because Trump is a bizarre character.

00:50:15.120 But I think that's the way forward.

00:50:19.280 And, you know, the health service really should have kept going

00:50:24.040 for everything else throughout the whole thing.

00:50:26.980 And then you get things like nightingales,

00:50:30.560 which were based on the gloomy predictions of the epidemiologists

00:50:34.520 and proved to be a complete waste of time.

00:50:37.640 Oh, sure, 40 patients were admitted to the one near here.

00:50:41.500 But that was just tokenism to show it could be done.

00:50:45.120 And even that project wasn't thought through, but the way you're going to get the staff from, you're going to have to take them to the existing hospital. You're not going to recruit staff in the timeframe to suddenly open it. Staff with a limiting factor in healthcare has always been so, always will.

00:51:00.080 so a question that a lot of ordinary people will be asking is when do we get back to normal and i

00:51:09.140 don't mean new normal i mean normal where we meet we shake hands we don't wear you know masks to go

00:51:15.960 to a supermarket and then you walk out of the supermarket go into a pub and you're fine to sit

00:51:19.900 with people like all of these things that don't make any sense no when do we get back to actual

00:51:25.180 normal. My prediction

00:51:27.320 is 1st of January, we'd be back

00:51:29.200 to normal, when you can get rid of everything.

00:51:31.380 No social distancing,

00:51:33.220 all those silly signs everywhere, and we'd go

00:51:35.160 on the London Transport. I mean, they put 0.67

00:51:37.120 a lot of effort into it, you know, they had

00:51:39.220 to, but I think it's

00:51:41.240 an overreaction, you know.

00:51:43.360 If the virus is on that tube, it's going to

00:51:45.160 get you, whether you're two metres or five

00:51:47.140 metres, as the tube's clouded,

00:51:49.200 you're going to get the virus, and it's there.

00:51:51.780 So, I think

00:51:53.300 January is the time to 0.94

00:51:55.160 New year, new vision, new normal.

00:51:59.000 It sounds great.

00:52:00.580 But what do you think we need to see in terms of the data to facilitate?

00:52:06.740 Because putting a date on it is sort of a little arbitrary, isn't it?

00:52:09.660 Whereas I think, I guess, a more interesting way of looking at it might be

00:52:13.880 what needs to happen with the virus in order for us to feel comfortable doing it.

00:52:18.700 Obviously, number one would be a vaccine.

00:52:20.740 If we get that, that sort of takes care of it.

00:52:23.240 Is that broadly accurate?

00:52:24.800 I mean, vaccine is not necessarily the answer

00:52:29.580 because first of all, it may take longer than we think.

00:52:31.840 It's got to be completely safe before any of the regulators

00:52:34.460 will allow it, otherwise they'll be pummeled

00:52:36.740 if it causes some bizarre neurological degenerative syndrome,

00:52:40.500 for example.

00:52:40.960 That doesn't sound good.

00:52:42.080 No.

00:52:42.500 It's not that I get caught in this one.

00:52:44.380 Exactly.

00:52:45.200 This is one of the complications of viruses, of vaccines,

00:52:48.560 especially if they're not fully tested.

00:52:50.860 But more importantly, it's not worked for the flu, really,

00:52:53.620 and it's not worked for SARS, so it may not work for this,

00:52:57.460 in a way that we hope.

00:52:58.780 It'll have partial immunity, but it'll help,

00:53:01.480 but it may not be the only solution.

00:53:03.440 The effort to vaccinate millions of people is quite significant.

00:53:08.840 But I think by January, we'll be in a much better place.

00:53:13.020 As long as the hospitalizations stay down, we can experiment.

00:53:16.340 We can start removing things like the masks

00:53:19.760 and like the social distancing.

00:53:23.220 Hand washing is not a bad idea.

00:53:25.600 The shaking hands, if you wash your hands, then it's fine, you know.

00:53:29.160 So I think we'll get back to normal quicker than we think,

00:53:32.540 and people will stop being scared.

00:53:35.180 What I find amazing is children.

00:53:37.340 I have six grandchildren.

00:53:38.800 I look at them and talk to them.

00:53:40.400 They're not frightened about it.

00:53:41.680 They're fine.

00:53:42.980 Well, they're pretty much immune.

00:53:44.280 Yeah, exactly.

00:53:45.300 So they've got no reason to be frightened.

00:53:46.980 But some of them would be locked up, you know.

00:53:49.180 Yeah.

00:53:49.700 Oh, yeah.

00:53:49.980 And so, but they haven't a better understanding.

00:53:53.920 Because children are much more adaptable than we are.

00:53:56.520 In wartime, children just went through it with bombs going off and no problem.

00:54:00.860 I mean, some of them had psychological scars, but they tolerated it.

00:54:04.540 And people from war zones, children, adapt to it all.

00:54:07.640 Whereas, yeah.

00:54:09.420 And what do you think about the New Zealand's position

00:54:14.680 in that they've taken extreme lockdowns?

00:54:17.300 The moment they got four cases, I think it was everything shut,

00:54:21.300 literally everything.

00:54:22.480 France has been wanting to close the borders for a long time.

00:54:26.400 But no, do you agree with that approach to it

00:54:30.140 or do you see it as being a huge overreaction?

00:54:32.400 I think that's a huge overreaction.

00:54:34.700 I mean, they're now getting cases because cases are coming

00:54:38.020 and that's the problem.

00:54:40.520 I haven't looked at the New Zealand filigons for the last two weeks, 1.00

00:54:43.160 but I gather they're bouncing back a bit

00:54:45.960 because they get people coming, whether they're legal or not legal,

00:54:49.980 they come and the figures start going up.

00:54:53.560 The countries that, if you look at the countries of the world,

00:54:57.620 they've all had slightly different strategies,

00:54:59.680 but the trouble is how firm was the policy

00:55:03.980 of not admitting people from a broad unit?

00:55:06.820 Because returning residents have always been allowed back.

00:55:09.480 So if you're a New Zealander and you come back from somewhere,

00:55:12.640 you're allowed in, and you may have to quarantine,

00:55:15.520 but how effective is that quarantine?

00:55:18.360 If you want to do it properly,

00:55:19.780 you've got to take people straight off the plane into a camp.

00:55:22.660 Remember the pictures at the very beginning of all this

00:55:25.720 of people coming from...

00:55:27.520 Where were they coming from now?

00:55:29.880 They were coming from Wuhan.

00:55:31.080 They were coming from China.

00:55:32.420 And they were bussed from Bryce Norton to the Milton Keynes

00:55:36.180 to accommodation in Milton Keynes

00:55:38.520 and kept there for two weeks.

00:55:40.220 And that was before they had any compulsory detention laws.

00:55:43.520 the laws and that was the first we saw of it seemed like years ago yeah it does so how firm

00:55:50.980 your quarantine is how firm your policing of the border and if you allow residents in who knows 0.99

00:55:57.420 what's going to happen that's what's probably happened in new zealand because it's also as

00:56:01.460 well is that we don't know that how long the virus has been here so for instance i was still a teacher

00:56:06.440 in in the december time and i remember around about january this there was a thread on twitter

00:56:12.440 with assistant heads and head teachers

00:56:15.320 talking about having COVID-like symptoms.

00:56:18.800 And we discussed ourselves about them.

00:56:21.020 I think I had it in mid-February.

00:56:22.500 I had all the symptoms.

00:56:23.760 There was a case in France in December, wasn't there?

00:56:26.540 There were cases in France.

00:56:28.460 There was even cases in November

00:56:29.960 at a shooting party in Worcestershire, believe it or not.

00:56:34.860 Really?

00:56:35.580 Wiltshire.

00:56:36.820 And there were three cases out of six.

00:56:42.440 people that stayed in a big country house and they've proven positive i mean how it all arose

00:56:47.960 and how it spread most likely scenario it rose in wuhan somehow whether it was your full great

00:56:53.740 outdoors comedy festival lineup is here on september 11th through 13th at arendale park

00:56:59.420 three nights five shows huge laughs september 11th through 13th buy tickets now at great

00:57:06.080 outdoors comedy festival.com do you have any unorthodox thoughts on the origins of the virus

00:57:12.100 yeah you mean it was an escape from the laboratory yeah it was a weaponized virus it was a research

00:57:19.240 program to weaponize the virus it escaped probably accidentally the viruses do escape

00:57:24.760 people break the safety rules don't wear gloves or don't wear whatever you need to wear and the

00:57:31.040 virus got out and then you know i like to think it's it's a luxury virus it went straight down

00:57:36.420 the airport road to the first class lounge and then went put me first class around the world

00:57:41.420 All its little friends, all its little viruses, said goodbye with their little suitcases and went off.

00:57:47.100 And they went first class because they could meet fat people, they could meet rich people,

00:57:51.800 they could meet people that were old, because older people can travel because they have more money than young,

00:57:57.700 and they shifted it.

00:57:59.000 And before we finish, the one thing I'd really like to say, because it reminds me of that,

00:58:03.800 that one of the economic consequences that the mainstream media don't bring out

00:58:08.840 is this business of generational theft,

00:58:11.840 which has now been increased.

00:58:14.180 The generational theft comes...

00:58:15.700 People my age had free education completely.

00:58:19.140 My kids had more or less free.

00:58:21.380 I think I just bought the £1,000 fee a year

00:58:24.000 for university education for the youngest.

00:58:27.380 Then we've had house prices that every time...

00:58:29.920 My first house was £12,000.

00:58:31.820 Imagine that.

00:58:32.760 Get out.

00:58:35.600 And you sell it for £60,000,

00:58:38.040 then you get the next one for £70,000, then you sell that for, you know, so it goes on up.

00:58:46.180 So all my generation, and we've had end scheme pensions, final year pensions,

00:58:53.760 whereas your generation is not going to have that. It's not possible.

00:58:57.680 Now what happens with COVID, of course, it disproportionately affects the younger people

00:59:01.660 whose education has been stopped, younger than you, education has been abruptly stopped,

00:59:07.260 and there are just going to be no jobs to get started.

00:59:11.000 So all those graduates that are out there,

00:59:13.420 a lot of them were promised internships.

00:59:16.580 They may get their internship because it's free.

00:59:18.360 They may get the SUNAC scholarships or whatever they call it in government,

00:59:23.680 but they're not going to have a proper job.

00:59:25.640 So with that in mind then, before we ask our last question,

00:59:29.800 should we have done and should we in the future in a similar situation

00:59:35.260 shield the vulnerable, shield the elderly,

00:59:37.980 and allow the rest of society to get on it with their lives as normal.

00:59:41.440 Is that the right solution here?

00:59:42.660 That seems a good solution.

00:59:44.900 I think you've got to give a free choice to people.

00:59:48.240 It's educational messaging.

00:59:50.160 If you're over 70, consider your health, for example.

00:59:53.620 If you're a fit, active 70-year-old, just carry about your business.

00:59:58.340 But remember, you are at greater risk than if you were 50.

01:00:01.460 And it's up to you what you decide to do.

01:00:03.520 not to try and enforce it, not to say every 70-year-old is on the street 1.00

01:00:08.420 and shoot at sight, shoot to kill him. 1.00

01:00:12.540 ID, sir, boom. 1.00

01:00:15.200 And that's the way forward.

01:00:18.580 And that protects them, and so the others can do whatever they want

01:00:24.560 because they're not likely to be seriously damaged.

01:00:26.820 So if a young person's on chemotherapy, for example, for cancer,

01:00:30.020 So then they should be prepared to protect themselves by isolating from the rest.

01:00:35.960 But it's mainly about avoiding crowds where you don't control your meetings.

01:00:40.260 So going to a shop, you have no control on social distance.

01:00:43.960 Whereas in your garden, you have perfect control on social distance.

01:00:48.480 And thank you so much for coming on the show.

01:00:51.100 It's proved incredibly enlightening.

01:00:52.800 The last question we always finish with is,

01:00:55.680 what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:01:00.420 So we're not talking about death.

01:01:03.240 And Western society never talks about death.

01:01:07.160 And it's become even more difficult with the demise of organized religion.

01:01:12.300 So organized religion, Church of England, whatever,

01:01:15.200 not just Christianity, but all the religions.

01:01:18.880 At the moment, we sort of blank it out of our lives.

01:01:23.080 There is no end to it.

01:01:24.500 We're going to go on forever.

01:01:25.680 We're eternal beings.

01:01:27.940 And I think that's what we've seen with this.

01:01:31.300 I've got a Twitter account, as you know, and if I mention death,

01:01:35.820 it's like a whole load of bees suddenly come from it saying you're being unpleasant mentioning death.

01:01:42.900 And I guess doctors are closer to death than most people.

01:01:46.820 If you're a cancer doctor, a lot of your patients are going to die.

01:01:49.460 You have to accept it.

01:01:51.120 But I think we don't talk about it in a meaningful way.

01:01:54.500 and we don't accept it and i think it's become a failure it's a failure for the medical establishment

01:02:02.060 if someone dies it's a failure for the politicians the death rate goes up and i think it's really

01:02:08.400 reflected in the conversation we've had if the average age of death is 82 for covid person then

01:02:16.080 that is actually very close to the average age of death in the uk anyway which is 82.3

01:02:22.440 so you're not actually taking life away but look at what we have taken away from

01:02:27.480 people so maybe the balance of death is not too bad a thing and it's now the

01:02:33.940 problem is you get the argument is well I'll carry on being harsh because you

01:02:38.040 know there'll be 40-year-old people in their prime with no comorbidities they've

01:02:41.720 also died well that's the nature of things we cross a road a certain

01:02:45.400 proportion of people get flattened by the bus coming by that's always gonna

01:02:48.780 to happen. You don't close the road because it will stop the buses travelling. So it's getting

01:02:53.620 a balance of risk in there. But death has got to become an acceptable outcome for people. It is in

01:03:00.100 hospices. That's the only place it is. It's not out there in society. That's such a good point.

01:03:06.860 I'm glad you make that point because I feel like on a lot of the response to this virus,

01:03:12.400 the thinking has been very one-dimensional,

01:03:15.620 very one-dimensional.

01:03:18.520 We'll save lives, as the slogan was.

01:03:21.420 But how many lives are now affected by the other things?

01:03:25.240 And I'm really glad we've had a chance

01:03:26.960 to discuss that with you.

01:03:28.440 Professor Sikora, thank you so much for coming on.

01:03:30.700 If people want to follow your commentary,

01:03:33.040 the things that you're putting,

01:03:34.260 where do they go to find that?

01:03:35.980 Prof. Sikora on Twitter.

01:03:38.560 And two or three a day is about the most I can make.

01:03:41.740 yeah fantastic well thank you very much for coming on and thank you for watching we will

01:03:46.180 see you very soon with another live stream or episode and they all go out at 7 p.m uk time

01:03:51.580 take care and see you soon guys bye

TRIGGERnometry - September 09, 2020

＂Lockdown Was an Overreaction＂ - Professor Karol Sikora

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