May 2, 2020 - 12:41pm
As he is careful to point out, Professor Michael Levitt is not an epidemiologist. He’s Professor of Structural Biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” He’s a numbers guy — as he told us in our interview, his wife says he loves numbers more than her — but then, much of modern science is really about statistics (as his detractors never tire of pointing out, Professor Neil Ferguson is a theoretical physicist by training).
With a purely statistical perspective, he has been playing close attention to the Covid-19 pandemic since January, when most of us were not even aware of it. He first spoke out in early February, when through analysing the numbers of cases and deaths in Hubei province he predicted with remarkable accuracy that the epidemic in that province would top out at around 3,250 deaths.
His observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes “sub-exponential”.
This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The ‘unmitigated’ scenarios modelled by (among others) Imperial College, and which tilted governments across the world into drastic action, relied on a presumption of continued exponential growth — that with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate, very quickly the majority of the population would be infected and huge numbers of deaths would be recorded. But Professor Levitt’s point is that that hasn’t actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.
He takes specific issue with the Neil Ferguson paper. “In a footnote to a table it said, assuming exponential growth of 15% for six days. Now I had looked at China and had never seen exponential growth that wasn’t decaying rapidly.”
The explanation for this flattening that we are used to is that social distancing and lockdowns have slowed the curve, but he is unconvinced. As he put it to me, in the subsequent examples to China of South Korea, Iran and Italy, “the beginning of the epidemics showed a slowing down and it was very hard for me to believe that those three countries could practise social distancing as well as China.” He believes that both some degree of prior immunity and large numbers of asymptomatic cases are important factors.
He also observes that the total number of deaths we are seeing, in places as diverse as New York City, parts of England, parts of France and Northern Italy, all seem to level out at a very similar fraction of the total population. “Are they all practising equally good social distancing? I don’t think so.” He disagrees with Sir David Spiegelhalter’s calculations that the totem is around one additional year of excess deaths, while (by adjusting to match the effects seen on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship) he calculates that it is more like one month of excess death that is need before the virus peters out.
More generally, he complains that epidemiologists only seem to be called wrong if they underestimate deaths, and so there is an intrinsic bias towards caution. “They see their role as scaring people into doing something, and I understand that… but in my work, if I say a number is too small and I’m wrong, or too big and I’m wrong, both of those errors are the same.”
He believes the much-discussed R0 is a faulty number, as it is meaningless without the time infectious alongside.
He describes indiscriminate lockdown measures as “a huge mistake,” and advocates a “smart lockdown” policy, focused on more effective measures, focused on protecting elderly people.
“There is no doubt in my mind, that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.
He is philosophical about the future and sees this as a generational mistake:
It’s a view that doesn’t fit the narrative, but which we felt deserved to be heard.
Please forgive quality issues on the video: Prof Levitt was joining us down the line from Tel Aviv and we had intermittent bandwidth issues which have done our best to edit out.
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
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SubscribeWhat a miserable, unkind article. Has the writer given any thought to the person who was relieved of her suffering thanks to this procedure? What’s wrong with consumerism per se? Why should this development be monstrous? It is the alternative – of a slow, agonising and pointlessly painful death – that is monstrous.
Surely though staying alive has also been technologised and marketed to the highest bidder, often controlled by doctors who have no real sense of ‘quality of life’. Few people really die ‘naturally’ anymore.
Shades of Futurama…
So what. Its for individuals to decide and most people support physician assisted suicide. You may emote about that or also exagerrate that Canafa’s MAID is encouraging disabled people into suicide ( a lie) but this will happen in tne UK and you will need a coping strategy.
The Sarco pod is to death what elective caesarean is to birth.
I wonder how long it’s going to be before you can “help your family get by after you are gone” if you agree to a hunt as your modus operandi. Emphasis on die.
That pod would look great with a wooden door
maybe also some flapping arms and a Dalek-like voice shouting “Exterminate! Exterminate!”
It is vaguely reminiscent of a Reliant Robin.
More like a Sinclair C5.
A Utilitarian wet dream.
I think this is the rational end point of atheistic materialism. If life and existence aren’t suffused with meaning by a creator who put you here for a reason, to do something you must continue living to discover, then life becomes something to be enjoyed when it’s good and to be tossed away when it becomes painful or even inconvenient. This is why progressive politics in our era has increasingly turned into something like a death cult. Demands for “rights” increasingly have to do with the supposed freedom to kill or to die on demand. Pregnant with an unexpected child that it would inconvenience you to raise? Kill it. Doing anything you didn’t consent to or plan for would be immoral. Sick or depressed? Kill yourself. Why go on suffering for no reason? You were arbitrarily coughed up here without your input to struggle meaninglessly. Death, like life, has no moral dimension that would make either one distinguishable from the other. As a practical matter, death, in a universe with no God, is the end of experience and, therefore, pain so it’s seen more and more as the solution to every thorny existential problem.
Viktor Frankl, in his Man’s Search for Meaning, describes his experience as a trained psychologist put into the Nazi death camps. He saved the lives of many men who, their families dead and their lives unbearable, were on the verge of suicide. He writes that the men would say they were going to end it all because they no longer had anything to expect from life. Frankl would tell them, maybe that’s true, but life may yet have something to expect from you. By placing the man in service to life rather than life in the service of the man, he convinced many men to go on living in unimaginably bleak circumstances. Many survived. I think Frankl’s philosophy – called Logotherapy – is the only way back to sanity in a culture wrecked by radical selfishness and a nihilistic obsession with individualism.
“….by a creator who put you here for a reason….”. It sounds like you approach this from a religious perspective. That is your right, but what about those of us (a majority where I live) who do not adhere to that religious view?
I’d suggest you adopt the religious view. I’ve tried it without the religious view for 25 years and it doesn’t work any other way.
I think that having offspring serves much the same purpose.
If you’re one to wonder about your purpose in life, that purpose is concrete and you are now emotionally attached as a protector/provider/mentor to some degree for the remainder of your life.
Seriously.
You’re wrong. It’s a culture war. Your way leads to death and civilizational collapse.
You’re right, unfortunately. Look where the moral slide we’re in right now has lead us. Why do we still have suicide hotlines? We can’t seem to agree anymore that killing yourself is a bad thing. How would someone talk someone else out of committing suicide if suicide is now packaged as the answer to all life’s insoluble problems? As far as I can tell, it was only the belief that, to paraphrase Shakespeare, the Everlasting had set His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter that made trying to stop suicidal people from carrying out their plans comprehensible. If death really is the best answer to pain, suffering, depression, ennui, sickness, etc.then why shouldn’t we promote it to everybody who wants it?
You are probably right but most people are materialists and want a choice of when and how to die. If you want to change this you need to convince people which you will fail to do if you castigated them for subscribing to ” radical selfishness” and ” nihilism” which makes you sound as though you consider yourself to be better than them.
I don’t consider myself to be better than them; I consider the way of thinking I’ve come to after many years of trying to do things the same way as them to be better than theirs. Life doesn’t owe us anything, we owe life. If you go around bitterly complaining that life hasn’t given you what you want, and you’re an atheist, who are you complaining to? It’s senseless. How about forgetting about what you want and open yourself up to the possibility that life needs something else from you and you’d better listen for when it calls you? And whenever it calls you for whatever you need to do, you’d better be there. In other words, you don’t decide when the show’s over. You might be needed on stage after you want it to be done.
I wonder how wealthy you are or how much good luck from inheritance you have had.
I’m not wealthy, don’t come from money, and I haven’t inherited anything and don’t stand to, although I’m not sure what that has to do with what I said about adopting a worldview that promotes a sense of duty to life and a faith that life has a purpose for you as an antidote to nihilism, despair, and suicide.
Logotherapy…or the Logos? The Word Who became flesh and dwelled among us?
Jesus Christ is the only Way back to life in culture enamoured of death and selfishness, friend. He redeems cultures by saving souls from the eternal, spiritual death in Hell that is the just punishment for our sins against a holy God. On the cross, Jesus bore the Father’s wrath against human sinfulness so that anyone who trusts in the Name of Jesus could be pardoned of their sins. Jesus paid the debt of our sins; if we trust in Him, we receive His holiness, so that when we stand before the Father after we die, He won’t look on us and see our sins but see the perfect, beautiful holiness of His Son. If you repent to Jesus in prayer and ask to be forgiven of your sins, and trust that He’s a good God Who’s compassionate and kind, and more than able to do for you what you could never do for yourself (pay the debt of every evil thing you’ve ever thought, said or done), then you’ll be brought back into relationship with Him. Jesus laid His life down so that His enemies whose sins put Him on the cross could become His friends, through repentance and faith (trust) in Him. Jesus is the God of loving-kindness, and in Him we can overcome all things—even despair and death.
Just as Jesus was resurrected, one day those who trust in Him too shall rise, overcoming this wicked world to be reunited with our Saviour and King.
“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:4-5.
Romans 3:23-26
One pictures Sol Roth obediently submitting to his state-mandated death to the tunes of Vivaldi and scenes of daffodil fields. Next, we’ll all be eating people.
Soylent Green.
Perhaps the rise of death cultism – whether de-growth environmentalism or assisted suicide, or simply gender dysphoria and childlessness, is telling us something about our species. Maybe our collective species consciousness is not so distinct from the collective consciousness of the biome it occupies, and the imbalances we have created within that biome are leading to these kinds of reactions.
What if, instead of 8 billion humans on earth, we had only 100 million? Would we have fewer assisted suicides and boys pretending they were girls?
It’s an interesting idea, But maybe as a species we’ve peaked and now we’re just idiots who inherited everything.
When I hear that idea, I’m always reminded of Asimov’s Foundation series, in which he (prescient master that he was) first articulated the idea of a degenerate civilisation relying on technologies it had forgotten how to engineer and no longer really understood.
I take the opposite view. I consider us to be a very young species, which in evolutionary terms is pretty accurate. Whilst our sense of history may make us seem old (there are no precedents for that ‘sense’) we might well be undergoing the kind of ‘growing pains’ that are inevitable once we’ve divested ourselves of certain illusions: the most egregious of course, being that we were “created”.
That’s not to say we mightn’t just blow ourselves to smithereens; but if we can work our way through the “loss of illusion” stage then there’s nothing to suggest we couldn’t continue to evolve and look back on these centuries in the way a mature adult looks back on the follies of their teenage years.
Hm. In every society I’ve ever seen or even read about there are some leaders and some followers. To get to the ideal “Everybody is equal and happy” seems counterintuitive, simply because each person is genetically different. So first you have to be able to control the gene pool……..
My point about lack of historical precedent isn’t about what’s already happened, but our sense of whether we’re “old” or not as a species.
I’ve not referred to gene pools, happiness or equality.
I agree that most societies are split between “leaders” and “followers”. I’ve always regarded myself as a “leader” without any “followers”.
I would think a person who says the idea that life is created is an “egregious” illusion should at minimum know things like where life came from, how the universe came into existence, and the source and nature of consciousness before ruling out a creative intelligence. And, even if you knew the answers to these questions, you’d still have to look at the deplorable consequences brought about by the loss of the “illusions” you refer to at scale and question whether there isn’t some fact about consciousness, whatever that might be, that requires those “illusions” in order to survive.
Does it matter whether or not there is a “creative intelligence”? However you spin it, we have free will. That is the important thing.
Very true. Our great burden.
I’m having a heap of fun exercising my free will.
Yes, it does. If the universe came into existence without an exercise of will by an intelligent being for some purpose then there can be no “why” to anything; there’s only “is”. If everything only is, it makes no sense to make normative (ought) statements about anything. We can say that things are a certain way and if we ask “why?” and we work our way down the turtle stack of “how” answers, we will finally hit bedrock at an “is” and have to conclude the “why” question itself is incoherent. And if we die and our consciousnesses die with us and experience ends, there is no moral import to existence at all. There is no consequence to any of our actions beyond their immediate effect. Let’s say we have free will. Some of us will choose kindness, fairness, and charity and some of us will choose cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness. Indeed, cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness carry a distinct advantage if your primary interest is getting power. If preferring kindness, fairness, and charity to cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness is just a matter of each person’s preference, what can it matter which one a person chooses? To say this doesn’t matter is to miss the fact that the highly selfish, destructive behavior we see from many people today is a direct result of the conclusion that there is no moral reality.
I appreciate that this idea of a “collective consciousness of the biome” for the human species all sounds a bit “woo-woo” but there is a good well researched example albeit in prokaryotes :
Bacteria have this system called quorum sensing that does all sorts of neat things in order to optimise the survival of a bacterial colony (including stopping cell division). One of the inputs to these systems is the availability of chemicals (food) the bacteria need to thrive.
I have a possibly misplaced faith that homo sapiens is demonstrating a similar process right now – although I think the limiter for us will be fresh, imbibable water not food.
Fascinating details. Thank you Elaine.