Those who oppose lockdowns do not place the economy above the health of the elderly, but recognise that these measures cause public health problems unrelated to Covid-19
My letter Published 20 November
I refer to your editorial “We must all soldier on together if coronavirus battle is to be won” (November 17).
Coming so soon after Remembrance Day, the headline conjures up unfortunate images of soldiers hauling themselves out of the trenches only to be mowed down by machine guns.
The coronavirus, thank goodness, is not that deadly. We now know from a Stanford University peer-reviewed of 61 studies worldwide, that the median Covid-19 infection fatality rate is 0.27 per cent. To be sure, that is two to three times higher than for influenza, but still means that on average 99.7 per cent of people with Covid-19 recover from it.
Your editorial criticises the “many who put business and dining above public health”. This is a false dichotomy. Those of us who oppose strong lockdowns do not put money above grandma’s health. Instead, we recognise that the lockdowns themselves cause public health problems unrelated to Covid-19.
For Hong Kong, unless we plan to permanently close our airport, we have to learn to live with some level of the virus in our community and to handle it. Balance is key, not “zero-virus” absolutism.
A final note: the number of Covid-19 deaths in Hong Kong this year (108) is 1.3 per cent of the deaths from pneumonia () in 2018. That is, pneumonia is 78 times as deadly as Covid-19, and the number killed by it every year has been steadily rising. Pneumonia is a similar disease to Covid-19, also most deadly for the elderly with comorbidities, like me. Yet we do not close our economy or the airport for pneumonia. We do not, in short, feel the need to “soldier on together” in mute submission, for any disease save Covid-19. Why is this?
Peter Forsythe, Discovery Bay
