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01 / 05
Ridley: Coronavirus Is the Wolf on the Loose

Blog Post | Health & Medical Care

Ridley: Coronavirus Is the Wolf on the Loose

This time, the warnings are not overdone.

In Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried “Wolf!”, the point of the tale is that eventually there was a wolf, but the boy was not believed because he had given too many false alarms. In my view, the COVID-19 coronavirus is indeed a wolf, or at least has the potential to be one. Many people, including President Trump, think we are over-reacting, because so many past scares have been exaggerated. I think that’s wrong.

Coming from you, a friend said to me the other day, that’s scary. I am known as an obsessive and serial debunker of false alarms. I have been at it for almost 40 years ever since I realised as a science journalist in the 1980s that acid rain was being wildly overblown as a threat to forests (I was right). This scepticism has served me well. I did not believe that mad cow disease would kill hundreds of thousands of people, as some “experts” were claiming in the mid 1990s. In the end just 177 died. Likewise, I refused to panic over bird flu, swine flu, SARS or ebola.

I set out to debunk exaggerated claims about the population explosion, peak oil and peak gas, nuclear winter, the ozone hole, pesticides, species extinction rates, genetically modified crops, sperm counts, ocean acidification and the millennium bug. In every case this made me unpopular and unfashionable, but close to the truth. I said climate change would happen more slowly and with less impact on storms, floods, droughts, sea ice and sea level than even some experts were claiming in the 1990s, let alone the extreme environmentalists, and it has.

It is very easy, in other words, to bet on the tendency of journalists and their readers to engage in a competitive auction of unjustified alarm. “The whole aim of practical politics,” said H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And no, the fact that the millennium bug was a damp squib was not because we were well prepared; some countries and industries did nothing and were still fine.

So why don’t I think this hobgoblin is imaginary? First, because lethal plagues have a long track record. From the plague of Justinian to the Black Death to the Spanish flu of 1918 to the HIV epidemic, new diseases have proved they can burn through the human population with frightening efficiency. It’s true we have got better at eradicating infectious diseases through vaccinations, pills and public health, but most viruses are still very hard to cure and some are very easy to catch.

The second reason is that new diseases are often more dangerous than existing ones and this one has jumped from bats, possibly via pangolins. In the past respiratory viruses have generally proved to be low in virulence once they become highly contagious: hence the large number of rhinovirus, adenovirus and coronavirus strains that we call collectively, “the common cold”. Even flu has been relatively less lethal since the special wartime conditions of 1918. But when they first infect our species, viruses can encounter a vulnerable immune system and run riot.

The third reason for alarm in this case is the speed with which COVID-19 has crossed regional and international boundaries. It does seem to have acquired an unusual skill at getting passed on from one person to another, usually not making them so sick that they stay away from meeting other people, which is what prevents ebola causing pandemics, but yet being capable of killing about 1% of people it infects. This is the frightening combination of traits that we have feared might one day arise.

Then there is the effect of globalisation, and the huge growth in international travel. I wrote in my notes in 1996, when reviewing a book on new viruses, “If we persist in creating conditions in which viruses can be easily transmitted and amplified, then we will persist in experiencing waves of new viral epidemics. The problem lies in the ecology of our society, not destruction of the environment.” Human beings are just too tempting an ecosystem for an ambitious virus.

But we have indeed cried wolf over so many issues, that it has contributed to us being underprepared. We should have seen that globalisation would cause such a risk to grow ever larger and taken action to prevent a new virus appearing. We should have worried about things other than climate change. Here are a few of the measures we could and should have taken in recent years instead of going into hysteria about the gradual warming of the temperature mainly at night, in winter and in the north.

We could have pursued an international agreement to ban the sale of live bats in markets. Bats are especially dangerous because they are fellow mammals and share with us a tendency to live in huge aggregations. We could have funded more research and development in antiviral therapies, vaccines and diagnostics. We could have built a better infrastructure to isolate cases in healthcare systems, and at transport hubs. These might have been expensive, yes – but nothing like the money we are spending on precautionary measures against dangerous climate change which is still decades away.

There are already several different strains of the virus, one of which, the L strain, looks to be more lethal than others. I fully expect that the milder strains will eventually prevail and this virus will settle down as a form of seasonal fever. But before it does so, in this first pandemic, it is now likely, though not inevitable, that it will kill hundreds of thousands of people.

Donald Trump takes comfort from the fact that it has killed only a handful of Americans so far. He forgets that the chart of an epidemic is exponential, as each person infects several people, and the power of such compound interest is, as Albert Einstein supposedly said, the eighth wonder of the world. The economist Tyler Cowen points out that it’s hard to beat an exponential process once a certain point has passed.

Last week Greta Thunberg was still telling the European Parliament that climate change is the greatest threat humanity faces. This week Extinction Rebellion’s upper-class twits were baring their breasts on Waterloo bridge in protest at the billions of people who they wrongly think may die from global warming in the next decade. These people are demonstrating their insensitivity. They are spooked by a spaniel when there’s a wolf on the loose.

World Health Organization | Mental Health

Global Suicide Rate Dropped Significantly Since 2000

“Between 2000 and 2021, the global age-standardized suicide rate dropped by 35%. The decreases varied by WHO region: 3% in Africa, 26% in South-East Asia, 30% in the Eastern Mediterranean, 48% in Europe and 50% in the Western Pacific (Fig. 10). The only region with an increase was the Americas, where the age-standardized suicide rate rose by 17% in the same time period. The global rate also decreased for age-group specific suicide rates (i.e. 15-29 years, 30-49 years, 50-69 years, and 70+ years) in the same time period.”

From World Health Organization.

BMC Health Services Research | Health Systems

Drone Deliveries Drastically Reduce Maternal Deaths in Ghana

The drone delivery company Zipline is transforming healthcare in Ghana by ensuring fast and reliable access to medical supplies. According to a recent study, healthcare facilities in Ghana’s Ashanti Region that gained access to Zipline’s drone delivery service saw maternal deaths fall by 56.4 percent.

From BMC Health Services Research.

World Health Organization | Pregnancy & Birth

Maternal Mortality Dropped Significantly from 2000 and 2023

“Between 2000 and 2023, the maternal mortality ratio (MMR, number of maternal deaths per 100 000 live births) dropped by about 40% worldwide…

eastern Europe and southern Asia achieved the greatest overall reduction in maternal mortality ratio (MMR): a decline of 75% (from an MMR of 38 to 9) and 71% (from an MMR of 405 down to 117), respectively. Despite its very high MMR in 2023, sub-Saharan Africa also achieved a substantial reduction in MMR of 40% between 2000 and 2023.

The greatest reduction in lifetime risk of maternal death during this period occurred in the region of central and southern Asia, with an 83% fall in risk from 1 in 71 in 2000 to 1 in 410 in 2023. In five regions, the lifetime risk of maternal mortality reduced by more than half: sub-Saharan Africa, northern Africa and western Asia, Australia and New Zealand, eastern and south-eastern Asia, and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand).”

From World Health Organization.

UNICEF | Overall Mortality

The Downward Trends in Child Mortality

“In 2023, the global under-five mortality rate was half of what it was in 2000 – a remarkable achievement that reflects decades of sustained investment and collaboration by governments, donors, health professionals, communities and families…

Progress has not been uniform across all age groups. Since 2000, deaths among children aged 1–59 months have fallen by 58 per cent, compared to a 44 per cent decline in neonatal deaths. Nearly half of all under-five deaths in 2023 occurred within the first 28 days of life, underscoring the heightened vulnerability of newborns and the need for greater investment in targeted interventions during this critical period.”

From UNICEF.