Coronavirus: Why didn’t Governments Do This?
Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA
There was one simple thing governments could (and should) have done: random testing of people outside hospitals.
If they had done that they would have known how many people had the coronavirus, how many people were unaffected by it and how many people were made ill by it. They would have also known the true mortality rate. And they would not have had to rely on a `mathematical model’ which originally estimated that 500,000 people would die in the UK but which eventually brought that down to well under 20,000.
Random tests of just 10,000 people in various communities in each nation would have provided valuable information. The testing should have included people of different ages. It should have included some people who were ill and who were well.
So why the devil didn’t they do that?
Pollsters can get good results from asking questions of a good number of people. So why didn’t governments everywhere do coronavirus tests in cities, towns and villages? The information obtained would have been invaluable – and would have probably enabled governments to avoid deadly and damaging lockdowns. Those countries which did some testing benefitted enormously from the knowledge.
There are two explanations for why governments didn’t do these tests:
1. They didn’t think of it. (The cock up theory.)
2. They didn’t want to do it because they wanted to turn democracies into dictatorships. (The conspiracy theory.)
I can think of no other explanation.
(The unavailability of tests is no explanation. There seem to have been plenty of tests available for celebrities and footballers.)
Copyright Vernon Coleman April 15th 2020
P.S. I have just been sent a reference for a study in the J. Clin Microbiol which suggests that recent flu vaccination can give rise to coronavirus antibody testing as positive and suggests `routine vaccination as a potential cause of false-positive antibody test results’. I hope scientific advisors around the world are aware of this.
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