A City Of Refuge

From CULTURE WATCH:
 

Corona and the Elimination of Risk

Apr 18, 2020

How far should the state go in seeking to eliminate risk?

Life is ALWAYS about trade-offs. When you hop on a skateboard to have a bit of fun, you risk falling off and hurting yourself. When you go to a restaurant – perhaps especially somewhere overseas – you take a risk of possibly getting food poisoning.
When you fly somewhere, there is always the risk of a plane crash. Nuclear power stations may be good at generating much-needed energy, but are they too risky? Having cameras all over the place in public areas can be good in monitoring criminal activities, but there is the risk that this can lead to a police state. A wise person will seek to minimise risk – but within reason. If we banned all cars in Australia, guess what? We would then have zero car accidents and fatalities. But most people would say that the price is far too high to pay for this. So as always, we deal with trade-offs. For example, we are currently in lockdown for two reasons. One is that the initial figures suggested that we were dealing with a very highly virulent disease. The World Health Organisation initially suggested that the case-fatality rate – the proportion of people diagnosed with the disease who die – would be 3.4 per cent. This is a very high number which would have caused a huge number of deaths. But as we have had gradually more and more data coming in, those percentages have been falling. In many examples, more complete data are now suggesting case-fatality rates of 0.4 per cent. My guess is that it will end up between 0.5 and 0.1 per cent, and probably nearer to the lower end of that. So if the disease isn’t as virulent as was originally thought, the number of deaths will be correspondingly lower.  Dr John A. Lee has been a doctor and a scientist his entire career, and he asks some hard questions here. He says this about how governments are dealing with COVID-19:
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