After the publication of the article Coronavirus: the first results, it turned out that there are a huge number of representatives of the sect of witnesses to the coronavirus among the residents of Khabrov. The original post contains a huge number of links to articles on the epidemiological inconsistency of quarantine, the economic consequences of the current policy and the limitation of basic human rights. I would like to analyze in detail a specific example of the results of the fight against coronavirus in a small Middle Eastern country, whose quarantine policy is often cited as an example to others. Well, let's look at Israel.
Dry data
The population of Israel is about 8.7 million. To date, 576 deaths have been recorded in Israel. It should be noted right away that those deaths were recorded for everyone who, at the time of leaving the world, had a positive test result for the virus. For example, the newspapers wrote about a woman with terminal stage cancer who contracted the disease shortly before her death, and she was also recorded in this statistic.
Let's also look at the age of the dead. According to the Ministry of Health, the average age of the deceased was 81.3 years, and the median was 84 years. Life expectancy in Israel is 82.3 years. That is, the median age of deaths is two whole years longer than the average life expectancy in the country.
And what about the economy?
According to the national insurance agency, at the moment 860 thousand people are registered as unemployed. Before the outbreak of the epidemic, 160,000 Israelis were unemployed.
GDP data for the second quarter, in which most of the quarantine fell, has not yet been released, but we can roughly estimate the losses according to data from Europe, in whose countries the severity of restrictions was comparable to the actions of the Israeli government. Compared to the second quarter of the previous year, the average GDP of the European Union fell by 14.1%. Spain became the record holder, destroying 18.5% of GDP. The American economy, according to data from the United States, has lost 9% of GDP. The fall in Israel's GDP should be exactly larger than the American one and comparable to the European one.
Has quarantine helped cope with the epidemic? No, it didn't help. The quarantine did not stop the spread of the virus.
Data interpretation and conclusions
Long years of living in a stable and prosperous world have lost their minds to reality. After the outbreak of a viral disease, a massive psychosis began. People made the greatest scientific discovery of the 21st century - it turned out that people are mortal. In particular, the elderly were mortals. People decided that something needed to be done about this, and forced their governments to close all businesses for quarantine, restrict all people in the right to travel and gather, restrict all those who disagree with these measures in the right to freedom of speech and close everyone to their homes. The politicians who could not resist the pressure complied with all the demands of the crowd.
So, let's summarize the results of such a policy for Israel.
576 old people died, whose time has just come.
Small business in the country is ruined, some businesses are permanently closed. Medium and large businesses suffer colossal losses. Seven hundred thousand people lost their jobs. Considering that some of them have children (and in Israel, on average, 2-3 children per family), it will turn out from a million to one and a half million people who have lost their livelihoods. And that's for 8.5 million people. Riots of unemployed youth take place every weekend across the country. The government's debt has grown many times over, and a huge hole has formed in the budget. And there are very difficult times ahead of us (like the rest of the world).
Best of all, a line from a song by Boris Grebenshchikov fits the situation:
... but according to new intelligence data, we were at war with ourselves ...