Normandy landings—the lesson for the COVID pandemic

 

Seventy-seven years have just passed since Operation Overlord was launched on the 6^th of June, 1944, when 160,000 soldiers crossed the English Channel to begin the end of the Nazi domination of Europe.

 

From D-Day in June to the end of August, the Allies ferried across over 2 million soldiers to Northern France. Over 220,000 of the young men, who came from as near as Britain, France, and Poland, and as far away as America, Canada, and Australia, never saw home again. Many more were maimed for life.

 

All who participated on that day and survived will be well over the age of 90, and we are soon to be faced with a world where no one who had experienced that world-changing epoch will be left. 

Compare the risks that they faced with the risk we face now in the COVID-19 pandemic, and comparing the differences in the way we behave, it becomes abundantly clear that this generation, who has reaped all the rewards of the sacrifices of the Normandy generation, has lost the sense of the tragic nature of life. This generation has forgotten that often risks are unavoidable, and all one can do is to make the most appropriate trade-off with the best knowledge at hand in order to maximize the good, or at least, to minimize the bad.

 

When faced today with an enemy that is much less deadly, the consensus of many Western countries (at least its leadership and institutions) is that lockdowns are the only answer. The unspoken implication is that it is worthwhile to sacrifice the livelihoods of its citizens, derange the mental health of young and old, induce loneliness in the vulnerable, deny basic needs for friendship and companionship across the board, and traduce the education and wellbeing of the children while piling up unprecedented debt on their young heads. And then, when the whole society is at near-neurosis, to say that it’s all for your own good. Objection to this is arrangement, even from experts with a differing view, and even when backed up with evidence, is tantamount to blasphemy.

 

This is absurd in its face – it may have been prudent in the early days of 2019, when the mortality risk of the virus was estimated to be more than 2%, or a fifth of that faced by the soldiers storming Nazi-fortified beaches in Northern France, if you get the virus at all. But that was more than a year ago. The mortality risk had been refined to a tenth of that in September 2020, given the high proportion of asymptomatic cases, which varies by study but could be higher than 50%.

Keeping in mind the rate of hospitalisation after catching COVID-19 is only 1-5%

 

Furthermore, the vast majority of deaths are in the comparatively frail elderly, and more than 90% of deaths are in those with more than two underlying conditions, such as influenza and pneumonia, hypertensive disease, diabetes, and heart failure, all of which are deadly diseases in themselves. This again circumscribes the danger of COVID-19. But the most grating thing is that multiple scientific studies show that lockdowns do not reduce mortality from COVID-19.

 

Now, a year and a half later, despite knowing these facts, as well as being armed with great advances in treatment options, not to mention half a dozen different types of effective vaccines, lockdowns still happen regularly in response to a handful of cases.

 

The tragic sense of life dictates that often we are faced with making compromises, and therefore we must not, as the old adage goes, make the best enemy of the good. The soldiers who braved the Nazi machine guns and bombs 77 years ago knew this, and were prepared to give it all to preserve life, liberty, and the freedom to pursue happiness for those they love. The irony is that today’s leaders seem to be doing exactly the opposite, willing to sacrifice everyone’s freedoms, basic happiness, and ability to simply subsist—all that the soldiers fought to preserve—for an illusory security.