IS THE WATER SAFE?
By: Gilleasbuig Ferguson
Tags: Isle Of Skye, Masks, Liberty, Open Water Swimming, Covid 19

A dissenting analysis of the Covid crisis, and a plea to unmask our children.

Gilleasbuig Ferguson, Isle of Skye, Scotland

Keeping an eye out for jellyfish (Loch Greshornish, Isle of Skye)

I stand on the old Skeabost pier below the house, wearing nothing but trunks, goggles and my wedding ring. No need for a wetsuit, as an insulating layer of lockdown-lard encircles my middle. Ink-black water laps at the dressed slab of the pier’s time-worn steps and a sea-eagle slides its way south over the hotel. Light drizzle sets in. I dive in and swim a ragged course up Loch Snizort Beag and back, making my way awkwardly through brine and seaweed like a lost beluga whale.

I now swim in the sea daily, despite the risks involved. In early September I ploughed into a lion’s mane jellyfish. Not fun. Their sting packs a wallop and I needed a heavy dose of codeine before I could sleep. There are threats to life too: I could get severe cramp and drown. I could get clobbered by a boat. If I’m really unlucky, a sea-eagle might drop a turtle on my head — an unlikely but fitting end for an open-water swimmer. Considering all the stress and over-eating of recent months though, a boring old heart attack is most likely.

I’m quite happy to take these risks because I enjoy it, I think it’s good for me, and I feel alive when I’m in there. I used to swim in a far safer place, with wonderful staff keeping constant watch, but the swimming pool in Portree (the island’s capital) was closed for six months, and is only now re-opening to the public.

So I brace myself and dive. I embrace the cold that used to give me a headache and severe pain in a place I shall not mention. I’m always slightly afraid to do it, but once I’m in it’s fine.

Figuratively it’s time that Skye, Scotland and the rest of the UK did the same. We need to plunge back into the lives we once enjoyed and learn to live them again. To socialise, shop, dine, study, play and worship freely. To work without being shackled by mad rules. To leave lockdown behind and ditch the distancing, bossy signs, Perspex, facemasks and tape. It might be a cold shock at first, but I am certain — despite the risk — that we would be better off, healthier and happier if we did. Yet here we are and here we shall stay for the foreseeable future — stringing moist hankies over our mouths from our ears, pumping sanitiser into our palms and silently following the arrows on the floor around the Co-op.

I’ve hated all this from the start and now that our children are being forced to wear ‘face-coverings’ on buses and in the high-school I hereby declare it publicly: I’ve had enough of this nonsense.

Back in March we were forced into house arrest, commanded to put life and the economy that sustains it on hold, to prevent half a million in the UK from dying. This never happened and never would have happened, yet we are continuing to live, and to allow our lives to be governed by ever more despotic decrees, as if the forecasted scenario actually did happen. We go on strangling our island livelihoods with unsustainable restrictions and carry on fearing Covid as an unprecedented plague, despite mounting evidence that this virus is far from exceptional.

Yes — it can be a serious disease, but the average age of those who have died with it — 82 — tells us a stark truth that the majority seem unwilling to face: this is only a significant threat to those who are very elderly and very unwell. To anyone 60 or under the threat to life appears to be less than, or equal to, seasonal flu.

And children? Well, that risk is as tiny as the virus itself. If the chance of a child dying from Covid warrants the latest mask edict, shouldn’t we also consider the commensurate risk posed by eagles dropping turtles? You may laugh, but sea-eagles continue to flourish and leatherback turtles have been spotted in Skye waters. Shouldn’t our kids wear steel helmets to and from school to negate that risk? Perhaps all school playgrounds could be netted, so any fumbled turtles just bounce off? If it saves one life we should do it, right?

Bonkers. Of course it is. But so, then, is allowing the government to muzzle our children who appear, by and large, to be immune to Covid. ‘They could spread it to others!’ people cry. Really? Is there half-an-ounce of solid evidence for this? Supposing they could, can a soggy facial garment prevent such spread? We are urged to believe that masks work against respiratory viruses but the evidence presented for this is weak and their effect, if they have one, is acknowledged to be minimal. In any case, why should all our healthy children now be viewed as potentially toxic: secret carriers of a deadly infection? This is wrong. Nicola Sturgeon has done a terrible disservice to those too young to question or refuse, and my plea here is that this unjustified imposition be withdrawn immediately. Masks serve only to perpetuate fear and to save the government from criticism for vastly over-estimating and over-reacting to this health crisis. If they admitted to these errors, we could all go back to life as usual tomorrow.

You may be shocked by my view, but that is because our governments and the media have utterly failed to present the truth like grown-ups and to encourage debate amongst experts of differing opinions. Instead of logic, common sense and proportionality we have had a daily diet of panic, fear and over-reaction. The result? A temporary crisis is now an incipient catastrophe, as the painful reality of slamming the brakes on our economy and then trying to get it moving again with the handbrake on becomes ever more apparent. The deaths and ruined health of many thousands caused by lockdown itself, through missed operations and appointments, undetected cancer and other conditions, is heart-breaking. The grim psychological impact remains to be calculated.

One only needs to go back five years and analyse government data on a bad but unexceptional flu season (winter, 2014/15) in which 28,330 died with the disease in England alone — including 104 children (0–14 yrs) and 701 of working age (15–65 yrs) — to gain a sense of proportion and to realise that masking our offspring now is an act of political expediency and nothing more. I am not aware of a single Scottish child that has succumbed to Covid and I am convinced that if the scaremongering we have endured since March, with daily death tallies and gloomy graphs, had been employed five years ago with flu, we would have been just as terrified back then.

Like flu, and many other nasty risks in life, we have to learn to live with Covid-19.

As long as Scotland continues to subscribe to the bizarre notion that a highly infectious sub-microscopic agent can be ‘suppressed’ like a band of terrorists, or ‘eliminated’ like a rat’s nest under the floorboards we, and our children, will continue to suffer outrages against liberty and common sense forever. The misguided ‘elimination strategy’, championed by Prof Devi Sridhar (an advisor to Nicola Sturgeon), has been called into question by distinguished epidemiologists such as Prof Carl Heneghan of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. If, he argues, we follow the route of suppressing infections to zero, at all costs, what do we do when we get there? Lockdown the country forever? Sit tight and wait for a vaccine that may never appear? This is clearly not viable, but Nicola Sturgeon continues to lead us down this ruinous path.

We may try and relieve some of our government’s blame for painting us into this corner by pointing out that the entire world has over-reacted, but that is not true. There is a country not too far away that didn’t follow the crowd and did something unusual — it kept its cool and based its actions on evidence rather than hysteria. They had few restrictions, no lockdown, no business shut-downs, no school closures for under 16s, and no masks. Sweden was reviled as reckless for following its lonely path but it has worked. Despite regrettable failures with its care homes, as we so sadly experienced here, the remainder of the population was largely unaffected. The epidemic appears to be over for Swedes and the country, barring a few sensible restrictions, is back to normal. If you peek below the surface of their death figures you will discover something astonishing that I’ve yet to see reported anywhere: the overall mortality (deaths from all causes) for people under 65 is lower in Sweden thus far in 2020 than their average for 2015–19. Per capita the figure is more favourable than Denmark or Finland, and on par with much lauded Norway (Eurostat data — below). If Covid poses a real threat to the young and if lockdown and masks actually help reduce mortality, how can this be?

Behold how the Swedes of working age die. Data you will never see on the BBC.

With grateful thanks to Harald, for permission to publish his elegant graphs (https://twitter.com/HaraldofW)

Back to my metaphor. Is the water of (normal) life I’m urging us to return to safe? Well, no. It can be cold and dark and dangers lie beneath. Life is never entirely safe and it never will be, but better to get in there and actually live it as a free individual than simply to exist and be consumed relentlessly by a threat we cannot see and the fear of a ‘second wave’ for which there is no evidence. The notion that governments can mitigate all the risks in our lives, including that posed by a virus, is a falsehood that we must abandon if we are to get back to the business of living again: though, judging from what I see around me, that happy day feels very far off.