Verdrängte Risiken einer Corona-Hysterie und was das konkret bedeutet

Am 16. März 2020 verordnete der schweizerische Bundesrat den landesweiten Corona-Lockdown mit der Schliessung von Schulen, Restaurants sowie Geschäften und Lokalitäten mit Publikumsverkehr wie Fitness Centers und anderen Einrichtungen. ‚Bleiben Sie zuhause!‘ stand in Leuchtschrift über Autobahnen. Mit einem Schlag wurde der als zuständig erachtete Bundesrat und Gesundheits-Minister Alain Berset zur allgegenwärtigen Medienfigur.

Am Tag danach, also am 17. März, schrieb ich auf meinem Blog volldaneben.ch einen Kommentar unter dem Titel ‚Verdrängte Risiken einer Corona-Hysterie – Divergenzen zwischen einer eng medizinischen und einer umfassend gesellschaftlichen Sichtweise‘‚. Durch die ökonomische Brille betrachtet, sah ich die extreme Fokussierung auf die Vermeidung von unmittelbaren Todesfällen bei praktisch völliger Vernachlässigung der potenziell massiven negativen Neben- und Folgeeffekte eines überschiessenden Lockdowns als verzerrte Interessenabwägung. Meinen Blogeintrag findet man in der rechten Spalte unter ‚März 2020‘.

Das US-amerikanische News-Portal ‚The Free Press‘ brachte letzten März einen langen Artikel des bekannten Wirtschafts-Journalisten Joe Nocera über die Warnungen des prominenten Epidemiologen D.A. Henderson vor einem totalen Lockdown der Gesellschaft im Falle einer Pandemie. Hendersons Warnungen stammen aus dem Jahr 2006 und hatten null Einfluss auf das Verhalten der US-amerikanischen und der meisten Behörden anderer Länder. Nocera gibt einen ausführlichen und vertieften Einblick in Hendersons Warnungen und Argumente. Es geht weitgehend genau um jene kostspieligen und opferreichen Neben- und Folgeeffekte, die ich im Blog als verdrängte Risiken einer Corona-Hysterie bezeichnet hatte, in meinem kurzen, spontan verfassten Text jedoch nicht detailliert ausführen konnte.

In diesem Sinne ist Joe Noceras ausführlicher Kommentar über Henderson eine willkommene Konkretisierung meiner damaligen prinzipiellen Überlegungen.

Aus dem Text von Joe Nocera auf ‚The Free Press‘

Years before Covid, the scientist credited with eradicating smallpox warned against shutting down the world to combat an epidemic. In 2006, ten years before his death at the age of 87, the legendary epidemiologist D.A. Henderson laid out a plan for how public health officials should respond to a major influenza pandemic. It was published in a small journal that focused mainly on bioterrorism—and was quickly forgotten.

As it turns out, that paper, titled “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” was Henderson’s prescient bequest to the future. If we had followed his advice, our country—indeed, our world—could have avoided its disastrous response to Covid.

This month marks the four-year anniversary of lockdowns on a global scale. And though the pandemic has passed, its consequences live on. The lockdowns embraced by the U.S. public-health establishment meant that millions of young people had their education and social development disrupted, or left school for good. Mental health problems rose substantially. So did incidents of domestic violence and overdose deaths.

It didn’t have to be that way.

Last year, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic, said at a conference, “If you’re a public health person, you have this narrow view of what the right decision is. . . . you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives [or] ruins the economy. This is a public health mindset.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president during much of the pandemic, was asked in the fall of 2022 whether he regretted his advocacy of lockdowns. He said, “Sometimes when you do draconian things, it has collateral negative consequences. . . on the economy, on the schoolchildren.” But, he added, “the only way to stop something cold in its tracks is to try and shut things down.”

It’s no secret that Fauci’s draconian recommendations did nothing to stop the virus, nor did closing schools save children’s lives. And the idea asserted by Collins and Fauci that public health is about a single metric—stopping a disease, no matter the unintended consequences—was an inversion of the principles espoused by D.A. Henderson.

Public health, as Henderson knew well, is very much about the entire health of society. A lifetime of watching people react to pandemics had taught him two essential things.

First, there were limits to what can be done to stop one. As Dr. Tara O’Toole, a close colleague and one of his three co-authors on that 2006 paper told me, “D.A. kept saying, ‘You have to be practical, and you have to be humble, about what public health can actually do, especially over sustained periods. Society is complicated, and you don’t get to control it.’ ” (While the paper dealt with influenza, its lessons applied to what we faced with the novel coronavirus.)

Second, Henderson believed in targeted protection for the ill and medically vulnerable, and that overreacting, in the form of shutting down society, would bring enormous harm that could be worse than the virus.

In his 2006 paper, Henderson warned public health and political officials of the cascading effects of a shutdown. It is an uncanny description of what took place in 2020:

Closing schools is an example. . . . if this strategy were to be successful, other sites where schoolchildren gather would also have to be closed: daycare centers, cinemas, churches, fast-food stores, malls, and athletic arenas. Many parents would need to stay home from work to care for children, which could result in high rates of absenteeism that could stress critical services, including healthcare. School closures also raise the question of whether certain segments of society would be forced to bear an unfair share of the disease control burden. A significant proportion of children in lower-income families rely on school feeding programs for basic nutrition.

He added: Political leaders need to understand the likely benefits and the potential consequences of disease mitigation measures, including the possible loss of critical civic services and the possible loss of confidence in government to manage the crisis.