A Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist who teaches at the Stanford School of Medicine lauded countries such as Sweden for how they handled the coronavirus without strict lockdown measures.
Michael Levitt, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2013, spoke with UnHerd for a story published Saturday and laid out the “winners” and “losers” of handling the coronavirus.
“I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn’t practice too much lockdown, and they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity,” he said.
Sweden was criticized for its decision not to enforce a nationwide stay-at-home order at the outbreak of the virus. An epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency said at the end of April the country’s plan to allow some exposure to the virus while protecting groups at high risk in hopes of building immunity in the general population is expected to soon reach a successful benchmark in Stockholm.
Levitt then directed his attention to nations he considers “losers” based on strict lockdown measures and economies that took a blow due to the orders.
“I see the standout losers as countries like Austria, Australia, and Israel that had very strict lockdowns but didn’t have many cases. They have damaged their economies, caused massive social damage, damaged the educational year of their children but not obtained any herd immunity,” he said.
Australia began to ease restrictions on Monday, allowing people in Western Australia to ease up on the two-man rule that only allowed a person to be accompanied by one other if they left the house.
“There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor,” Levitt said.
“I think this is another foul-up on the part of the baby boomers. I am a real baby boomer — I was born in 1947; I am almost 73 years old — but I think we’ve really screwed up. We’ve caused pollution, we’ve allowed the world’s population to increase threefold in my lifetime, we’ve caused the problems of global warming, and now we’ve left your generation with a real mess in order to save a relatively small number of very old people,” he added.
The Nobel laureate predicted in March that nations would recover from the coronavirus more quickly than others predicted, saying, “What we need is to control the panic.”
In the United States, local leaders are slowly making moves to reopen economies and lift lockdown orders to ease financial burdens taken on by citizens. The U.S. economy has contracted at a 4.8% pace from January through March, and the effects of the virus have hit more than 26 million people who lost their jobs in the last five weeks.
Many state governors, however, say stay-at-home orders are still necessary, including California’s Gavin Newsom, who is hesitant to lift social distancing orders as counties move to reopen.
“I just want folks to know we’re getting very close to making really meaningful augmentations to that stay-at-home order,” Newsom said Friday. “I want to say many days, not weeks, as long as we continue to be prudent and thoughtful.”
“The only thing that’s gonna hold us back is the spread of this virus,” Newsom said. “And the only thing that is sure to advance the spread of the virus is thousands of people congregating together. Practicing social distancing or physical distance, we can avoid that.”
Medical experts warn that widespread reopening cannot happen safely without increased coronavirus testing capacity.
