PETER HITCHENS: Have five weeks of mad lockdown panic actually done us good?

Particularly for Mr. H L'Eplattenier:
The situation you described in Spain is incorrect. Coastal regions (the areas where most secondary residences are located) are, with the exception of Catalonia, ie Barcelona, the least affected. There was no spread of the virus radiating out from Madrid, and in the Valencian Community, Almería, Murcia and Andalucia, hospitals are for the most part runing at normal capacity; indeed, in some cases they are eerily under capacity as regular procedures and specialist consultations have been post-poned in favor of the possible influx of covid-19 cases.
What has happened here, as in Lombardy, as in London, as in New York, is that following the reports of the outbreak in China, all those "biblical" figures of possible deaths published in haste by the WHO and Imperial College, the fear and hysteria partnership kicked in. Anybody with a sore throat, a cough or a fever fled to the nearest hospital and they were admitted, as governments were not applying a calm, common sense approach to the problem -isolate the vulnerable and advise those showing symptoms to stay at home and isolate. Any epidemiologist will tell you that the best place to fight an epidemic is in the home and not the hospital. People who were not infected turned up in the hospitals and so picked up the virus there and added to the numbers, essentially turning the hospitals into virus incubators, where said virus just lingered in the air, on surfaces, etc, waiting for more succeptibles to turn up.
One only has to look at the progression. Wuhan, large city, virus possibly spread by Chinese textile workers to Lombardy, area with large conurbations (plus elderly population and pollution). Thence to Madrid and on to London and New York. All high density population areas where governments failed their populations by not responding calmly, and folk fled to the nearest hospital with mild symptons which might or might not have been of an illness they had been told was going to shred their lungs and also the lungs of hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen.