September 27, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment looks at the third mitigation strategy in this series to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-19 virus: Lockdowns.
Background: On March 13, 2020, the White House declared a national state of emergency and implemented a 15-day temporary stay-at-home order to “flatten the curve” on hospitalizations, so hospitals did not get overrun with Covid cases. That temporary lockdown was successful.
Then the lockdown order was extended. The decision on continuance of the lockdown order was up to state governors. The length of the extension varied widely from state to state some choosing to have no extension at all and others to extend the lockdown as much as two years. Similar lockdown decisions were also made in different countries.
My Takeaways: The excerpts provide circumstantial evidence of the following:
After reading the excerpts coupled with your own experience your takeaways maybe different.
There are two additional items in the attached PDF you might find of interest. First, Michael Betrus grades 25 aspects of pandemic actions on pages 18 – 21. Second, Pamela Popper & Shane Price report on their versions of “lockdown madness” including pandemic guidelines for sex as published by the British Columbia Center for Disease Control on pages 24 & 25.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment looks at the third mitigation strategy in this series to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-19 virus: Lockdowns.
Background: On March 13, 2020, the White House declared a national state of emergency and implemented a 15-day temporary stay-at-home order to “flatten the curve” on hospitalizations, so hospitals did not get overrun with Covid cases. That temporary lockdown was successful.
Then the lockdown order was extended. The decision on continuance of the lockdown order was up to state governors. The length of the extension varied widely from state to state some choosing to have no extension at all and others to extend the lockdown as much as two years. Similar lockdown decisions were also made in different countries.
My Takeaways: The excerpts provide circumstantial evidence of the following:
- Hospitals did not get overrun, in fact some suffered economically because of too few patients.
- Where lockdowns were extended other medical and mental health issues increased because people seeking treatment was greatly diminished; preventive medicine was neglected; suicides were more prevalent; child and domestic abuse occurrences increased; drug and alcohol abuse increased; and child development (learning and socializing) was stunted from school closures, playground closures, and group interactions being limited.
- Severe economic impacts were experienced from massive unemployment to small business closures, to long lasting supply chain issues.
- Comparison figures between lockdowns and non-lockdowns among different states and countries show little difference in death per capita rates. In other words, lockdowns did not save lives to any substantial degree.
After reading the excerpts coupled with your own experience your takeaways maybe different.
There are two additional items in the attached PDF you might find of interest. First, Michael Betrus grades 25 aspects of pandemic actions on pages 18 – 21. Second, Pamela Popper & Shane Price report on their versions of “lockdown madness” including pandemic guidelines for sex as published by the British Columbia Center for Disease Control on pages 24 & 25.
Happy Learning,
Harley
COVID PANDEMIC CRITIQUE – SEGMENT 7
CONTROLLING THE SPREAD – LOCKDOWNS: EXCERPTS
WHY THE UNITED STATES LOCKED DOWN: On March 13, 2020, the White House declared a national state of emergency. America’s government leaders embarked on a draconian policy of shutting down society. Restrictions included stay-at-home orders, limits on family visits and group activities, business restrictions and school closures, medical care shutdowns, constraints on personal movement, quarantines, and travel bans – that defines lockdowns. Put forth as a temporary 15-or-30-day closure, the stated goal was to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations. At the time, the action seemed logical and well-intended. Slow the timeline of illness so hospitals could avoid overcrowding and cope with the increasing numbers needing COVID-19 care. That would also allow mobilization of resources, including personnel, beds, and equipment to those parts of the country where they are needed most. It would provide extra time to produce tests and protective and medical equipment and allow scientists and companies to start developing new drugs and vaccines. Most people accepted the temporary shutdown, given the level of danger implied by the earliest information about the virus.
The policy goal then shifted. No longer was it “flatten the curve.” Drs. Fauci and Birx succeeded in convincing America’s decision-makers to implement blunt, extremely harsh policies that considered only one specific disease, rather than the whole of health. Those polices were also immoral, because the consequences would fall disproportionately on poor, minority populations and others of low socio-economic status. Instead of concentrating resources on protecting the only group at high risk to die and avoiding serious damage to everyone else, an unfocused and reckless response was broadly instituted. Nearly all US governors implemented and continued those lockdowns throughout 2020 and beyond. Many leaders in other countries did the same.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott Atlas, MD (2021)
No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.
The president walked in. The vice president looked at me and signaled me to speak. Despite my nerves, I plunged right into the deep end. Opening with my PowerPoint graphics, I said, “Mr. President, we need to take additional action immediately. I’m recommending that we extend the Slow the Spread measures by thirty days.” “What will happen if we don’t do the thirty days?” he asked. He had cut to the chase.
I paused for a second, the decided to hit close to home: “If we don’t, I’m certain that we’re going to have fifty, a hundred, and potentially a thousand Elmhurst Hospitals. That means more trucks outside those facilities. That means more bodies inside those trucks. We’re going to see city after city looking like what New York does right now. It will only get worse.” “I know that hospital,” Trump said. “What’s going on there, it’s horrible.” “What are you basing this on?”
I explained to him that how the United States was tracking as Italy had: we were two weeks behind where they were. I hit hard on Italy’s case fatality rate, the toll it was taking especially on people over seventy, people with other health issues – the overweight, the hypertensive, those with known cardiac or other respiratory or systemic issues. I showed him one of the charts we’d created. It showed a steep and inexorable rate of rise of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. “That fast?” he said. “Yes, Mr. President.” “How many?” “One to two hundred thousand dead by the end of May. Best-case scenario.” Worse case?” “If we do nothing?” He nodded. “Millions. Somewhere between one-point-five and two-point-five million.” “Are you sure?” “I am Mr. President.” “Tony, what about you?” He turned to Dr. Fauci. “Do you see it the same?” “Yes, Mr. President, I do.” The president nodded. “Okay, okay.”
He had listened to the data, looked at the graphs and the evidence, and had made the only choice he could – and in doing so, he was helping us deliver a crucial message to the American people. These mitigation policies were needed. It wasn’t a question of economic vitality, but of individual lives. I just hoped he had the political will to keep them in place.
“We will never shut down the country again. Never.” President Trump’s tone was emphatic, edged with agitation. It was the first week of April 3, mere days after the president had announced the 30-day extension of the Slow the Spread campaign to the American public, and the ground had shifted suddenly and without warning.
Members of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) team had put together an independent analysis of the data I’d used for my computational assumptions, using similar case curves they’d developed. They use vastly different assumptions than the ones I had used. Italy and many European countries had reached a peak for new infections. Their conclusion: in this first surge, 26,000 people would die by Memorial Day. We had predicted 100,000 and 240,000. Clearly, this was an enormous difference. My projections were nearly four to ten times greater. The CEA and I saw two very different futures. I saw a pandemic of historic proportions; they saw a fairly average year of seasonal flu.
In the moment, the importance of the 26,000 versus the 100,000 -240,000 discrepancy didn’t fully register with me. Over time, as the deaths continued to rise, the CEA would up its estimate, eventually getting to 66,000. That was still well below my projections, but near enough to mine that we could have engaged in dialogue. I could have shown which of their errors explained the difference, how they had employed a similar model but with wrong assumptions. But no one initiated that conversation. What if I had demanded an audience with the president and Hassett? What if we had sat down and gone through the differing projections, side by side? I might have been able to alleviate the administration’s worst fears by suggesting that the optimal way forward wouldn’t necessarily “shut down” the country and that we could maintain significant economic activity while still protecting Americans. I don’t know. Today, I regret not having tried.
Source: Silent Invasion by Dr. Deborah Birx (2022).
The purpose of a lockdown is not to stop the virus spread. The purpose is to slow it down, so the hospitalizations did not exceed capacity. By mid-April hospitals were going broke from their inability to served non-COVID-19 patients and the lack of COVID – 19 patients. The insanity reached a new level in American history in late April. Hospitals were not overwhelmed. In fact, they never reached capacity with COVID-19 patients. As hospitals stayed empty, were going broke, the curve was flat, states remained closed as unemployment claims reached forty million. Forty million. It’s a hard number to grasp, as that is about 20% of the workforce. Meanwhile, most in the media were championing continued lockdowns without ever presenting critical data analysis.
Source: COVID-19 Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus (2020)
A few of us looking at the data – not at what public health authorities or governors or reporters were saying about the data but at the data itself – could see two crucial facts emerging as early as the first week of April 2020. First, Covid was far less threatening than it had originally seemed. Yes, it could be deadly, especially to the elderly and people with severe comorbidities. But it would not overwhelm the medical system, much less all of society. Second, the lockdowns, at least as the U.S. and Europe conducted them were useless, if not counterproductive.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
MEDICAL CONSEQUENCES: On October 4, 2020, forty-four global experts, representing some of the leading universities in the world, came together to issue “The Great Barrington Declaration.” It reads as follows:
CONTROLLING THE SPREAD – LOCKDOWNS: EXCERPTS
WHY THE UNITED STATES LOCKED DOWN: On March 13, 2020, the White House declared a national state of emergency. America’s government leaders embarked on a draconian policy of shutting down society. Restrictions included stay-at-home orders, limits on family visits and group activities, business restrictions and school closures, medical care shutdowns, constraints on personal movement, quarantines, and travel bans – that defines lockdowns. Put forth as a temporary 15-or-30-day closure, the stated goal was to “flatten the curve” of hospitalizations. At the time, the action seemed logical and well-intended. Slow the timeline of illness so hospitals could avoid overcrowding and cope with the increasing numbers needing COVID-19 care. That would also allow mobilization of resources, including personnel, beds, and equipment to those parts of the country where they are needed most. It would provide extra time to produce tests and protective and medical equipment and allow scientists and companies to start developing new drugs and vaccines. Most people accepted the temporary shutdown, given the level of danger implied by the earliest information about the virus.
The policy goal then shifted. No longer was it “flatten the curve.” Drs. Fauci and Birx succeeded in convincing America’s decision-makers to implement blunt, extremely harsh policies that considered only one specific disease, rather than the whole of health. Those polices were also immoral, because the consequences would fall disproportionately on poor, minority populations and others of low socio-economic status. Instead of concentrating resources on protecting the only group at high risk to die and avoiding serious damage to everyone else, an unfocused and reckless response was broadly instituted. Nearly all US governors implemented and continued those lockdowns throughout 2020 and beyond. Many leaders in other countries did the same.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott Atlas, MD (2021)
No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.
The president walked in. The vice president looked at me and signaled me to speak. Despite my nerves, I plunged right into the deep end. Opening with my PowerPoint graphics, I said, “Mr. President, we need to take additional action immediately. I’m recommending that we extend the Slow the Spread measures by thirty days.” “What will happen if we don’t do the thirty days?” he asked. He had cut to the chase.
I paused for a second, the decided to hit close to home: “If we don’t, I’m certain that we’re going to have fifty, a hundred, and potentially a thousand Elmhurst Hospitals. That means more trucks outside those facilities. That means more bodies inside those trucks. We’re going to see city after city looking like what New York does right now. It will only get worse.” “I know that hospital,” Trump said. “What’s going on there, it’s horrible.” “What are you basing this on?”
I explained to him that how the United States was tracking as Italy had: we were two weeks behind where they were. I hit hard on Italy’s case fatality rate, the toll it was taking especially on people over seventy, people with other health issues – the overweight, the hypertensive, those with known cardiac or other respiratory or systemic issues. I showed him one of the charts we’d created. It showed a steep and inexorable rate of rise of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. “That fast?” he said. “Yes, Mr. President.” “How many?” “One to two hundred thousand dead by the end of May. Best-case scenario.” Worse case?” “If we do nothing?” He nodded. “Millions. Somewhere between one-point-five and two-point-five million.” “Are you sure?” “I am Mr. President.” “Tony, what about you?” He turned to Dr. Fauci. “Do you see it the same?” “Yes, Mr. President, I do.” The president nodded. “Okay, okay.”
He had listened to the data, looked at the graphs and the evidence, and had made the only choice he could – and in doing so, he was helping us deliver a crucial message to the American people. These mitigation policies were needed. It wasn’t a question of economic vitality, but of individual lives. I just hoped he had the political will to keep them in place.
“We will never shut down the country again. Never.” President Trump’s tone was emphatic, edged with agitation. It was the first week of April 3, mere days after the president had announced the 30-day extension of the Slow the Spread campaign to the American public, and the ground had shifted suddenly and without warning.
Members of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) team had put together an independent analysis of the data I’d used for my computational assumptions, using similar case curves they’d developed. They use vastly different assumptions than the ones I had used. Italy and many European countries had reached a peak for new infections. Their conclusion: in this first surge, 26,000 people would die by Memorial Day. We had predicted 100,000 and 240,000. Clearly, this was an enormous difference. My projections were nearly four to ten times greater. The CEA and I saw two very different futures. I saw a pandemic of historic proportions; they saw a fairly average year of seasonal flu.
In the moment, the importance of the 26,000 versus the 100,000 -240,000 discrepancy didn’t fully register with me. Over time, as the deaths continued to rise, the CEA would up its estimate, eventually getting to 66,000. That was still well below my projections, but near enough to mine that we could have engaged in dialogue. I could have shown which of their errors explained the difference, how they had employed a similar model but with wrong assumptions. But no one initiated that conversation. What if I had demanded an audience with the president and Hassett? What if we had sat down and gone through the differing projections, side by side? I might have been able to alleviate the administration’s worst fears by suggesting that the optimal way forward wouldn’t necessarily “shut down” the country and that we could maintain significant economic activity while still protecting Americans. I don’t know. Today, I regret not having tried.
Source: Silent Invasion by Dr. Deborah Birx (2022).
The purpose of a lockdown is not to stop the virus spread. The purpose is to slow it down, so the hospitalizations did not exceed capacity. By mid-April hospitals were going broke from their inability to served non-COVID-19 patients and the lack of COVID – 19 patients. The insanity reached a new level in American history in late April. Hospitals were not overwhelmed. In fact, they never reached capacity with COVID-19 patients. As hospitals stayed empty, were going broke, the curve was flat, states remained closed as unemployment claims reached forty million. Forty million. It’s a hard number to grasp, as that is about 20% of the workforce. Meanwhile, most in the media were championing continued lockdowns without ever presenting critical data analysis.
Source: COVID-19 Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus (2020)
A few of us looking at the data – not at what public health authorities or governors or reporters were saying about the data but at the data itself – could see two crucial facts emerging as early as the first week of April 2020. First, Covid was far less threatening than it had originally seemed. Yes, it could be deadly, especially to the elderly and people with severe comorbidities. But it would not overwhelm the medical system, much less all of society. Second, the lockdowns, at least as the U.S. and Europe conducted them were useless, if not counterproductive.
Source: Pandemia by Alex Berenson (2021)
MEDICAL CONSEQUENCES: On October 4, 2020, forty-four global experts, representing some of the leading universities in the world, came together to issue “The Great Barrington Declaration.” It reads as follows:
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health, leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. Our goal should be therefore to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balance the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sports, and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Source: Faucian Bargain by Steve Deace & Todd Erzen (2021)
Despite decades of research on the lives lost from severe unemployment and easily obtainable data quantifying health harms from missed medical care, most health economists and social scientists remained quiet.
This is the legacy of those who advocated, imposed, and maintained lockdowns: Half of the 650,000 cancer patients skipped chemotherapy during the first months of lockdown. 40% of stroke patients and half of heart attack patients were so afraid they did not call an ambulance; in March-April 2020, New York City alone has a 400% increase in deaths from non-COVID heart disease. Organ transplants from living donors were down 85% from the same period the last year. About 46% of the top six cancers were not diagnosed during the first four months of the shutdown—these cancers will present for care in later stages, and many people will die. Two-thirds to over 80% of cancer screenings were skipped in the first three months, including 70% of colonoscopies and 67% if mammograms. Over nine months, 750,000 to over 1,000,000 new US cancer cases went undetected. Severe child abuse cases brought to ERs skyrocketed by 35%, brought in by parents who thought they killed their own children. Most childhood vaccinations were skipped, generating an impending future health disaster.
Lockdowns also inflicted tremendous psychological damage, especially harming America’s children and younger generation. At least one adverse mental health symptom in almost three-fourths of those aged 18 to 24, college-aged Americans, at the end of June 2020. One in four US college-aged kids, considered suicide after the initial three-month lockdown and as of February 2021 are more than twice as likely as all adults to report new or increased drug use (25% vs. 13%) or recent suicidal thoughts (26% to 11%). Deaths from drug overdoses skyrocketed to 93,331, a record, the sharpest annual increase (30%) in at least three decades. Hundreds of thousands of child abuse cases in the US were hidden in just the first two months of school closures, since schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed. Doctor visits by teenagers for self-harm tripled in the fall of 2020. Suicide attempts among girls 12 to 17 were 50.6% higher than they were during the same period in 2019. Fifty-two percent of college-aged Americans had a significant, unwanted weight gain during the lockdown – and that weight gain averaged a shocking 28 pounds. By March 2021, a full 50% of those 18 to 24 said they “felt nervous” about any future social interaction.
In enacting lockdowns without evaluating the secondary health effect of those harsh policies, the fundamental principles of public health were violated. They failed to consider the total health impact of the policies and the pandemic; they also failed to protect those most vulnerable to those harms – children, the poor, and the elderly.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021)
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LOCKDOWNS: Dr. Fauci’s strategy for managing the COVID-19 pandemic was to suppress viral spread by mandatory masking, social distancing, quarantining the healthy (also known as lockdowns), while instructing COVID patients to return home and do nothing – receive no treatment whatsoever – until difficulties breathing sent them back to the hospital to submit to intravenous remdesivir and ventilation. This approach to ending an infectious disease contagion had no public health precedent and anemic scientific support. Predictably, it was grossly ineffective; America racked up the world’s highest body count.
Source: The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy, Jr. (2021).
A very interesting article was published in The Lancet in July that sought to understand which factors correlate, on a country level with Covid related outcomes. The most interesting thing about the study was that it sought to understand what effect lockdowns, border closures, and widespread testing have in terms of decreasing the number of Covid deaths. The study chose to limit itself to looking at the 50 countries with the most recorded cases of Covid as of April 1, 2020. The factors that most strongly predicted the number of people who died of Covid in a country were rate of obesity, average age, and level of income disparity. Each percentage increase in the rate of obesity resulted in a 12% increase in Covid deaths. Each additional average year in age in the population increased Covid deaths by 10%. On the opposite end of the spectrum, each point in the direction of greater equality resulted in a 12% decrease in Covid deaths. All these results were statistically significant.
The authors found no correlation whatsoever between the severity of lockdown and number of Covid deaths. And they didn’t find any correlation between border closures and Covid deaths either. And there was no correlation between mass testing and Covid deaths either, for that matter. Basically, nothing that various world governments have done to combat Covid seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths.
COMPARISONS AROUND THE WORLD: We had three control groups during the lockdowns of 2020: Sweden, South Dakota, and Florida. If lockdowns work, the open states and countries should have far worse results in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths than the locked down ones. They are not. Sweden is right at the European Union average, and South Dakota and Florida are right in the mix with most states. Meanwhile, kids in South Dakota and Florida got educated, people worked, depression was lower than average, and deaths from all causes were right in line with the U.S. average.
By the end of April 2020, about 2.6 billion people were through or were still under lockdowns for a matter of weeks. The largest ten largest countries in millions were India (1,380), China (760), U.S. (297), Bangladesh (165), Russia (142), Philippines (100), UK (68), France (65), Italy (60), and South Africa (59).
Japan: Japan’s first COVID-19 death was on February 12. Like Sweden, Japan opted not to undergo a lockdown. Japan has a population density of 900 people per square mile. For comparison the U.S. has 93, Italy has 533, California has 253, Florida has 400, and New York City has 27,000. Unlike most other countries, restaurants, businesses, factories, hotels and public transportation remained open. Japan realized one of the lowest per capita fatality rates (13 per million people), the number that really matters, the ultimate scorecard for evaluating how countries fared compared to one another.
South Korea: South Korea was widely hailed in the media as a model country in their handling of SARS-CoV-2. They were very aggressive testing for the virus out of the gate. Within a week of their first positive test on their homeland, the South Korean government worked closely with the private healthcare industry to create mass testing. As a result, they quickly identified a city called Daegu, a city about the size of Austin, Texas, as a source of spread. South Korea never experienced a Lombardy (Italy) like outbreak, and it was attributed to testing. They also created about 50 drive-through testing centers and tested many more than any other country very quickly. They treated and isolated infected individuals right away. It is interesting that far eastern countries like South Korea, Japan and the Philippines were among the lowest in per capita fatalities compared to western countries. Obesity has to be one distinguishing reason. South Korea was, along with Japan, one of the great successes in minimizing the impact of COVID-19.
Source: Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus (2020)
A June 2021 study found that lockdown policies in 43 countries and in the US states, led to more excess deaths:
As of this writing 37,000 Floridians deaths have been attributed to COVID-19. Florida, even with its large, high-risk population of elderly in 4,000 long-term care facilities, outperformed most states that maintained societal closured. Florida outperformed: the overall USA for COVID deaths per capita; 25 individual lockdown states in COVID deaths per capita; 40 states in age adjusted COVID mortality for those 65 plus year old, the high-risk group; the overall US age adjusted COVID morality – by 40%; two-thirds of states in excess mortality increase (percent increase in all deaths over a non-pandemic year), and the overall US excess mortality increase – by 24%.
How did Florida compare to other large states with similar urban-rural populations and diversity? Florida ranks number one of the ten largest states in lowest excess mortality; ranks number one of the ten largest states in lowest age adjusted mortality for those aged 65 plus; and ranks number one of the ten largest states in lowest age-adjusted mortality for all ages
Florida should also be compared to another large, diverse, mixed urban-rural state with a similar climate – California. Florida has the fifth oldest population in the country, while California is much younger, with the nation’s seventh youngest population. California implemented and maintained very stringent lockdowns. Florida did better than California: in protecting its citizens from dying (118 per 100,000 people in Florida versus 168 per 100,000 in California; at protecting its minorities; and at protecting jobs for lower-income people. As if March 31, 2021, employment for low-wage earners in California was down 38.3% in Florida it increased by 0.4%
Bottom line: Lockdowns did not stop the virus or save lives. Massive lives were lost because of the lockdowns. Focused protection was the safer and more ethical strategy. “Long lockdown” is far worse than “long COVID.” It’s not even close. And that’s the science.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021).
AN ECONOMIC LESSON – THINKING THINGS THROUGH AT THE MARGIN: We needed politicians to do something they don’t usually do – to start to think at the margin. In simple terms, a lot of the time political decisions and policies are made using binary thinking, such as to ban or not to ban, or to spend or not to spend. Yet most meaningful decisions in life are actually not binary but are about whether more or less of an activity is desirable.
The lockdown itself is a great example of this failure to think on the margin. Banning low-risk activities as part of stay-at-home orders because they are not “essential” means banning lots of interactions where the marginal benefits exceed the marginal costs. Fishing in most uncrowded locations or paddleboarding in the Pacific are zero cost. There are clear marginal benefits whether from the vitamin D and open air, the positive impact on their mental health, or the opportunity to take children out and away from the house they have been stuck inside for weeks. A handful of people roaming free on the sand or on lawns are noy likely to bring tiny upticks in the risks of spreading COVID-19. Thousands of people packing a beach, on the other hand, clearly would raise the risks. A marginal approach would seek to limit numbers of people at the beach or advise them to keep socially distanced, rather than banning use of public spaces, as was seen in many states.
Source: Economics in One Virus by Ryan A. Bourne (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
Despite decades of research on the lives lost from severe unemployment and easily obtainable data quantifying health harms from missed medical care, most health economists and social scientists remained quiet.
This is the legacy of those who advocated, imposed, and maintained lockdowns: Half of the 650,000 cancer patients skipped chemotherapy during the first months of lockdown. 40% of stroke patients and half of heart attack patients were so afraid they did not call an ambulance; in March-April 2020, New York City alone has a 400% increase in deaths from non-COVID heart disease. Organ transplants from living donors were down 85% from the same period the last year. About 46% of the top six cancers were not diagnosed during the first four months of the shutdown—these cancers will present for care in later stages, and many people will die. Two-thirds to over 80% of cancer screenings were skipped in the first three months, including 70% of colonoscopies and 67% if mammograms. Over nine months, 750,000 to over 1,000,000 new US cancer cases went undetected. Severe child abuse cases brought to ERs skyrocketed by 35%, brought in by parents who thought they killed their own children. Most childhood vaccinations were skipped, generating an impending future health disaster.
Lockdowns also inflicted tremendous psychological damage, especially harming America’s children and younger generation. At least one adverse mental health symptom in almost three-fourths of those aged 18 to 24, college-aged Americans, at the end of June 2020. One in four US college-aged kids, considered suicide after the initial three-month lockdown and as of February 2021 are more than twice as likely as all adults to report new or increased drug use (25% vs. 13%) or recent suicidal thoughts (26% to 11%). Deaths from drug overdoses skyrocketed to 93,331, a record, the sharpest annual increase (30%) in at least three decades. Hundreds of thousands of child abuse cases in the US were hidden in just the first two months of school closures, since schools are the number one agency where abuse is noticed. Doctor visits by teenagers for self-harm tripled in the fall of 2020. Suicide attempts among girls 12 to 17 were 50.6% higher than they were during the same period in 2019. Fifty-two percent of college-aged Americans had a significant, unwanted weight gain during the lockdown – and that weight gain averaged a shocking 28 pounds. By March 2021, a full 50% of those 18 to 24 said they “felt nervous” about any future social interaction.
In enacting lockdowns without evaluating the secondary health effect of those harsh policies, the fundamental principles of public health were violated. They failed to consider the total health impact of the policies and the pandemic; they also failed to protect those most vulnerable to those harms – children, the poor, and the elderly.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021)
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LOCKDOWNS: Dr. Fauci’s strategy for managing the COVID-19 pandemic was to suppress viral spread by mandatory masking, social distancing, quarantining the healthy (also known as lockdowns), while instructing COVID patients to return home and do nothing – receive no treatment whatsoever – until difficulties breathing sent them back to the hospital to submit to intravenous remdesivir and ventilation. This approach to ending an infectious disease contagion had no public health precedent and anemic scientific support. Predictably, it was grossly ineffective; America racked up the world’s highest body count.
Source: The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy, Jr. (2021).
A very interesting article was published in The Lancet in July that sought to understand which factors correlate, on a country level with Covid related outcomes. The most interesting thing about the study was that it sought to understand what effect lockdowns, border closures, and widespread testing have in terms of decreasing the number of Covid deaths. The study chose to limit itself to looking at the 50 countries with the most recorded cases of Covid as of April 1, 2020. The factors that most strongly predicted the number of people who died of Covid in a country were rate of obesity, average age, and level of income disparity. Each percentage increase in the rate of obesity resulted in a 12% increase in Covid deaths. Each additional average year in age in the population increased Covid deaths by 10%. On the opposite end of the spectrum, each point in the direction of greater equality resulted in a 12% decrease in Covid deaths. All these results were statistically significant.
The authors found no correlation whatsoever between the severity of lockdown and number of Covid deaths. And they didn’t find any correlation between border closures and Covid deaths either. And there was no correlation between mass testing and Covid deaths either, for that matter. Basically, nothing that various world governments have done to combat Covid seems to have had any effect whatsoever on the number of deaths.
COMPARISONS AROUND THE WORLD: We had three control groups during the lockdowns of 2020: Sweden, South Dakota, and Florida. If lockdowns work, the open states and countries should have far worse results in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths than the locked down ones. They are not. Sweden is right at the European Union average, and South Dakota and Florida are right in the mix with most states. Meanwhile, kids in South Dakota and Florida got educated, people worked, depression was lower than average, and deaths from all causes were right in line with the U.S. average.
By the end of April 2020, about 2.6 billion people were through or were still under lockdowns for a matter of weeks. The largest ten largest countries in millions were India (1,380), China (760), U.S. (297), Bangladesh (165), Russia (142), Philippines (100), UK (68), France (65), Italy (60), and South Africa (59).
Japan: Japan’s first COVID-19 death was on February 12. Like Sweden, Japan opted not to undergo a lockdown. Japan has a population density of 900 people per square mile. For comparison the U.S. has 93, Italy has 533, California has 253, Florida has 400, and New York City has 27,000. Unlike most other countries, restaurants, businesses, factories, hotels and public transportation remained open. Japan realized one of the lowest per capita fatality rates (13 per million people), the number that really matters, the ultimate scorecard for evaluating how countries fared compared to one another.
South Korea: South Korea was widely hailed in the media as a model country in their handling of SARS-CoV-2. They were very aggressive testing for the virus out of the gate. Within a week of their first positive test on their homeland, the South Korean government worked closely with the private healthcare industry to create mass testing. As a result, they quickly identified a city called Daegu, a city about the size of Austin, Texas, as a source of spread. South Korea never experienced a Lombardy (Italy) like outbreak, and it was attributed to testing. They also created about 50 drive-through testing centers and tested many more than any other country very quickly. They treated and isolated infected individuals right away. It is interesting that far eastern countries like South Korea, Japan and the Philippines were among the lowest in per capita fatalities compared to western countries. Obesity has to be one distinguishing reason. South Korea was, along with Japan, one of the great successes in minimizing the impact of COVID-19.
Source: Lockdowns on Trial by Michael Betrus (2020)
A June 2021 study found that lockdown policies in 43 countries and in the US states, led to more excess deaths:
- With longer shelter-in-place orders, more excess deaths occurred
- In the 43 countries with available data, excess deaths were falling before lockdowns, but once lockdowns were instituted, the death toll began rising
- In the United States, deaths increased once lockdowns were implemented.
As of this writing 37,000 Floridians deaths have been attributed to COVID-19. Florida, even with its large, high-risk population of elderly in 4,000 long-term care facilities, outperformed most states that maintained societal closured. Florida outperformed: the overall USA for COVID deaths per capita; 25 individual lockdown states in COVID deaths per capita; 40 states in age adjusted COVID mortality for those 65 plus year old, the high-risk group; the overall US age adjusted COVID morality – by 40%; two-thirds of states in excess mortality increase (percent increase in all deaths over a non-pandemic year), and the overall US excess mortality increase – by 24%.
How did Florida compare to other large states with similar urban-rural populations and diversity? Florida ranks number one of the ten largest states in lowest excess mortality; ranks number one of the ten largest states in lowest age adjusted mortality for those aged 65 plus; and ranks number one of the ten largest states in lowest age-adjusted mortality for all ages
Florida should also be compared to another large, diverse, mixed urban-rural state with a similar climate – California. Florida has the fifth oldest population in the country, while California is much younger, with the nation’s seventh youngest population. California implemented and maintained very stringent lockdowns. Florida did better than California: in protecting its citizens from dying (118 per 100,000 people in Florida versus 168 per 100,000 in California; at protecting its minorities; and at protecting jobs for lower-income people. As if March 31, 2021, employment for low-wage earners in California was down 38.3% in Florida it increased by 0.4%
Bottom line: Lockdowns did not stop the virus or save lives. Massive lives were lost because of the lockdowns. Focused protection was the safer and more ethical strategy. “Long lockdown” is far worse than “long COVID.” It’s not even close. And that’s the science.
Source: A Plague Upon Our House by Scott W. Atlas, MD (2021).
AN ECONOMIC LESSON – THINKING THINGS THROUGH AT THE MARGIN: We needed politicians to do something they don’t usually do – to start to think at the margin. In simple terms, a lot of the time political decisions and policies are made using binary thinking, such as to ban or not to ban, or to spend or not to spend. Yet most meaningful decisions in life are actually not binary but are about whether more or less of an activity is desirable.
The lockdown itself is a great example of this failure to think on the margin. Banning low-risk activities as part of stay-at-home orders because they are not “essential” means banning lots of interactions where the marginal benefits exceed the marginal costs. Fishing in most uncrowded locations or paddleboarding in the Pacific are zero cost. There are clear marginal benefits whether from the vitamin D and open air, the positive impact on their mental health, or the opportunity to take children out and away from the house they have been stuck inside for weeks. A handful of people roaming free on the sand or on lawns are noy likely to bring tiny upticks in the risks of spreading COVID-19. Thousands of people packing a beach, on the other hand, clearly would raise the risks. A marginal approach would seek to limit numbers of people at the beach or advise them to keep socially distanced, rather than banning use of public spaces, as was seen in many states.
Source: Economics in One Virus by Ryan A. Bourne (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| covid_7l_lockdowns_--_segment_7.pdf |