The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. There is no relationship between lockdowns and virus control.
Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes. The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and «nonpharmaceutical interventions» account for the difference between the fictionalized vs.
Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. «A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes» by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. «Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions became effective.
One is that differences in host susceptibility and behavior can result in herd immunity at a relatively low prevalence level. Accounting for individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to the coronavirus yields a maximum of 17% to 20% of the population that needs to be infected to reach herd immunity, an estimate that is empirically supported by the cohort of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. » «Estimation of the current development of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Germany» by Matthias an der Heiden, Osamah Hamouda. « In addition, there is a certain amount of time between all these individual steps, so that no survey system, no matter how good, can make a statement about the current infection process without additional assumptions and calculations».
Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown? by Simon N. «A Bayesian inverse problem approach applied to UK data on COVID-19 deaths and the disease duration distribution suggests that infections were in decline before full UK lockdown , and that infections in Sweden started to decline only a day or two later. An analysis of UK data using the model of Flaxman et al. » «Some may claim that the decline in the number of additional patients every day is a result of the tight lockdown imposed by the government and health authorities. Examining the data of different countries around the world casts a heavy question mark on the above statement. »
«The current epidemic of COVID-19 is unparalleled in recent history as are the social distancing interventions that have led to a significant halt on the economic and social life of so many countries. » «This phenomenological study assesses the impacts of full lockdown strategies applied in Italy, France, Spain and United Kingdom, on the slowdown of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends. Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe.
We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic». «Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe» by Marco Colombo, Joseph Mellor, Helen M Colhoun, M. «The classic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model formulated by Kermack and McKendrick assumes that all individuals in the population are equally susceptible to infection. From fitting such a model to the trajectory of mortality from COVID-19 in 11 European countries up to 4 May 2020 Flaxman et al. We show that relaxing the assumption of homogeneity to allow for individual variation in susceptibility or connectivity gives a model that has better fit to the data and more accurate 14-day forward prediction of mortality.
Allowing for heterogeneity reduces the estimate of ‘counterfactual’ deaths that would have occurred if there had been no interventions from 3.2 million to 262,000, implying that most of the slowing and reversal of COVID-19 mortality is explained by the build-up of herd immunity. » «The findings of this study suggest that prompt interventions were shown to be highly effective at reducing peak demand for intensive care unit beds but also prolong the epidemic, in some cases resulting in more deaths long term. This happens because covid-19 related mortality is highly skewed towards older age groups. In the absence of an effective vaccination programme, none of the proposed mitigation strategies in the UK would reduce the predicted total number of deaths below 200 000».
«Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis» by Amir Shlomai, Ari Leshno, Ella H Sklan, Moshe Leshno. «A nationwide lockdown is expected to save on average 274 median 124, interquartile range lives compared to the ‘testing, tracing, and isolation’ approach. However, the ICER will be on average $45,104,156 to prevent one case of death. » Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control, by Ted Cohen and Marc Lipsitch.
«The link between limiting pathogen exposure and improving public health is not always so straightforward. » «The response to COVID-19 has been overwhelmingly to lockdown much of the world’s economies in order to minimize death rates as well as the immediate negative effects of COVID-19. I argue that such policy is too often de-contextualized as it ignores policy externalities, assumes death rate calculations are appropriately accurate and, and as well, assumes focusing on direct Covid-19 effects to maximize human welfare is appropriate. As a result of this approach current policy can be misdirected and with highly negative effects on human welfare.
Moreover, such policies can inadvertently result in not minimizing death rates at all, especially in the long run. Improving the decision-making environment, inclusive of providing more comprehensive governance and improving mental models could have lockdowns throughout the world thus yielding much higher levels of human welfare». « We set out to model the disease with every expectation of failure. In choosing variables it was obvious from the outset that there would be contradictory outcomes in the real world. »
«Higher Covid death rates are observed in the latitude and in the longitude ranges. The national criteria most associated with death rate are life expectancy and its slowdown, public health context metabolic and non-communicable diseases , economy , and environment . Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate. Countries that already experienced a stagnation or regression of life expectancy, with high income and NCD rates, had the highest price to pay.
This burden was not alleviated by more stringent public decisions. » «States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions» by Adam McCann. The results are plotted against deaths per capita and unemployment. The graphics reveal no relationship in stringency level as it relates to the death rates, but finds a clear relationship between stringency and unemployment.
«The Taiwanese case reveals something extraordinary about pandemic response. As much as public-health authorities imagine that the trajectory of a new virus can be influenced or even controlled by policies and responses, the current and past experiences of coronavirus illustrate a different point. The severity of a new virus might have far more to do with endogenous factors within a population rather than the political response. According to the lockdown narrative, Taiwan did almost everything ‘wrong’ but generated what might in fact be the best results in terms of public health of any country in the world».
«Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line» by Michael Levitt, Andrea Scaiewicz, Francesco Zonta. «We test this hypothesis by showing that the trajectory of cases or deaths in any outbreak can be converted into a straight line. We find that in some locations that entire trajectory can be predicted early, whereas others take longer to follow this simple functional form». « Instead, I use empirical data, based on variation amongst United States counties, over one-fifth of which just had social distancing rather than lockdown.
Political drivers of lockdown provide identification. Lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths. This pattern is visible on each date that key lockdown decisions were made in New Zealand. The apparent ineffectiveness of lockdowns suggests that New Zealand suffered large economic costs for little benefit in terms of lives saved».
« While conventional wisdom, to date, has been that lockdowns were successful we find not one piece of evidence supporting this claim». « Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated». «Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs . After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. »
«Lockdown Effects on Sars-CoV-2 Transmission — The evidence from Northern Jutland» by Kasper Planeta Kepp and Christian Bjørnskov. «The exact impact of lockdowns and other NPIs on Sars-CoV-2 transmission remain a matter of debate as early models assumed 100% susceptible homogenously transmitting populations, an assumption known to overestimate counterfactual transmission, and since most real epidemiological data are subject to massive confounding variables. Here, we analyse the unique case-controlled epidemiological dataset arising from the selective lockdown of parts of Northern Denmark, but not others, as a consequence of the spread of mink-related mutations in November 2020. Our analysis shows that while infection levels decreased, they did so before lockdown was effective, and infection numbers also decreased in neighbour municipalities without mandates.
Instead, control of infection pockets possibly together with voluntary social behaviour was apparently effective before the mandate, explaining why the infection decline occurred before and in both the mandated and non-mandated areas. The data suggest that efficient infection surveillance and voluntary compliance make full lockdowns unnecessary at least in some circumstances». « The remaining 91% of the effect was due to voluntary behavior changes. This is excluding the effect of curfew and facemasks, which was not employed in all countries».
Source: AIER
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