Lockdowns don’t work. It remains a mystery as to why the world entered one

January 22 was the first unnatural experiment — Wuhan, China entered into a lockdown. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

 On March 10, Italy went into a lockdown, and, over the next month, the world followed. Herewith, some highlights about the lockdown crisis that deserve mention. WHO director Tedros Adhanom said as early as March 11 that history does not have a precedent for controlling a pandemic. Yet, lockdowns were recommended.

By end March, 170 countries had closed their borders, 140 countries had several WHO containment measures, as compiled by OxGRT in place, and there were 8,81,000 COVID-19 cases and 43,000 deaths. Today, cases are 40 times, and deaths 24 times higher. This has occurred during the most intense period of lockdowns and controls around the world. In the six month October 1957-March 1958 period, excess deaths in the US numbered 62,000.

In the three-month February-April period in 1963, excess deaths numbered 57,000. In these two instances, excess deaths were 36 and 30 per cent higher than «normal». In the US, at the peak of the crisis March-May, excess deaths were 1,22,300 and COVID-19 deaths around 9,50,00.

« There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission, although higher compliance in a severe pandemic might improve effectiveness» . Yet, for COVID-19, NPIs were recommended in bundles by WHO and other experts. As is universally acknowledged, the WHO is the apex body for advice and guidance for health problems. It houses leading epidemiological experts and before COVID, they were advocating policies reminiscent of earlier confrontations with viruses.

Given this history, it remains a mystery as to why the world entered into a lockdown. Since the average death rate from COVID is 2.5 per cent, these results imply that somewhere between 10 to 20 million less infections resulted from this unnatural experiment.

Examination of the contradiction between the observed reality of 40 million cases, and the experimental reality of lockdown research, is the purpose of my above-mentioned paper. No matter what the test, the dominant result is that not only lockdowns were not effective, but that, in a large majority of cases, lockdowns were counter-productive i. My analysis stops in end-July and, therefore, ignores the post-July second wave of infections. If these data are included, the fate of lockdowns would be a lot worse.

Note that in the late 1950s, influenza vaccines were available in the US and yet excess deaths were higher than the 2020 episode of no vaccine. It is not as if no scientist forecast that lockdowns would be a disaster.

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Source: Surjit S Bhalla | The Indian Express