Definition: Lockdowns are the forcible closure by the state of "non-essential" businesses and activities.
Features of a lockdown tend to include:
The closure of businesses, or restricting business capacity
The closure of restaurants
The closure of schools
The closure of churches
The closure of joyful in-person activities
The outlawing of gatherings over a certain # of people
The exclusion of state-sanctioned activities from shut downs or their enforcement
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Upon the advent of COVID-19, Western nations followed China in lockstep with the unprecedented policy of lockdowns to "slow the spread". Lockdowns were pursued with flagrant disregard for the evidence and the standard public health playbook. No serious medical playbook for combatting a new virus has recommended widespread lockdowns. There is no class taken by any public health expert that teaches that when there's a new virus you're supposed to lock your entire country down, and for good reason. Lockdowns are a deadly and downright destructive policy.
Have you ever seen a movie about the creation of a super-intelligent AI? In such movies, the AI is often given a set of rules along the lines of "protect humanity at all costs". As the storyline typically progresses, the AI misconstrues the message of this rule and comes to the conclusion that it must kill humanity in order to save it. The human then must fight the AI - you get the idea.
Government behaves much like a corrupted AI. The government has been given the directive that it must put almost limitless effort into fighting COVID-19. In doing so, the government has ignored the colossal cost of their policies in lives, livelihoods, and human well-being. As any medical expert worth his salt will quickly tell eager bureaucrats - the monomaniacal fixation upon one virus while ignoring all other threats to public health is nothing less than dangerous and insane. Much like the corrupted AI, our governments have decided to fixate upon fighting one virus, leaving untold mountains of death and destruction in its wake.
Unlike AI, humans have agency. The abject failure of bureaucrats and public health officials to consider the disastrous negative consequences of their lockdown policies could be construed as a mistake on day one, but its nothing short of evil on day 250.
What are the costs of lockdowns? Here are a few of the most notable: Loss of livelihoods/unemployment leads directly to death by suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, anxiety, neglect. Less cancer/disease screenings lead to more deaths, as well as delayed 'elective' surgery. Demolished supply chains lead to poverty, starvation, malnutrition, Tuberculosis, Malaria, HIV, child marriage, etc.
Now lets look at the specifics:
(adapted from @OBusyBody on Twitter)
Dissolved supply chains and obliterated markets are devastating, particularly to the third world. The middle to upper classes of the first world have the luxury of 'riding it out' in the comfort of their home. They have savings to fall back on, "essential" or virtual jobs to work in. The poor have no such luxury. Lockdown advocates will present their policies as empathetic because they 'save lives', but the exact opposite is true. Lockdown advocates are the least empathetic among us because they have demonstrated themselves to be utterly incapable of even acknowledging the smallest side-effect let alone the disastrous impacts of their own policy.
Death and destruction associated with lockdowns is certainly not limited to the third world. There are very real consequences in the first world as well.
(Credit to @OBusyBody on Twitter)
Death is not the only price we pay for our indifference. Children arguably take on a greater burden, placed upon them so forcefully by those who could not be bothered to consider the secondary consequences of their actions.
(Credit to @OBusyBody on Twitter)
Even the CDC Director Robert Redfield acknowledges that in the young we're seeing far greater deaths from suicide and drug overdoses than deaths by COVID-19.
Some have tried to estimate the number of lives lost due to lockdowns thus far (for the short-run):
Estimations from the JAMA Network (cited by CDC) show that of the 225,530 excess deaths attributed to the 2020 pandemic, ~33.25% were not attributable to COVID-19. That's 74,989 deaths just in the short run most likely attributable to lockdowns - the only other
mass casualty incident.
Scott Atlas further dissects the data:
Although it's tough to predict the exact amount of death and suffering that will be caused by lockdowns in the long run, we can still examine the dramatic drops in screenings/treatment for various diseases. To be clear, society has not simply gotten healthier so fast, rather they are not getting screened/treated for deadly diseases out of fear and the policies resulting from our collective panic.
Examine this chart. A lower number than baselines indicates how less people visited hospitals for screenings/treatment for various conditions at different stages of COVID-19. Only death and despair can result from this.
Ethical Skeptic has done incredible great work visualizing the cost of lockdowns. Upon further examination, accounting for the 93.3% drop in Flu deaths in the US, we find that COVID-19 (at this point in time) has simply replaced the flu (killing those who otherwise would have died from flu) - leaving only lockdown deaths and nothing to show for it.
You can find more on Ethical Skeptic's calculation of lockdown deaths here.
Another method by which we can measure deaths by lockdown vs COVID-19 is with quality-adjusted life-years (QALY). We want to measure how many QALY, or years of life, citizens are losing as a result of lockdowns versus a non-lockdown scenario.
A DHSC paper advising U.K. policy states: "When morbidity is taken into account, the estimates for the health impacts from a lockdown and lockdown induced recession are greater in terms of QALYs than the direct COVID-19 deaths." Now, in order to justify continued lockdowns despite such high losses in QALYs the paper further asserts that without lockdowns upwards of 1.6 million U.K. citizens would have died of COVID-19 by March 2021. This was an insane claim then and it only gets more insane by the day. The U.K. currently (11/19/20) sits at just ~53,000 deaths.
Thus we can safely conclude that QALYs lost due to lockdowns vastly outweigh QALYs saved due to lockdowns.
For more on this, read here.
Some additions:
(CNBC) - Yelp data shows 60% of >lockdown< business closures are now permanent. That's almost 100,000 businesses just as of August!
thepriceofpanic.com is another great resource compiling a list of the destructive effects of lockdowns.
Tom Woods has also compiled a solid list of links detailing deaths by lockdown.
It is for these reasons that over 12,000 medical and public health scientists have signed the Great Barrington Declaration condemning lockdowns.
Armed with this information, it should be overwhelmingly obvious how childish it is for lockdown advocates to lecture us about "if it saves only one life". Are we really saving lives if our "life saving" actions directly result in far more deaths? In the words of Thomas Sowell, "There are no solutions, only trade offs". We do not live in a cartoonishly simple reality where our actions only have their intended effects. There are indisputable secondary consequences for locking down ones nation and it would be irresponsible for public health officials to fail to consider them.
Unfortunately, such ignorance of the expert class appears to be precisely what is happening.
Watch as Maajid Nawaz corners epidemiologist Gabriel Scally on the cost of lockdowns.
It should immediately become apparent how slippery Professor Scally is being with his arguments. He attributes all deaths to be a result of the virus. The virus somehow makes lockdowns an unquestionable required policy and we cannot possibly open until we get the virus "under control". Thus, all lockdown deaths suddenly become the fault of the coronavirus! What a reprehensibly dishonest way to wipe the blood clean from the hands of a lockdown advisor! No wonder the possibility that lockdowns kill more people than they save is a completely foreign concept to Scally.
Scally's view is representative of the thought process plaguing experts in the US and around the world. Our government, remembering our corrupt AI analogy, has decided that it must first defeat the virus before it can be bothered to worry about minimizing deaths! To suggest that lockdowns are a totally unnecessary death multiplier is met with baffled stammering from our PhD friends, who couldn't be bothered to consider the secondary health consequences of their actions.
But it's not like nobody had a clue. Well before 2020, the experts knew lockdowns were a bad idea.
The Epidemiology team at Johns Hopkins similarly condemned large-scale quarantine - "It is important to communicate to political leaders the absence of evidence surrounding many NPI interventions and the adverse consequences that may follow them".
In the CDC's 2017 Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza there is no recommendation for mass business, restaurant, bar, church closures even for "novel" viruses. Temporary school closures are recommended, but in the context of COVID-19, its widely accepted at this point that the ordinary Flu is significantly more dangerous to children. Even for Pandemics of "very high severity", no severe lockdown NPI's are recommended.
Luckily, COVID-19 isn't even close to a pandemic of "very high severity". According to the CDC's Pandemic Severity Index, the current pandemic falls under category two at most.
Thus, for our current situation, it was never recommended that we close schools for more than four weeks let alone months. Even for the worst pandemics, any modifications to work behavior should have been voluntary. Forcefully putting large swaths of people out of work was never recommended. Mandatory widespread masking was never recommended.
Armed with this information, it should come as no surprise that never-before-tried, never-before-recommended lockdowns simply do not work.
Why have health officials and politicians suddenly become so eager to implement lockdowns? Any idea that they are simply "following the science" can be immediately ruled out.
Has everyone simultaneously forgotten the standard epidemic game plan?
Has everyone simultaneously chosen to ignore the complete lack of evidence for lockdown effectiveness?
Has everyone simultaneously forgotten the necessity of weighing costs and benefits of policy decisions?
I wish I knew.
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