Lockdowns

ed with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”3) Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic, Meunier, 2020“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 (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.”4) Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models, Chin, 2020“Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.”5) vvvlrNPIs). In this way, it may be possible to isolate the role of mrNPIs, net of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics.Here, we use Sweden and South Korea as the counterfac-tuals to isolate the effects of mrNPIs in5) Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19, Bendavid, 2020“Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19…we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less-restrictive interventions.”“After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country.”“In the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the United States in early 2020.”6) Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions, Rice, 2020“We therefore conclude that the somewhat counterintuitive results that school closures lead to more deaths are a consequence of the addition of some interventions that suppress the first wave and failure to prioritise protection of the most vulnerable people.When the interventions are lifted, there is still a large population who are susceptible and a substantial number of people who are infected. This then leads to a second wave of infections that can result in more deaths, but later. Further lockdowns would lead to a repeating series of waves of infection unless herd immunity is achieved by vaccination, which is not considered in the model. A similar result is obtained in some of the scenarios involving general social distancing. For example, adding general social distancing to case isolation and household quarantine was also strongly associated with suppression of the infection during the intervention period, but then a second wave occurs that actually concerns a higher peak demand for ICU beds than for the equivalent scenario without general social distancing.”7) Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary? Kuhbandner, 2020“Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the corona virus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions become effective. Several reasons for such an autonomous decline have been suggested. 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. Another reason is that seasonality may also play an important role in dissipation.”8) A First Literature Review: Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19, Herby, 2021“Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19…studies which differentiate between the two types of behavioral change find that, on average, mandated behavioral changes accounts for only 9% (median: 0%) of the total effect on the growth of the pandemic stemming from behavioral changes. The remaining 91% (median: 100%) of the effect was due to voluntary behavioral changes.” 9) Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe, Colombo, 2020“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.”10) Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis, Shlomai, 2020“A national lockdown has a moderate advantage in saving lives with tremendous costs and possible overwhelming economic effects.”11) Lockdowns and Closures vs COVID – 19: COVID Wins, Bhalla, 2020“As we have stressed throughout, a direct test of lockdowns on cases is the most appropriate test. This direct test is a before after test i.e. a comparison of what happened post lockdown versus what would have happened. Only for 15 out of 147 economies the lockdown “worked” in making infections lower; for more than a hundred countries, post lockdown estimate of infections was more than three times higher than the counter factual. This is not evidence of success – rather it is evidence of monumental failure of lockdown policy…“we also test, in some detail, the hypothesis that early lockdowns, and more stringent lockdowns, were effective in containing the virus. We find robust results for the opposite conclusion: later lockdowns performed better, and less stringent lockdowns achieved better outcomes.” “For the first time in human history, lockdowns were used as a strategy to counter the virus. While conventional wisdom, to date, has been that lockdowns were successful (ranging from mild to spectacular) we find not one piece of evidence supporting this claim.”12) SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution, Djaparidze, 2020“Found that 180-day of mandatory isolations to healthy <60 (i.e. schools and workplaces closed) produces more final deaths…e mandatory isolations have caused economic damages and since these enforced isolations were sub-optimal they involuntarily increased the risk of covid-19 disease-related damages.”13) Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response, Gibson, 2020“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.”14) Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison, Bjørnskov, 2020“The lockdowns in most Western countries have thrown the world into the most severe recession since World War II and the most rapidly developing recession ever seen in mature market economies. They have also caused an erosion of fundamental rights and the separation of powers in a large part of the world as both democratic and autocratic regimes have misused their emergency powers and ignored constitutional limits to policy-making (Bjørnskov and Voigt, 2020). It is therefore important to evaluate whether and to which extent the lockdowns have worked as officially intended: to suppress the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and prevent deaths associated with it. Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.”15) Inferring UK COVID-19 fatal infection trajectories from daily mortality data: were infections already in decline before the UK lockdowns ?, Wood, 2020“A Bayesian inverse problem approach applied to UK data on first wave Covid-19 deaths and the disease duration distribution suggests that fatal infections were in decline before full UK lockdown (24 March 2020), and that fatal infections in Sweden started to decline only a day or two later. An analysis of UK data using the model of Flaxman et al. (2020, Nature 584) gives the same result under relaxation of its prior assumptions on R.”16) The 1illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe, Homburg, 2020“We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”17) Child malnutrition and COVID-19: the time to act is now, Fore, 2020“The COVID-19 pandemic is undermining nutrition across the world, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). The worst consequences are borne by young children. Some of the strategies to respond to COVID-19—including physical distancing, school closures, trade restrictions, and country lockdowns—are impacting food systems by disrupting the production, transportation, and sale of nutritious, fresh, and affordable foods, forcing millions of families to rely on nutrient-poor alternatives.”18) Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation, De Larochelambert, 2020“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.”19) Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: A quasi-experimental study, Hunter, 2020“Closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders and closure of all non-businesses was not associated with any independent additional impact.”20) Israel: thefatemperor, 2020“Given that the evidence reveals that the Corona disease declines even without a complete lockdown, it is recommendable to reverse the current policy and remove the lockdown.”21) Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy, Altman, 2020“The response to COVID-19 has been overwhelmingly to lockdown much 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 (incorporating externalities) at all, especially in the long run… such misdirected and sub-optimal policy is a product of policy makers using inappropriate mental models which are lacking in a number of key areas; the failure to take a more comprehensive macro perspective to address the virus, using bad heuristics or decision-making tools, relatedly not recognizing the differential effects of the virus, and adopting herding strategy (follow-the-leader) when developing policy.” 22) The Mystery of Taiwan, Janaskie, 2020



“Another fascinating outlier – often cited as a case in which a government handled the pandemic the correct way – was Taiwan. Indeed, Taiwan presents an anomaly in the mitigation and overall handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. In terms of stringency, Taiwan ranks among the lowest in the world, with fewer controls than Sweden and far lower than the U.S….The government did test at the border and introduce some minor controls but nowhere near that of most counties. In general, Taiwan rejected lockdown in favor of maintaining social and economic functioning.” “Despite Taiwan’s closer proximity to the source of the pandemic, and its high population density, it experienced a substantially lower-case rate of 20.7 per million compared with New Zealand’s 278.0 per million. Rapid and systematic implementation of control measures, in particular effective border management (exclusion, screening, quarantine/isolation), contact tracing, systematic quarantine/isolation of potential and confirmed cases, cluster control, active promotion of mass masking, and meaningful public health communication, are likely to have been instrumental in limiting pandemic spread. Furthermore, the effectiveness of Taiwan’s public health response has meant that to date no lockdown has been implemented, placing Taiwan in a stronger economic position both during and post-COVID-19 compared with New Zealand, which had seven weeks of national lockdown (at Alert Levels 4 and 3).”23) What They Said about Lockdowns before 2020, Gartz, 2021“While expert consensus regarding the ineffectiveness of mass quarantine of previous years has recently been challenged, significant present-day evidence continuously demonstrates that mass quarantine is both ineffectual at preventing disease spread as well as harmful to individuals.”24) Cost of Lockdowns: A Preliminary Report, AIER, 2020“In the debate over coronavirus policy, there has been far too little focus on the costs of lockdowns. It’s very common for the proponents of these interventions to write articles and large studies without even mentioning the downsides…a brief look at the cost of stringencies in the United States, and around the world, including stay-at-home orders, closings of business and schools, restrictions on gatherings, shutting of arts and sports, restrictions on medical services, and interventions in the freedom of movement.”25) Leaked Study From Inside German Government Warns Lockdown Could Kill More People Than Coronavirus, Watson, 2020
German Minister: Lockdown Will Kill More Than Covid-19 Does“The lockdown and the measures taken by the German federal and central governments to contain the coronavirus apparently cost more lives, for example of cancer patients, than of those actually killed by it.”
“Half a million more will die from tuberculosis.”26) Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, Berry, 2021“Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behavior, and small but adverse effects on the economy.”27) Study: Lockdown “Will Destroy at Least Seven Times More Years of Human Life” Than it Saves, Watson, 2020“A study has found that the “stay at home” lockdown order in the United States will “destroy at least seven times more years of human life” than it saves and that this number is “likely” to be more than 90 times greater… Research shows that at least 16.8% of adults in the United States have suffered “major mental harm from responses to Covid-19…Extrapolating these numbers out, the figures show that “anxiety from responses to Covid-19 has impacted 42,873,663 adults and will rob them of an average of 1.3 years of life, thus destroying 55.7 million years of life.”28) Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19, Atkeson, 2020“Failing to account for these four stylized facts may result in overstating the importance of policy mandated NPIs for shaping the progression of this deadly pandemic… The existing literature has concluded that NPI policy and social distancing have been essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the number of deaths due to this deadly pandemic. The stylized facts established in this paper challenge this conclusion.”29) THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCK ON LIFE EXPECTANCY AND MORTALITY RATES, Bianchi, 2021“Policy-makers should therefore consider combining lockdowns with policy interventions meant to reduce economic distress, guarantee access to health care, and facilitate effective economic reopening under health care policies to limit SARS-CoV-19 spread…assess the long-run effects of the COVID-19 economic recession on mortality and life expectancy. We estimate the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment shock to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race and gender, resulting in a significant increase in mortality rates and drop in life expectancy. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while the effects for white men will unfold over longer horizons. These figures translate in more than 0.8 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.”30) Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence, AIER, 2020“The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.”31) Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control, Cohen, 2020“The link between limiting pathogen exposure and improving public health is not always so straightforward. Reducing the risk that each member of a community will be exposed to a pathogen has the attendant effect of increasing the average age at which infections occur. For pathogens that inflict greater morbidity at older ages, interventions that reduce but do not eliminate exposure can paradoxically increase the number of cases of severe disease by shifting the burden of infection toward older individuals.”32) Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature, Allen, 2020“Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.”33) Covid-19: How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe? Karáth, 2020“Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19. President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade. Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.”34) PANDA, Nell, 2020“For each country put forward as an example, usually in some pairwise comparison and with an attendant single cause explanation, there are a host of countries that fail the expectation. 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. But there were certain variables that appeared to be reliable markers as they had surfaced in much of the media and pre-print papers. These included age, co-morbidity prevalence and the seemingly light population mortality rates in poorer countries than that in richer countries. Even the worst among developing nations—a clutch of countries in equatorial Latin America—have seen lighter overall population mortality than the developed world. Our aim therefore was not to develop the final answer, rather to seek common cause variables that would go some way to providing an explanation and stimulating discussion. There are some very obvious outliers in this theory, not the least of these being Japan. We test and find wanting the popular notions that lockdowns with their attendant social distancing and various other NPIs confer protection.”35) States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions, McCann, 2021Graphics reveal no relationship in stringency level as it relates to the death rates, but finds a clear relationship between stringency and unemployment. 36) COVID-19 Lockdown Policies: An Interdisciplinary Review, Robinson, 2021“Studies at the economic level of analysis points to the possibility that deaths associated with economic harms or underfunding of other health issues may outweigh the deaths that lockdowns save, and that the extremely high financial cost of lockdowns may have negative implications for overall population health in terms of diminished resources for treating other conditions. Research on ethics in relation to lockdowns points to the inevitability of value judgements in balancing different kinds of harms and benefits than lockdowns cause.”37) Comedy and Tragedy in Two Americas, Tucker, 2021“Covid unleashed a version of tyranny in the United States. Through a surreptitious and circuitous route, many public officials somehow managed to gain enormous power for themselves and demonstrate that all our vaunted limits on government are easily transgressed under the right conditions. Now they want to use that power to enact permanent change in this country. Right now, people, capital, and institutions are fleeing from them to safe and freer places, which only drives the people in power to madness. They are right now plotting to shut down the free states through any means possible.”38) Lockdowns Worsen the Health Crisis, Younes, 2021“We suspect that one day, the quarantining of entire societies that was carried out in response to the coronavirus pandemic, leading to vast swaths of the population becoming unhealthier overall and ironically more susceptible to severe outcomes from the virus, will be seen as the 21^st century version of bloodletting.  As the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff has observed, public health is not just about one disease, but all health outcomes.  Apparently, in 2020, the authorities forgot this obvious truth.”39) The Damage of Lockdowns to Young People, Yang, 2021“Biological and cultural reasons why young people, mostly referring to those under the age of 30, are particularly vulnerable to the isolation as well as lifestyle disruptions brought about by lockdowns… “Adults under 30 experienced the highest increase in suicidal thinking in the same period, with rates of suicidal ideation rising from 12.5% to 14% in people aged 18-29. For many of the young adults surveyed, these mental health challenges persisted into the summer, despite a loosening of restrictions.”40) Lifestyle and mental health disruptions during COVID-19, Giuntella, 2021“COVID-19 has affected daily life in unprecedented ways. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset of college students before and during the pandemic, we document dramatic changes in physical activity, sleep, time use, and mental health. We show that biometric and time-use data are critical for understanding the mental health impacts of COVID-19, as the pandemic has tightened the link between lifestyle behaviors and depression.”41) CDC: A Quarter of Young Adults Say They Contemplated Suicide This Summer During Pandemic, Miltimore, 2020“One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they’ve considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation’s mental health during the crisis. The data also flags a surge of anxiety and substance abuse, with more than 40 percent of those surveyed saying they experienced a mental or behavioral health condition connected to the Covid-19 emergency. The CDC study analyzed 5,412 survey respondents between June 24 and 30.”42) Global rise in childhood mental health issues amid pandemic, LEICESTER, 2021“For doctors who treat them, the pandemic’s impact on the mental health of children is increasingly alarming. The Paris pediatric hospital caring for Pablo has seen a doubling in the number of children and young teenagers requiring treatment after attempted suicides since September.Doctors elsewhere report similar surges, with children — some as young as 8 — deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills and otherwise self-harming. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides hit record levels in 2020, according to the Education Ministry.”43) Lockdowns: The Great Debate, AIER, 2020“The global lockdowns, on this scale with this level of stringency, have been without precedent. And yet we have examples of a handful of countries and US states that did not do this, and their record in minimizing the cost of the pandemic is better than the lockdown countries and states. The evidence that the lockdowns have done net good in terms of public health is still lacking.”44) COVID-19 containment policies through time may cost more lives at metapopulation level, Wells, 2020“Show that temporally restricted containment efforts, that have the potential to flatten epidemic curves, can result in wider disease spread and larger epidemic sizes in metapopulations.” 45) The Covid-19 Emergency Did Not Justify Lockdowns, Boudreaux, 2021“Yet there was no such careful calculation for the lockdowns imposed in haste to combat Covid-19. Lockdowns were simply assumed not only to be effective at significantly slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but also to impose only costs that are acceptable. Regrettably, given the novelty of the lockdowns, and the enormous magnitude of their likely downsides, this bizarrely sanguine attitude toward lockdowns was – and remains – wholly unjustified.”46) Death and Lockdowns, Tierney, 2021“Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.”47) The COVID Pandemic Could Lead to 75,000 Additional Deaths from Alcohol and Drug Misuse and Suicide, Well Being Trust, 2021“The brief notes that if the country fails to invest in solutions that can help heal the nation’s isolation, pain, and suffering, the collective impact of COVID-19 will be even more devastating. Three factors, already at work, are exacerbating deaths of despair: unprecedented economic failure paired with massive unemployment, mandated social isolation for months and possible residual isolation for years, and uncertainty caused by the sudden emergence of a novel, previously unknown microbe…the deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year… lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford Medical School. “We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.”48) Professor Explains Flaw in Many Models Used for COVID-19 Lockdown Policies, Chen, 2021“Economics professor Doug Allen wanted to know why so many early models used to create COVID-19 lockdown policies turned out to be highly incorrect. What he found was that a great majority were based on false assumptions and “tended to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs.” He found it troubling that policies such as total lockdowns were based on those models. “They were built on a set of assumptions. Those assumptions turned out to be really important, and the models are very sensitive to them, and they turn out to be false,” said Allen, the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, in an interview.”“Furthermore, “The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries,” writes Allen. In other words, in his assessment, heavy lockdowns do not meaningfully reduce the number of deaths in the areas where they are implemented, when compared to areas where lockdowns were not implemented or as stringent.”49) The Anti-Lockdown Movement Is Large and Growing, Tucker, 2021“The lesson: lockdown policies failed to protect the vulnerable and otherwise did little to nothing actually to suppress or otherwise control the virus. AIER has assembled fully 35 studies revealing no connection between lockdowns and disease outcomes. In addition, the Heritage Foundation has published an outstanding roundup of the Covid experience, revealing that lockdowns were largely political theater distracting from what should have been good public health practice.” 50) The Ugly Truth About The Covid-19 Lockdowns, Hudson, 2021“By following the data and official communications from global organisations, PANDA unravels what transpired that led us into deleterious lockdowns, which continue to have enormous negative impacts across the world.”51) The Catastrophic Impact of Covid Forced Societal Lockdowns, Alexander, 2020“It is also noteworthy that these irrational and unreasonable restrictive actions are not limited to any one jurisdiction such as the US, but shockingly have occurred across the globe. It is stupefying as to why governments, whose primary roles are to protect their citizens, are taking these punitive actions despite the compelling evidence that these policies are misdirected and very harmful; causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It’s tantamount to insanity what governments have done to their populations and largely based on no scientific basis. None! In this, we have lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious ‘science’ or worse, opinion, and this erosion of fundamental freedoms and democracy is being championed by government leaders who are disregarding the Constitutional (USA) and Charter (Canada) limits to their right to make and enact policy. These unconstitutional and unprecedented restrictions have taken a staggering toll on our health and well-being and also target the very precepts of democracy; particularly given the fact that this viral pandemic is no different in overall impact on society than any previous pandemics. There is simply no defensible rationale to treat this pandemic any differently.”52) Cardiovascular and immunological implications of social distancing in the context of COVID-19, D’Acquisto, 2020“It is clear that social distancing measures such as lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic will have subsequent effects on the body including the immune and cardiovascular systems, the extent of which will be dependent on the duration of such measures. The take-home message of these investigations is that social interaction is an integral part of a wide range of conditions that influence cardiovascular and immunological homeostasis.”53) A Statistical Analysis of COVID-19 and Government Protection Measures in the U.S., Dayaratna, 2021“Our analysis demonstrates that the time from a state’s first case to voluntary changes in residence mobility, which occurred before the imposition of shelter-in-place orders in 43 states, indeed quelled the time to reach the maximum growth in per capita cases. On the other hand, our analysis also indicates that these behavioral changes were not significantly effective in quelling mortality… our simulations find a negative effect of the time from a state’s first case to the imposition of shelter-in-place orders on the time to reach the specified per capita mortality thresholds. Our analysis also finds a slightly smaller negative effect on the time from a state’s first case to the imposition of prohibitions on gatherings above 500 people…. shelter-in-place orders can also have negative unforeseen health-related consequences, including the capacity to cause patients to avoid visits to doctors’ offices and emergency rooms. In addition, these policies can result in people, including those with chronic illnesses, skipping routine medical appointments, not seeking routine procedures to diagnose advanced cancer, not pursuing cancer screening colonoscopies, postponing non-emergency cardiac catheterizations, being unable to seek routine care if they experience chronic pain, and suffering mental health effects, among others…drug overdose deaths, alcohol consumption, and suicidal ideation have also been noted to have increased in 2020 compared to prior years.”54) Lockdowns in Taiwan: Myths Versus Reality, Gartz, 2021“Articles citing a “tightening” of rules only briefly acknowledge that Taiwan never locked down. Instead, they blame the increase in cases on a loosening of travel restrictions and on people’s becoming “more relaxed or careless as time goes by.” A closer look reveals that this harsh turn in restrictions consists of capping gatherings at 500 for outdoors and 100 for indoors to 10 and 5 respectively — more in line with gathering limits imposed by Western nations.The reality is that the hyperbolic 124 action items misrepresent the Taiwanese approach. Relative to other countries, Taiwan serves as a beacon of freedom: children still attended school, professionals continued to go to work, and businesspeople were able to keep their businesses open.”55) Lockdowns Need to Be Intellectually Discredited Once and For All, Yang, 2021“Lockdowns do not provide any meaningful benefit and they cause unnecessary collateral damage. Voluntary actions and light-handed accommodations to protect the vulnerable according to comprehensive analysis, not cherry-picked studies with overly short timelines, provide similar, if not better, virus mitigation compared to lockdown policies. Furthermore, contrary to what many keep trying to say, it is lockdowns that are the causal factor behind the unprecedented economic and social damage that has been dealt to society.”56) Canada’s COVID-19 Strategy is an Assault on the Working Class, Kulldorff, 2020“The Canadian COVID-19 lockdown strategy is the worst assault on the working class in many decades. Low-risk college students and young professionals are protected; such as lawyers, government employees, journalists, and scientists who can work from home; while older high-risk working-class people must work, risking their lives generating the population immunity that will eventually help protect everyone. This is backwards, leading to many unnecessary deaths from both COVID-19 and other diseases.”57) Our COVID-19 Plan would Minimize Mortality and Lockdown-induced Collateral Damage, Kulldorff, 2020“While mortality is inevitable during a pandemic, the COVID-19 lockdown strategy has led to more than 220,000 deaths, with the urban working class carrying the heaviest burden. Many older workers have been forced to accept high mortality risk or increased poverty, or both. While the current lockdowns are less strict than in March, the lockdown and contact tracing strategy is the worst assault on the working class since segregation and the Vietnam War.Lockdown policies have closed schools, businesses and churches, while not enforcing strict protocols to protect high-risk nursing home residents. University closures and the economic displacement caused by lockdowns have led millions of young adults to live with older parents, increasing regular close interactions across generations.”58) The costs are too high; the scientist who wants lockdown lifted faster; Gupta, 2021“It’s becoming clear that a lot of people have been exposed to the virus and that the death rate in people under 65 is not something you would lock down the economy for,” she says. “We can’t just think about those who are vulnerable to the disease. We have to think about those who are vulnerable to lockdown too. The costs of lockdown are too high at this point.”59) Review of the Impact of COVID-19 First Wave Restrictions on Cancer Care, Collateral Global, Heneghan; 2021“Restrictive measures in the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic in 2019-20 led to wide-scale, global disruption of cancer care. Future restrictions should consider disruptions to the cancer care pathways and plan to prevent unnecessary harms.”60) German Study Finds Lockdown ‘Had No Effect’ on Stopping Spread of Coronavirus, Watson, 2021“Stanford researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”61) Lockdown will claim the equivalent of 560,000 lives because of the health impact of the ‘deep and prolonged recession it will cause’, expert warns, Adams/Thomas/Daily Mail, 2020“Lockdowns will end up claiming the equivalent of more than 500,000 lives because of the health impact of the ‘deep and prolonged recession it will cause.”62) Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns, Glen, 2021“Likewise, a 2020 paper about quarantines published in The Lancet states: “Separation from loved ones, the loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can, on occasion, create dramatic effects. Suicide has been reported, substantial anger generated, and lawsuits brought following the imposition of quarantine in previous outbreaks. The potential benefits of mandatory mass quarantine need to be weighed carefully against the possible psychological costs.”Yet, when dealing with Covid-19 and other issues, politicians sometimes ignore this essential principle of sound decision-making. For a prime example, NJ Governor Phil Murphy recently insisted that he must maintain a lockdown or “there will be blood on our hands.” What that statement fails to recognize is that lockdowns also kill people via the mechanisms detailed above… In other words, the anxiety from reactions to Covid-19—such as business shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, media exaggerations, and legitimate concerns about the virus—will extinguish at least seven times more years of life than can possibly be saved by the lockdowns.Again, all of these figures minimize deaths from anxiety and maximize lives saved by lockdowns. Under the more moderate scenarios documented above, anxiety will destroy more than 90 times the life saved by lockdowns.”63) The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence, Brooks, 2020“Reported negative psychological effects including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. Stressors included longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. Some researchers have suggested long-lasting effects. In situations where quarantine is deemed necessary, officials should quarantine individuals for no longer than required, provide clear rationale for quarantine and information about protocols, and ensure sufficient supplies are provided. Appeals to altruism by reminding the public about the benefits of quarantine to wider society can be favourable.”64) Lockdown ‘had no effect’ on coronavirus pandemic in Germany, Huggler, 2021“A new study by German scientists claims to have found evidence that lockdowns may have had little effect on controlling the coronavirus pandemic. Statisticians at Munich University found “no direct connection” between the German lockdown and falling infection rates in the country.”65) Swedish researchers: Anti-corona restrictions have killed as many people as the virus itself, Peterson, 2021“The restrictions against the coronavirus have killed as many people as the virus itself. The restrictions have first and foremost hit the poorer parts of the world and struck young people, the researchers believe, pointing to children who died of malnutrition and various diseases. They also pointed to adults who died of diseases that could have been treated. “These deaths we see in poor countries are related to women who die in childbirth, newborns who die early, children who die of pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria because they are malnourished or not vaccinated,” Peterson said.”66) Lockdowns Leave London Broken, Burden, 2021“In normal times, London runs on a sprawling network of trains and buses that bring in millions of commuters to work and spend. Asking those people to work from home ripped the heart out of the economy, leaving the U.K. capital more like a ghost town than a thriving metropolis.The city is now emerging from a year of lockdowns with deeper scars than much of the rest of the U.K. Many restaurants, theaters and shops remain shuttered, and the migrant workers that staffed them fled to their birth countries in the tens of thousands. Even when most of the rules expire in June, new border restrictions since the U.K. left the European Union will make it harder for many to return. As a result, the city’s business model focused on population density is in upheaval, and many of London’s strengths have turned to weaknesses.”67) Lockdowns Are a Step Too Far in Combating Covid-19, Nocera, 2020“The truth is that using lockdowns to halt the spread of the coronavirus was never a good idea. If they have any utility at all, it is short term: to help ensure that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed in the early stages of the pandemic. But the long-term shutdowns of schools and businesses, and the insistence that people stay indoors — which almost every state imposed at one point or another — were examples of terribly misguided public policy. It is likely that when the history of this pandemic is told, lockdowns will be viewed as one of the worst mistakes the world made.”68) Stop the Lies: Lockdowns Did Not and Do Not Protect the Vulnerable, Alexander, 2021“Lockdowns didn’t protect the vulnerable, but rather harmed them and shifted the morbidity and mortality burden to the underprivileged.”69) Why Shutdowns and Masks Suit the Elite, Swaim, 2021“The dispute over masks—like those over school closures, business shutdowns, social-distancing guidelines and all the rest—should always properly have been a discussion of acceptable versus unacceptable risk. But the preponderance of America’s cultural and political leaders showed no ability to think about risk in a helpful way.”70) The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on Excess Mortality, Agrawal, 2021“Find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases. The increase in excess mortality is statistically significant in the immediate weeks following SIP implementation for the international comparison only and occurs despite the fact that there was a decline in the number of excess deaths prior to the implementation of the policy… failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier, and in which SIP policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement SIP policies. We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of SIP policies based on pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.”71) COVID-19 Lockdowns Over 10 Times More Deadly Than Pandemic Itself, Revolver, 2020“We have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.”72) The Impact of Interruptions in Childhood Vaccination, Collateral Global, 2021“COVID-19 pandemic measures caused significant disruption to childhood vaccination services and uptake. In future pandemics, and for the remainder of the current one, policymakers must ensure access to vaccination services and provide catch-up programs to maintain high levels of immunisation, especially in those most vulnerable to childhood diseases in order to avoid further inequalities.”73) Shelter-in-place orders didn’t save lives during the pandemic, research paper concludes, Howell, 2021
COVID-19 lockdowns caused more deaths instead of reducing them, study finds“Researchers from the RAND Corporation and the University of Southern California studied excess mortality from all causes, the virus or otherwise, in 43 countries and the 50 U.S. states that imposed shelter-in-place, or “SIP,” policies. In short, the orders didn’t work. “We fail to find that SIP policies saved lives. To the contrary, we find a positive association between SIP policies and excess deaths. We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases,” the researchers said in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).”74) Experts Said Ending Lockdowns Would Be Worse for the Economy than the Lockdowns Themselves. They Were Wrong, MisesInstitute, 2021“There is no indication whatsoever that states with longer periods of lockdown and forced social distancing fared better economically than states that abandoned covid restrictions much earlier. Rather, many states that ended lockdowns early—or didn’t have them at all—now show less unemployment and more economic growth than states that imposed lockdowns and social distancing rules much longer. The complete lack of any correlation between economic success and covid lockdowns illustrates yet again that the confident predictions of the experts—who insisted that states without long lockdowns would endure bloodbaths and economic destruction—were very wrong.”75) The Harms of Lockdowns, The Dangers of Censorship, And A Path Forward, AIER, 2020“When you read about failures of intelligence, probably the most spectacular being the weapons of mass destruction fiasco, the lesson that they were supposed to learn from that, and maybe have learned, is that you need to encourage cognitive dissonance. You need to encourage critical thinking. You need to have people who are looking at things differently than your mainstream view, because it will help to prevent you from making catastrophic errors. It will help to keep you honest.And we’ve done exactly the opposite instead of encouraging critical thinking, different ideas, we’ve stifled it. That’s what makes the actions of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons towards you so shocking because it’s absolute the opposite of what we need to do. And it’s been that absence of critical thinking of incorporating critical thinking in our decision-making that has led to one mistake after another in handling COVID-19.”76) UNDERSTANDING INTER-REGIONAL DIFFERENCES IN COVID-19 MORTALITY RATES, PANDA, 2021“We cannot argue that the phased adoption of these measures has any impact on risk mitigation. This is an important consideration for policy makers who must carefully balance the benefits of a phased lockdown strategy with the economic harm caused by such an intervention.”77) Potential lessons from the Taiwan and New Zealand health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Summers, 2020“Extensive public health infrastructure established in Taiwan pre-COVID-19 enabled a fast coordinated response, particularly in the domains of early screening, effective methods for isolation/quarantine, digital technologies for identifying potential cases and mass mask use. This timely and vigorous response allowed Taiwan to avoid the national lockdown used by New Zealand. Many of Taiwan’s pandemic control components could potentially be adopted by other jurisdictions.”78) 5 Times More Children Committed Suicide Than Died of COVID-19 During Lockdown: UK Study, Phillips, 2021“Five times more children and young people committed suicide than died of COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic in the United Kingdom, according to a study, which also concluded that lockdowns are more detrimental to children’s health than the virus itself.”79) Study Indicates Lockdowns Have Increased Deaths of Despair, Yang, 2021“Deaths of despair due in large part to social isolation. Regardless of whether they think lockdowns work, policymakers must be cognizant of the fact shutting down society also leads to excess deaths. Whether it’s from the government policies themselves or the willful compliance of society enforcing the soft despotism of popular hysteria, social isolation is taking its toll on the lives of many.”80) DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE INCIDENCE OF EXCESS MORTALITY IN 2020, Mulligan, 2020“Presumably social isolation is part of the mechanism that turns a pandemic into a wave of deaths of despair. However, the results in this paper do not say how much, if any, comes from government stay-at-home orders versus various actions individual households and private businesses have taken to encourage social distancing.”81) Effects of the lockdown on the mental health of the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy: Results from the COMET collaborative network, Fiorillo, 2020“Although physical isolation and lockdown represent essential public health measures for containing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, they are a serious threat for mental health and well-being of the general population. As an integral part of COVID-19 response, mental health needs should be addressed.”Mental Health and the Covid-19 Pandemic, Pfefferbaum, 2020“The Covid-19 pandemic has alarming implications for individual and collective health and emotional and social functioning. In addition to providing medical care, already stretched health care providers have an important role in monitoring psychosocial needs and delivering psychosocial support to their patients, health care providers, and the public — activities that should be integrated into general pandemic health care.”82) Why Government Lockdowns Mostly Harm the Poor, Peterson, 2021“For developed countries, lockdowns undoubtedly imposed significant economic and health costs. Many workers in the service sector, like the food industry, for example, were left unemployed and had to rely on government stimulus checks to get them through the bumpiest stages of the pandemic. Some businesses had to shutter their doors entirely, leaving many employers without jobs as well. This is to say nothing of the severe mental health consequences of government lockdown orders…These irresponsible government actions are especially acute and more harmful in developing countries and among the poor because most workers can’t afford to sacrifice weeks or perhaps months of income, only to be confined to what is effectively house arrest.”83) Cost of Lockdowns: A Preliminary Report, AIER, 2020“In the debate over coronavirus policy, there has been far too little focus on the costs of lockdowns. It’s very common for the proponents of these interventions to write articles and large studies without even mentioning the downsides.” 84) In Africa, social distancing is a privilege few can afford, Noko, 2020“Social distancing could probably work in China and in Europe – but in many African countries, it is a privilege only a minority can afford.”85) Teargas, beatings and bleach: the most extreme Covid-19 lockdown controls around the world, Ratcliff, 2020“Violence and humiliation used to police coronavirus curfews around globe, often affecting the poorest and more vulnerable.”86) “Shoot them dead”: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte orders police and military to kill citizens who defy coronavirus lockdown, Capatides, 2020“Later that night, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took to the airwaves with a chilling warning for his citizens: Defy the lockdown orders again and the police will shoot you dead.”87) Colombia’s Capital Locks Down as Cases Surge, Vyas, 2021
Colombia Protests Turn Deadly Amid Covid-19 Hardships“Bogotá, which has logged a quarter of the nation’s cases, had already applied restrictions on mobility and alcohol sales in order to contain gatherings and the spread of the virus before expanding the measures.”“The nationwide unrest was triggered by a proposed tax-collection overhaul and stringent pandemic lockdowns that have been blamed for causing mass unemployment and throwing some four million people into poverty.”88) Argentina receives AstraZeneca jabs amid anti-lockdown protests, AL JAZEERA, 2021“New COVID-19 restrictions have been imposed in and around Buenos Aires in effort to stem recent rise in infections…Argentines took to the streets on Saturday, however, to protest against new coronavirus-related restrictions in and around the capital, Buenos Aires, that came into effect on Friday… Horacio Rodriguez Larreta, head of the city government, said last week that Buenos Aires “totally disagree[s] with the decision of the national government to close schools.”89) Lives vs. Livelihoods Revisited: Should Poorer Countries with Younger Populations Have Equally Strict Lockdowns? Von Carnap, 2020“Economists in the rich world have largely supported stringent containment measures, rejecting any trade-off between lives and livelihoods…strict lockdowns in countries where a significant share of the population is poor are likely to have more severe consequences on welfare than in richer countries. From a macro perspective, any negative economic effect of a lockdown is reducing a budget with already fewer resources in a poor country.”90) Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Developing Countries: Lessons from Selected Countries of the Global South, Chowdhury, 2020“If testing, contact tracing and other early containment measures had been adequately done in a timely manner to stem viral transmission, nationwide lockdowns would not have been necessary, and only limited areas would have had to be locked down for quarantine purposes. The effectiveness of containment measures, including lockdowns, are typically judged primarily by their ability to quickly reduce new infections, ‘flatten the curve’ and avoid subsequent waves of infections. However, lockdowns can have many effects, depending on context, and typically incur huge economic costs, unevenly distributed in economies and societies.”91) Battling COVID-19 with dysfunctional federalism: Lessons from India, Choutagunta, 2021“Find that India’s centralized lockdown was at best a partial success in a handful of states, while imposing enormous economic costs even in areas where few were affected by the pandemic.”92) The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea, Tucker, 2020“Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69, 1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.”93) Young People Are Particularly Vulnerable To Lockdowns, Yang, 2021“The damage to society was certainly extensive, with a 3.5 percent annualized economic retraction record in 2020 and a 32.9 percent decline in Q2 of 2020, making this one of the sharpest economic declines in modern history. However, the level of suffering and trauma caused by these policies cannot be appropriately expressed by economic data alone. Lockdown policies may have caused a substantial amount of financial damage but the social damage is just as concerning, if not more so. Across the board, there have been increased reports of mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, that are linked to social isolation, substantial life disruptions, and existential dread over the state of the world. Unlike lost dollars, mental health problems leave real and lasting damage which could lead to complications later in life, if not self-harm or suicide. For young people, a drastic increase in suicides has claimed more lives than Covid-19. That is because they are far less vulnerable to Covid than older segments of the population but far more negatively impacted by lockdowns.”94) More “Covid Suicides” than Covid Deaths in Kids, Gartz, 2021“Before Covid, an American youth died by suicide every six hours. Suicide is a major public health threat and a leading cause of death for those aged under 25 — one far bigger than Covid. And it is something that we have only made worse as we, led by politicians and ‘the science,’ deprived our youngest members of society — who constitute one-third of the US population — of educational, emotional and social development without their permission or consent for over a year… the biggest increase in youth deaths occurred in the 15-24 age bracket — the age group most susceptible to committing suicide, and which constitutes 91% of youth suicides… such “deaths of despair” tend to be higher among youths, particularly for those about to graduate or enter the workforce. With economic shrinkage due to lockdowns and forced closures of universities, youths face both less economic opportunity and limited social support — which plays an important role in reporting and preventing self-harm — through social networks.”95) Comparison of COVID-19 outcomes among shielded and non-shielded populations, Jani, 2021“Linked family practitioner, prescribing, laboratory, hospital and death records and compared COVID-19 outcomes among shielded and non-shielded individuals in the West of Scotland. Of the 1.3 million population, 27,747 (2.03%) were advised to shield, and 353,085 (26.85%) were classified a priori as moderate risk…in spite of the shielding strategy, high risk individuals were at increased risk of death.” 96) Sweden: Despite Variants, No Lockdowns, No Daily Covid Deaths, Fumento, 2021““Locking down is saving time,” he said last year. “It’s not solving anything.” In essence the country “front-loaded” its deaths and decreased those deaths later on…Despite Sweden inevitably feeling undertow from economies that did lock down, “Covid-19 has had a rather limited impact on its economy compared with most other European countries,” according to the Nordetrade.com consulting firm. “Softer preventative restrictions against Covid-19 earlier in the year and a strong recovery in the third quarter contained the GDP contraction,” it said.Thus, the country the media loved to hate is reaping the best of all worlds: Few current cases and deaths, stronger economic growth than the lockdown countries, and its people never experienced the yoke of tyranny.”97) Lockdown lessons, Ross, 2021“Never take radical action without overwhelming evidence that it will work. The authorities took all manner of drastic actions and weren’t the least bit interested in offering evidence and they still aren’t. Unelected bureaucrats, who know nothing about us, dictated how we live our lives down to the tiniest details. The authorities coerced hundreds of millions of people to wear masks. They assumed that would reduce transmission. There is now evidence that masks are worse than useless.Be extremely reluctant to commit sweeping violations of the Constitution. The Constitution is our country’s greatest asset and our north star. Ignoring it or trampling on it is never a good idea. The Constitution is what makes us who we are. We ought to treat it like the treasure it is.Always consider both costs and benefits and make best-effort projections of both. The costs of virtually every aspect of the lockdown were more than the benefits, usually far more…it has increased the amount of depression and number of suicides, especially among those age 18 and younger. The postponement and cancellation of medical appointments have resulted in thousands of premature deaths.”98) Prof. Sunetra Gupta — New Lockdown is a Terrible Mistake, Gupta, 2020“I would beg to disagree. I think there is an alternative, and that alternative involves reducing the deaths that this pandemic might cause by diverting our energies to protecting the vulnerables. Now, why would I say that? The main reason to say that is because the costs of alternative strategies such as lockdown are so profound that we are left with a contemplation of how to go ahead, go forwards, in this current sort of situation without inflicting harm, not just to those who are vulnerable to COVID, but to the general population in a way that meets with those standards that we set ourselves from the moment we were, maybe not born, but from the moment that we became cognizant of those responsibilities towards society.”99) The harms of lockdown will vastly outweigh the benefits, Hinton, 2021“Nearly 1.2 m people waiting at least six months for vital services.” 100) Lockdowns don’t work, Stone/AEI, 2020“Lockdowns don’t work. That simple sentence is enough to ignite a firestorm of controversy these days, whether you say it in public (to someone at least six feet away, of course) or online. As soon as the words leave your lips, they begin to be interpreted in extraordinary ways. Why do you want to kill old people? Why do you think the economy is more important than saving lives? Why do you hate science? Are you a shill for Trump? Why are you spreading misinformation about the severity of COVID? But here’s the thing: there’s no evidence of lockdowns working. If strict lockdowns actually saved lives, I would be all for them, even if they had large economic costs. But, put simply, the scientific and medical case for strict lockdowns is paper-thin… If you’re going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work.”101) Science Killed itself over COVID-19, Raleigh/Federalist/Atlas, 2021“Lockdowns destroyed people, Atlas said, by “shutting down medical care, stopping people from seeking emergency medical care, increasing drug abuse, increasing death by suicide, more psychological damage, particularly among the younger generation. Hundreds and thousands of child abuse cases went unreported. Teenagers’ self-harm cases have tripled… Mortality data showing that anywhere from a third or half of the deaths during the pandemic were not due to COVID-19,” Atlas said. “They were extra deaths due to the lockdowns…we should offer targeted protections for high-risk people but no lockdowns of low-risk people.”102) Assembling Covid Jigsaw Pieces Into a Complete Pandemic Picture, Brookes, 2021“Overall there is a minimal positive impact from quarantine policy, isolation requirements, Test and Trace regimes, social distancing, masking or other non-pharmaceutical interventions. Initially, these were the only tools in the tool-box of interventionist politicians and scientists. At best they slightly delayed the inevitable, but they also caused considerable collateral harms.”103) Covid Lockdowns Signal the Rise of Public Policy by Ransom, O’Neill/MisesInstitute, 2021“Public policy by ransom occurs when a government imposes a behavioral requirement on individuals and enforces this by punishing the general public in aggregate until a stipulated level of compliance is attained. The method relies on members of the public and public commentators—like Marcotte—who will attribute blame for these negative consequences to recalcitrant citizens who fail to adopt the preferred behaviors of the governing class. In the weltanschauung that underpins this type of governance, government reactions to public behaviors are “metaphysically given” and are treated as a mere epiphenomenon of the actions of individual members of the public who dare to behave in ways disliked by public authorities… what has emerged as an ominous mode of thinking in this atmosphere is the reflexive attribution of blame to recalcitrant members of the public for any subsequent negative consequences imposed on the public by government policies. If the government chooses to impose a negative consequence on the public—even conditionally on the behavior of the public—that consequence is a chosen policy of the government and must be viewed as a policy choice.”104) Sweden Saw Lower Mortality Rate Than Most of Europe in 2020, Despite No Lockdown, Miltimore, 2021“I think people will probably think very carefully about these total shutdowns, how good they really were…t hey may have had an effect in the short term, but when you look at it throughout the pandemic, you become more and more doubtful…data published by Reuters that show Sweden, which shunned the strict lockdowns embraced by most nations around the world, experienced a smaller increase in its mortality rate than most European countries in 2020.”105) Weighing the Costs of COVID Versus the Costs of Lockdowns, Leef/National Review, 2021“Yet there was no such careful calculation for the lockdowns imposed in haste to combat Covid-19. Lockdowns were simply assumed not only to be effective at significantly slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but also to impose only costs that are acceptable. Regrettably, given the novelty of the lockdowns, and the enormous magnitude of their likely downsides, this bizarrely sanguine attitude toward lockdowns was – and remains – wholly unjustified. And the unjustness of this reaction is further highlighted by the fact that, in a free society, the burden of proof is on those who would restrict freedom and not on those who resist such restrictions… policy-makers should be just as interested in the costs of the problem as in the costs of any proposed solution to it.”106) Increase in preterm stillbirths and reduction in iatrogenic preterm births for fetal compromise: a multi-centre cohort study of COVID-19 lockdown effects in Melbourne, Australia, Hui, 2021“Lockdown restrictions in a high-income setting, in the absence of high rates of COVID-19 disease, were associated with a significant increase in preterm stillbirths, and a significant reduction in iatrogenic PTB for suspected fetal compromise.”107) Impact of the COVID19 pandemic on cardiovascular mortality and catherization activity during the lockdown in central Germany: an observational study, Nef, 2021“During the COVID-19-related lockdown a significant increase in cardiovascular mortality was observed in central Germany, whereas catherization activities were reduced.”108) Editor’s Note – Cancer Review Issue, Collateral Global, 2021“Before the lockdowns, we had made so much progress in the war on cancer.  Between 1999 and 2019, cancer mortality dropped by an astonishing 27% in the United States, down to 600,000 deaths in 2019.  Worldwide, the age-standardized death rate from cancer has decreased by 15% since 1990.  Cancer, like COVID-19, is by proportion an old person’s disease, with 27% of cases afflicting people 70 and over and over 70% of cases afflicting people 50 and over.  Despite progress against the disease, 18.1 million new cases were diagnosed worldwide in 2018, and 9.6 million people died from cancer… N\nearly eight out of ten cancer patients reported delays in care, with almost six out ten skipping doctor visits, one in four skipping imaging, and one in six missing surgery…the toll from cancer, exacerbated by lockdown and panic, will continue into the indefinite future.”109) Impact of COVID-19 and partial lockdown on access to care, self-management and psychological well-being among people with diabetes: A cross-sectional study, Yeoh, 2021“COVID-19 and lockdown had mixed impacts on self-care and management behaviours. Greater clinical care and attention should be provided to people with diabetes with multiple comorbidities and previous mental health disorders during the pandemic and lockdown…the pandemic and quarantine measures may have led to many losses including a loss of loved ones, employment, financial security, direct social contacts, educational opportunities, recreation and social support. A review of the psychological impact of quarantine demonstrated a high prevalence of psychological symptoms and emotional disturbance.”110) Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States: Online Survey, Jewell, 2020“Findings suggest that many US residents are experiencing high stress, depressive, and anxiety symptomatology, especially those who are underinsured, uninsured, or unemployed.”111) Mental health in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic: cross-sectional analyses from a community cohort study, Jia, 2020“Increased psychological morbidity was evident in this UK sample and found to be more common in younger people, women and in individuals who identified as being in recognised COVID-19 risk groups. Public health and mental health interventions able to ameliorate perceptions of risk of COVID-19, worry about COVID-19 loneliness and boost positive mood may be effective.”112) The psychological impact of quarantine on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Luo, 2020“Based on these studies, a great amount of psychologic symptoms or problems developed during the quarantine period, including anxiety (228/649, 35.1%), depression (110/649, 16.9%), loneliness (37/649, 5.7%) and despair (6/649, 0.9%). One study (Dong et al., 2020) reported that people quarantined had suicidal tendencies or ideas than those not quarantined.”113) COVID-19 pandemic leads to major backsliding on childhood vaccinations, new WHO, UNICEF data shows, WHO, 2021“23 million children missed out on basic childhood vaccines through routine health services in 2020, the highest number since 2009 and 3.7 million more than in 2019”114) Virus-linked hunger tied to 10,000 child deaths each month, Hinnant, 2020“All around the world, the coronavirus and its restrictions are pushing already hungry communities over the edge, cutting off meager farms from markets and isolating villages from food and medical aid. Virus-linked hunger is leading to the deaths of 10,000 more children a month over the first year of the pandemic, according to an urgent call to action from the United Nations shared with The Associated Press ahead of its publication in the Lancet medical journal…The parents of the children are without work,” said Annelise Mirabal, who works with a foundation that helps malnourished children in Maracaibo, the city in Venezuela thus far hardest hit by the pandemic. “How are they going to feed their kids?…in May, Nieto recalled, after two months of quarantine in Venezuela, 18-month-old twins arrived at his hospital with bodies bloated from malnutrition.”115) CG REPORT 3: The Impact of Pandemic Restrictions on Childhood Mental Health, Collateral Global, 2021“The evidence shows the overall impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents is likely to be severe… Eight out of ten children and adolescents report worsening of behaviour or any psychological symptoms or an increase in negative feelings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. School closures contributed to increased anxiety, loneliness and stress; negative feelings due to COVID-19 increased with the duration of school closures. Deteriorating mental health was found to be worse in females and older adolescents.”116) Unintended Consequences of Lockdowns: COVID-19 and the Shadow Pandemic, Ravindran, 2021“Using variation in the intensity of government-mandated lock-downs in India, we show that domestic violence complaints increase 0.47 SD in districts with the strictest lockdown rules. We find similarly large increases in cyber-crime complaints.”117) Projected increases in suicide in Canada as a consequence of COVID-19, McIntyre, 2020“A percentage point increase in unemployment was associated with a 1.0% increase in suicide between 2000 and 2018. In the first scenario, the rise in unemployment rates resulted in a projected total of 418 excess suicides in 2020-2021 (suicide rate per 100,000: 11.6 in 2020). In the second scenario, the projected suicide rates per 100,000 increased to 14.0 in 2020 and 13.6 in 2021, resulting in 2114 excess suicides in 2020-2021. These results indicate that suicide prevention in the context of COVID-19-related unemployment is a critical priority.”118) COVID-19, unemployment, and suicide, Kawohl, 2020“In the high scenario, the worldwide unemployment rate would increase from 4·936% to 5·644%, which would be associated with an increase in suicides of about 9570 per year. In the low scenario, the unemployment would increase to 5·088%, associated with an increase of about 2135 suicides… expect an extra burden for our mental health system, and the medical community should prepare for this challenge now. Mental health providers should also raise awareness in politics and society that rising unemployment is associated with an increased number of suicides. The downsizing of the economy and the focus of the medical system on the COVID-19 pandemic can lead to unintended long-term problems for a vulnerable group on the fringes of society.”119) The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer deaths due to delays in diagnosis in England, UK: a national, population-based, modelling study, Maringe, 2020“Substantial increases in the number of avoidable cancer deaths in England are to be expected as a result of diagnostic delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.”120) Economic impact of avoidable cancer deaths caused by diagnostic delay during the COVID-19 pandemic: A national population-based modelling study in England, UK, Gheorghe, 2021“Premature cancer deaths resulting from diagnostic delays during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK will result in significant economic losses. On a per-capita basis, this impact is, in fact, greater than that of deaths directly attributable to COVID-19. These results emphasise the importance of robust evaluation of the trade-offs of the wider health, welfare and economic effects of NPI to support both resource allocation and the prioritisation of time-critical health services directly impacted in a pandemic, such as cancer care.”121) Cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic: did we shout loudly enough and did anyone listen? A lasting legacy for nations, Price, 2021“In just four cancer types (breast, colon, lung and oesophagus), studies during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (published July 2020 [3]) predicted 60,000 lost life years. The quality-adjusted life years and the productivity losses due to these excess cancer deaths have been estimated in this new article to be 32,700 and £104 million over 5 years, respectively. This is nearly 1.5 times higher per capita than that of deaths directly related to COVID-19 in that time. The authors confirm that this is a conservative estimate for these cancer groups as it does not take into account additional productivity losses due to delays or reduction in quality of treatment and stage migration.”122) Donation and transplantation activity in the UK during the COVID-19 lockdown, Manara, 2020“Compared with 2019, the number of deceased donors decreased by 66% and the number of deceased donor transplants decreased by 68%, larger decreases than we estimated.”123) Rapid Systematic Review: The Impact of Social Isolation and Loneliness on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in the Context of COVID-19, Loades, 2020“Children and adolescents are probably more likely to experience high rates of depression and most likely anxiety during and after enforced isolation ends. This may increase as enforced isolation continues.”124) The Costs and Benefits of Covid-19 Lockdowns in New Zealand, Lally, 2021“Using data available up to 28 June 2021, the estimated additional deaths from a mitigation strategy are 1,750 to 4,600, implying a Cost per Quality Adjusted Life Year saved by locking down in March 2020 of at least 13 times the generally employed threshold figure of $62,000 for health interventions in New Zealand; the lockdowns do not then seem to have been justified by reference to the standard benchmark. Using only data available to the New Zealand government in March 2020, the ratio is similar and therefore the same conclusion holds that the nation-wide lockdown strategy was not warranted.”125) Trends in suicidal ideation over the first three months of COVID-19 lockdowns, Killgore, 2020“The percentage of respondents endorsing suicidal ideation was greater with each passing month for those under lockdown or shelter-in-place restrictions due to the novel coronavirus, but remained relatively stable and unchanged for those who reported no such restrictions.”126) Cardiovascular Mortality during the COVID-19 Pandemics in a Large Brazilian City: a Comprehensive Analysis, Brant, 2021“The greater occurrence of CVD deaths at home, in parallel with lower hospitalization rates, suggests that CVD care was disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemics, which more adversely affected older and more socially vulnerable individuals, exacerbating health inequities in BH.”127) Excess Deaths in People with Cardiovascular Diseases during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Banerjee, 2021“Mortality data suggest indirect effects on CVD will be delayed rather than contemporaneous (peak RR 1.14). CVD service activity decreased by 60–100% compared with pre-pandemic levels in eight hospitals across China, Italy, and England.”128) Cardiovascular Deaths During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States, Wadhera, 2021“Hospitalizations for acute cardiovascular conditions have declined, raising concern that patients may be avoiding hospitals because of fear of contracting severe acute respiratory syndrome- coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2)…there was an increase in deaths caused by ischemic heart disease and hypertensive diseases in some regions of the United States during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.”129) Lockdowns of Young People Lead to More Deaths from Covid-19, Berdine, 2020“On April 1, 2020 Dr Anthony Fauci indicated that lockdowns would have to continue until there were zero new cases. This policy indicated a strategy whose goal was eradication of the virus through lockdown. The premise that the virus could be eradicated was a false one. While individual virus particles can certainly be killed, the Covid-19 virus cannot be eradicated. If the virus could be eradicated, then Australia would have already succeeded with its brutal lockdown. All of the scientific data, as opposed to the wishful thinking coming out of Garbage In Garbage Out models, indicates that the virus is here forever – much like influenza. Given the fact that the virus will eventually spread to the entire young and economically active population, lockdowns of the young cannot possibly achieve reduced mortality compared to voluntary action.”130) A second lockdown would break South Africans, Griffiths, 2020“It is likely that soon there will be increased calls for a second hard lockdown as it gets worse, either countrywide or in particular provinces. Should such a decision be implemented it will probably take many South Africans over their breaking point as some may well lose what they so desperately attempted to save during the initial lockdown.”131) CDC, Longitudinal Trends in Body Mass Index Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic Among Persons Aged 2–19 Years — United States, 2018–2020, Lange, 2021“During the COVID-19 pandemic, children and adolescents spent more time than usual away from structured school settings, and families who were already disproportionally affected by obesity risk factors might have had additional disruptions in income, food, and other social determinants of health.† As a result, children and adolescents might have experienced circumstances that accelerated weight gain, including increased stress, irregular mealtimes, less access to nutritious foods, increased screen time, and fewer opportunities for physical activity (e.g., no recreational sports) (2,3).”132) The Truth About Lockdowns, Rational Ground, 2021“1.4 million additional tuberculosis deaths due to lockdown disruptions, 500,000 additional deaths related to HIV, Malaria deaths could double to 770,000 total per year, 65 percent decrease in all cancer screenings, Breast cancer screenings dropped 89 percent, Colorectal screenings dropped 85 percent, At least 1/3 of excess deaths in the U.S. are already not related to COVID-19, Increase in cardiac arrests but decrease in EMS calls for them, Significant increase in stress-related cardiomyopathy during lockdowns, 132 million additional people in sub-Saharan Africa are projected to be undernourished due to lockdown disruptions, Study estimates up to 2.3 million additional child deaths in the next year from lockdowns, Millions of girls have been deprived of access to food, basic healthcare, and protection and thousands exposed to abuse and exploitation.”133) The Backward Art of Slowing the Spread? Congregation Efficiencies during COVID-19, Mulligan, 2021“Micro evidence contradicts the public-health ideal in which households would be places of solitary confinement and zero transmission. Instead, the evidence suggests that “households show the highest transmission rates” and that “households are high-risk settings for the transmission of [COVID-19].”134) The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns, Luskin, 2020“Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”135) An Interview with Gigi Foster, Warrior Against Lockdowns, Brownstone, 2021“Well, I mean, we thought that was necessary because we were just surrounded by people who have bought into the lockdown ideology. And they will have in their minds, a very facile sort of reason why lockdowns should work. And so, we addressed that very directly in that section as you know. We say, “Look, on the surface of it, the idea is that you prevent people from interacting with each other and therefore, transmitting the virus. That’s what people believe. That’s what they think when they think lockdown, they think, “That’s what I’m doing.” But they don’t realize how many other collateral problems are happening and also how little that particular objective is actually being serviced, because of the fact that we live in these interdependent societies now. And we also are trapping people often in large buildings, sharing air together, and not able to go outside as much and so we’re actually potentially increasing the spread of the virus, at least within communities, our communities. So, it basically is an example of trying to engage with the people we feel are misguided on this issue in a calm way, not screaming at each other, not sort of taking the radical position on either side and just saying, “I’m going to play gotcha with you” because that’s not productive.”136) The Politicisation of Science Funding in the US, Carl, 2021Regarding Sweden: “As an aside, the report clearly states: “The best way of comparing the mortality impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic internationally is by looking at all-cause mortality compared with the five-year average.” So what do the new numbers show? Sweden has had negative excess mortality. In other words, the level of mortality between January 2020 and June 2021 was lower than the five-year average. If this isn’t a vindication of Anders Tegnell’s approach, I don’t know what is.”137) Pandemic lockdown, healthcare policies and human rights: integrating opposed views on COVID-19 public health mitigation measures, Burlacu, 2020“Starting from the rationale of the lockdown, in this paper we explored and exposed the other consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic measures such as the use or abuse of human rights and freedom restrictions, economic issues, marginalized groups and eclipse of all other diseases. Our scientific attempt is to coagulate a stable position and integrate current opposing views by advancing the idea that rather than applying the uniform lockdown policy, one could recommend instead an improved model targeting more strict and more prolonged lockdowns to vulnerable risk/age groups while enabling less stringent measures for the lower-risk groups, minimizing both economic losses and deaths. Rigorous (and also governed by freedom) debating may be able to synchronize the opposed perspectives between those advocating an extreme lockdown (e.g., most of the epidemiologists and health experts), and those criticizing all restrictive measures (e.g., economists and human rights experts). Confronting the multiple facets of the public health mitigation measures is the only way to avoid contributing to history with yet another failure, as seen in other past epidemics.”138) Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation During the COVID-19 Pandemic — United States, June 24–30, 2020, Czeisler, 202025.5% of persons 18 to 24 years old seriously considered suicide in the prior 30 days (Table 1).CDC: A Quarter of Young Adults Say They Contemplated Suicide This Summer During Pandemic – Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)139) Will the Truth on COVID Restrictions Really Prevail?, Atlas, 2021“Separate from their limited value in containing the virus — efficacy that has often been “grossly exaggerated” in published papers — lockdown policies have been extraordinarily harmful.  The harms to children of closing in-person schooling are dramatic, including poor learning, school dropouts, social isolation, and suicidal ideation, most of which are far worse for lower income groups. A recent study confirms that up to 78% of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over three months. If one extrapolates to the entire country, where about 150,000 new cancers are diagnosed per month, three-fourths to over a million new cases over nine months will have gone undetected. That health disaster adds to missed critical surgeries, delayed presentations of pediatric illnesses, heart attack and stroke patients too afraid to call emergency services, and others all well documented… Beyond hospital care, CDC reported four-fold increases in depression, three-fold increases in anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of suicidal ideation, particularly among young adults after the first few months of lockdowns, echoing the AMA reports of drug overdoses and suicides. Domestic abuse and child abuse have been skyrocketing due to the isolation and specifically to the loss of jobs, particularly in the strictest lockdowns.”140) With Low Vaccination Rates, Africa’s Covid Deaths Remain Far below Europe and the US, Mises Wire, 2021“Since the very beginning of the covid panic, the narrative has been this: implement severe lockdowns or your population will experience a bloodbath. Morgues will be overwhelmed, the death total toll will be astounding. On the other hand, we were assured those jurisdictions that do lock down would see only a fraction of the death toll… The lockdown narrative, of course, has already been thoroughly overturned. Jurisdictions that did not lock down or adopted only weak and short lockdowns ended up with covid death tolls that were either similar to—or even better than—death tolls in countries that adopted draconian lockdowns. Lockdown advocates said locked-down countries would be overwhelmingly better off. These people were clearly wrong.”141) Rethinking lockdowns, Joffe, 2020“Lockdowns have also resulted in a wide-range of unintended ramifications. Economic damage, delays in “non-urgent” surgeries, diagnoses, and treatments, and excess deaths arising from the “collateral effects” of lockdown measures should all be considered as policy-makers weigh future measures.Dr. Joffe argues that Canadians have been essentially presented with a “false dichotomy” – between a choice of either economically-damaging lockdowns or lethal inaction. However, his analysis finds that the costs of the lockdown measures compare poorly against their purported benefits when measured by Quality Adjusted Life Years, or QALY. “Various cost-benefit analyses from different countries, including some of these costs, have consistently estimated the cost in lives from lockdowns to be at least five to 10 times higher than the benefit, and likely far higher.”142) Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza, WHO, 2020“Home quarantine of exposed individuals to reduce transmission is not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it.”143) Projected deaths of despair from COVID-19, Well Being Trust, 2020“More Americans could lose their lives to deaths of despair, deaths due to drug, alcohol, and suicide, if we do not do something immediately. Deaths of despair have been on the rise for the last decade, and in the context of COVID-19, deaths of despair should be seen as the epidemic within the pandemic.”144) Dr Matthew Owens: Undoing the untold harms of COVID-19 on young people: a call to action, 2020“A sense of proportion is now needed to help mitigate the negative impact of the ‘lockdown’ measures and encourage the healthy development and wellbeing of all young people.”145) Stay at Home, Protect the National Health Service, Save Lives”: A cost benefit analysis of the lockdown in the United Kingdom, Miles, 2020“The costs of continuing severe restrictions are so great relative to likely benefits in lives saved that a rapid easing in restrictions is now warranted.”146) Great Barrington Declaration, Gupta, Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, 2020“Both COVID-19 itself and the lockdown policy reactions have had enormous adverse consequences for patients in the US and around the world. While the harm from COVID-19 infections are well represented in news stories every day, the harms from lockdowns themselves are less well advertised, but no less important. The patients hurt by missed medical visits and hospitalizations due to lockdowns are as worthy of attention and policy response as are patients afflicted by COVID-19 infection.”147) Sweden saw lower 2020 death spike than much of Europe – data, Ahlander, 2021“Sweden, which has shunned the strict lockdowns that have choked much of the global economy, emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries, an analysis of official data sources showed.”148) Open Letter from Medical Doctors and Health Professionals to All Belgian Authorities and All Belgian Media, AIER, 2020“If we compare the waves of infection in countries with strict lockdown policies to countries that did not impose lockdowns (Sweden, Iceland …), we see similar curves.  So there is no link between the imposed lockdown and the course of the infection. Lockdown has not led to a lower mortality rate.”149) Will Months of Remote Learning Worsen Students’ Attention Problems? Harwin, 2020“Robert is working from home again, along with over 50 million students, as schools in 48 states have shut down in-person classes to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. How will the long absence from traditional school routines affect Robert and the millions of other students across the country who struggle with self-control, focus, or mental flexibility?”150) COVID-19 Mandates Will Not Work for the Delta Variant, Alexander, 2021“Yet the elites are far removed from the ramifications of their nonsensical, illogical, specious policies and edicts. Dictates that do not apply to them or their families or friends. The ‘laptop’ affluent class could vacate, work remotely, walk their dogs and pets, catch up on reading their books, and do tasks they could not do had they been in the workplace daily. They could hire extra teachers for their children etc. Remote working was a boon. The actions of our governments however, devastated and long-term hurt the poor in societies and terribly and perversely so, and many could not hold on and committed suicide. AIER’s Ethan Yang’s analysis showed that deaths of despair skyrocketed. Poor children, especially in richer western nations such as the US and Canada, self-harmed and ended their lives, not due to the pandemic virus, but due to the lockdowns and school closures. Many children took their own lives out of despair, depression, and hopelessness due to the lockdowns and school closures.”151) Open letter from medical doctors and health professionals to all Belgian authorities and all Belgian media, The American Institute of Stress, 2020“If we compare the waves of infection in countries with strict lockdown policies to countries that did not impose lockdowns (Sweden, Iceland …), we see similar curves.  So there is no link between the imposed lockdown and the course of the infection. Lockdown has not led to a lower mortality rate. If we look at the date of application of the imposed lockdowns we see that the lockdowns were set after the peak was already over and the number of cases decreasing. The drop was therefore not the result of the taken measures.”152) Lockdown Scepticism Was Never a ‘Fringe’ Viewpoint, Carl, 2021“Whether or not lockdowns are justifiable on public-health grounds, they certainly represent the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history. In the UK, lockdowns have contributed to the largest economic contraction in more than 300 years, as well as countless bankruptcies, and a dramatic rise in public borrowing.”153) Actuaries warn Ramaphosa of a ‘humanitarian disaster to dwarf Covid-19′ if restrictive lockdown is not lifted, Bell, 2020“The frequently voiced government mantra that lives are being prioritised and that the issue is “lives versus the economy” is described in the Panda report as a false dichotomy. The report notes: “Viruses kill. But the economy sustains lives, and poverty kills too.”It points out that the admitted intention of the lockdown is to “flatten the curve”, to spread expected virus deaths over time, so as not to overburden hospital systems. This “saves lives to the extent that avoidable deaths are prevented, but merely shifts the timing of the rest by some weeks.”154) THE STATE OF THE NATION: A 50-STATE COVID-19 SURVEY REPORT #23: DEPRESSION AMONG YOUNG ADULTS, Perlis, 2020“In line with our May results, our survey indicates that the next administration will lead a country where unprecedented numbers of younger individuals are experiencing depression, anxiety, and, for some, thoughts of suicide. These symptoms are not concentrated among any particular subgroup or region in our survey; they are elevated in every group we examined. Our survey results also strongly suggest that those with direct economic and property losses resulting from COVID-19 appear to be at particular risk, so strategies focusing on these individuals may be critical.”155) COVID-19 to Add as Many as 150 Million Extreme Poor by 2021, The World Bank, 2020“Global extreme poverty is expected to rise in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years as the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic compounds the forces of conflict and climate change, which were already slowing poverty reduction progress, the World Bank said today.The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021, depending on the severity of the economic contraction. Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, is likely to affect between 9.1% and 9.4% of the world’s population in 2020, according to the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report. This would represent a regression to the rate of 9.2% in 2017. Had the pandemic not convulsed the globe, the poverty rate was expected to drop to 7.9% in 2020.”156) The impact of COVID-19 on heart failure hospitalization and management: report from a Heart Failure Unit in London during the peak of the pandemic, Bromage, 2020“Incident AHF hospitalization significantly declined in our centre during the COVID-19 pandemic, but hospitalized patients had more severe symptoms at admission. Further studies are needed to investigate whether the incidence of AHF declined or patients did not present to hospital while the national lockdown and social distancing restrictions were in place. From a public health perspective, it is imperative to ascertain whether this will be associated with worse long-term outcomes.”157) For the Greater Good? The Devastating Ripple Effects of the Covid-19 Crisis, Schippers, 2020The side effects so far seem to outweigh the positive effects and a recent historical overview of outbreaks concludes that: “History suggests that we are actually at much greater risk of exaggerated fears and misplaced priorities” (Jones D. S., 2020; p. 1683). The main side effects are: Excess mortality from causes other such as hunger, delayed health care, increase in effects mental health issues, suicide, increase in diseases such as measles, and increased inequalities due to school closures and job loss. These have ripple effects throughout society. In many countries emergency admissions, e.g., for cardiac chest pain and transient ischemic attacks, are decreased by about 50%, as people are avoiding hospital visits, which eventually will lead to higher death rates from other causes, such as heart attack and strokes (Sarner, 2020). Also, many medical treatments such as chemotherapy have not been given and were postponed (Sud et al., 2020). In terms of mental health effects, vulnerable groups, such as people with prior mental health issues might be at especially high risk (Jeong et al., 2016). Indeed, a survey by Young Minds revealed that up to 80% of young people with a history of mental health issues reported a worsening of their condition as a result of the pandemic and lockdown measures (Sarner, 2020). The mental health effects arguably affect the general population as a whole, and it has been suggested that this will be a global catastrophe (Izaguirre-Torres and Siche, 2020).158) COVID-19 emergency measures and the impending authoritarian pandemic, Thomson, 2020“Yet, as this Article demonstrates—with diverse examples drawn from across the world—there are unmistakable regressions into authoritarianism in governmental efforts to contain the virus. Despite the unprecedented nature of this challenge, there is no sound justification for systemic erosion of rights-protective democratic ideals and institutions beyond that which is strictly demanded by the exigencies of the pandemic. A Wuhan-inspired all-or-nothing approach to viral containment sets a dangerous precedent for future pandemics and disasters, with the global copycat response indicating an impending ‘pandemic’ of a different sort, that of authoritarianization. With a gratuitous toll being inflicted on democracy, civil liberties, fundamental freedoms, healthcare ethics, and human dignity, this has the potential to unleash humanitarian crises no less devastating than COVID-19 in the long run.”159) Falling living standards during the COVID-19 crisis: Quantitative evidence from nine developing countries, Egger, 2021“Document declines in employment and income in all settings beginning March 2020. The share of households experiencing an income drop ranges from 8 to 87% (median, 68%). Household coping strategies and government assistance were insufficient to sustain precrisis living standards, resulting in widespread food insecurity and dire economic conditions even 3 months into the crisis. We discuss promising policy responses and speculate about the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups.”160) COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, Bagus, 2021“The violation of basic human rights in the form of curfews, lockdowns, and coercive closure of business has been amply illustrated during the COVID-19 crisis. Naturally, the COVID-19 example is indicative rather than representative and its lessons cannot be generalized. During the COVID-19 crisis, several authors have argued that from a public health point of view, these invasive interventions such as lockdowns have been unnecessary and, indeed, detrimental to overall public health. In fact, prior scientific research on disease mitigation measures during a possible influenza pandemic had warned against such invasive interventions and recommended a more normal social functioning.”161) COVID-19 mortalities in England and Wales and the Peltzman offsetting effect, Williams, 2021“Our results suggest: (i) a refined estimate of mean weekly COVID-19 excess deaths that is 63% of standard excess deaths; and (ii) a positive net excess mortality impact of the lockdown. We make a case that (ii) is due to the Peltzman offsetting effect, i.e. the intended mortality impact of the lockdown was more than offset by the unintended impact.”162) Progression of COVID-19 under the highly restrictive measures imposed in Argentina, Sagripanti, 2021“The number of yearly deaths caused by respiratory diseases and influenza in Argentina before the pandemic was similar to the total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 cumulated on April 25, 2021, more than a year after the pandemic started. The failure to detect any benefit on ameliorating COVID-19 by the long and strict nation-wide lock-downs in Argentina should raise world-wide concerns about mandating costly and ineffective restrictive measures during ongoing or future pandemics.”163) COVID-19 in South Africa, Broadbent, 2020“This does not show that locking down made no difference relative to a counterfactual scenario (and a full analysis would need to consider provincial trajectories too), but it does mean that a detailed (and provincial) analysis needs to be undertaken before we can evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown measures in the South African context. Were we to try to “read off” the effect of the interventions from the shape of the epidemic, we would have to conclude they had no effect. Likewise we would have to attribute the slow progress of the epidemic in the country to background features (e.g. the relative youthfulness of the population). This is a caution against such “reading off” both in this context and others.”164) The effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on SARS-CoV-2 transmission in different socioeconomic populations in Kuwait: a modeling study, Khadadah, 2021“Our simulated epidemic trajectories show that the partial curfew measure greatly reduced and delayed the height of the peak in P1, yet significantly elevated and hastened the peak in P2. Modest cross-transmission between P1 and P2 greatly elevated the height of the peak in P1 and brought it forward in time closer to the peak of P2.”165) Hard, not early: putting the New Zealand Covid-19 response in context, Gibson, 2020“The cross-country evidence shows that restrictions imposed after the inflection point in infections is reached are ineffective in reducing total deaths. Even restrictions imposed earlier have just a modest effect.”166) The SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic in High Income Countries Such as Canada: A Better Way Forward Without Lockdowns, Joffe, 2021 “Specifically, there are three priorities including the following: first, protect those most at risk by separating them from the threat (mitigation); second, ensure critical infrastructure is ready for people who get sick (preparation and response); and third, shift the response from fear to confidence (recovery). We argue that, based on Emergency Management principles, the age-dependent risk from SARS-CoV-2, the minimal (at best) efficacy of lockdowns, and the terrible cost-benefit trade-offs of lockdowns, we need to reset the pandemic response. We can manage risk and save more lives from both COVID-19 and lockdowns, thus achieving far better outcomes in both the short- and long-term.”167) On the effectiveness of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns: Pan metron ariston, Spiliopoulos, 2021“Governments conditioned policy choice on recent pandemic dynamics, and were found to de-escalate the associated stringency of implemented NPIs more cautiously than in their escalation, i.e., policy mixes exhibited significant hysteresis. Finally, at least 90% of the maximum effectiveness of NPIs can be achieved by policies with an average Stringency index of 31–40, without restricting internal movement or imposing stay at home measures, and only recommending (not enforcing) closures on workplaces and schools, accompanied by public informational campaigns. Consequently, the positive effects on case and death growth rates of voluntary behavioral changes in response to beliefs about the severity of the pandemic, generally trumped those arising from mandatory behavioral restrictions.” 168) Covid-19: Comparisons by Country and Implications for Future Pandemics, Mehl-Madrona, 2021“While no lockdown resulted in higher mortality, the difference between strict lockdown and lax lockdown was not terribly different and favored lax lockdown. Only one of the top 44 countries had long and strict restrictions. Strict restrictions were more common in the worst performing countries in terms of Covid mortality. The United States had both the largest economic growth coupled with the largest rate of mortality. Those who did well economically, had lower mortality and less pressure on their population. Yet they had less mortality than average and less than their neighbors.”169) Does Social Isolation Really Curb COVID-19 Deaths? Direct Evidence from Brazil that it Might do the Exact Opposite, de Souza, 2020“There appears to be strong empirical evidence that, in Brazil, the adoption of restrictive measures increasing social isolation have worsened the pandemic in that country instead of mitigating it, likely as a higher-order effect emerging from a combination of factors.”170) The tiered restrictions enforced in November 2020 did not impact the epidemiology of the second wave of COVID-19 in Italy, Rainisio, 2021“The trend of R(t) tending to increase shortly after the measures became effective does not allow to exclude that the enforcement of such restrictions might have been counterproductive. These results are instrumental in informing public health efforts aimed at attempting to manage the epidemic efficiently. Planning further use of the tiered restrictions and the associated containment measures should be carefully and critically revised to avoid a useless burden to the population with no advantage for the containment of the epidemic or a possible worsening.”

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