The crew at the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) have done an analysis of excess mortality for 2020 across 32 countries to get a clearer picture of the impact of the pandemic and lockdowns. They used excess mortality instead of “Covid deaths”, they explain, to avoid problems with recording and classification of deaths and include any impact of anti-Covid measures. They used age-adjusted mortality to take into account differences in the average age of populations. They compared 2020’s figures to the average of the previous five years to give a percentage increase or excess during the pandemic year (they have made the tool they used to analyse the data publicly available).
The results are plotted in the graph below. Perhaps the most telling result is that Sweden, which did not impose strict lockdown measures throughout the year (it kept all retail and hospitality and most schools open and imposed no restrictions on private gatherings) saw only a 1.5% increase in age-adjusted mortality. Surely no one can argue that such a small increase in mortality (and almost entirely among the elderly and already unwell) can justify the severe and harmful suspensions of civil liberties we have endured over the past year?
The CEBM team made the following observations on the results.
Relative excess mortality in the countries we have examined ranges from -4.3% to 14.4% and is strongly positively correlated with the recorded number of COVID-19 deaths (r = 0.8). Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Latvia and Norway experienced fewer deaths in 2020 according to our analysis. As we would expect, these countries have recorded a lower number of COVID-19 deaths than other countries. For example, Iceland, Norway and Finland have all recorded fewer than 12 per 100,000 COVID-19 deaths. Denmark and Latvia are perhaps exceptions to this having recorded 32 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 and Latvia 54 per 100,000.
A number of eastern European countries saw little or no excess deaths in the first half of the year but have experienced significant excess mortality in the second half of 2020. Bulgaria, Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia with Poland and Bulgaria exhibiting levels of excess mortality of the same order of magnitude as the countries in the centre of the first wave (e.g. Spain, France, England and Wales, Italy).
The USA which has often been cited as the worse affected country (often using the total number of COVID-19 deaths) has relative excess of 12.9%, which although one of the highest, is below some with even higher relative excess mortality such as Poland and Chile.
Talking of the USA, here’s an update on how the states are doing, comparing those which issued stay-at-home lockdown orders this winter with those that did not. No-lockdown states continue to have fewer Covid deaths per million than lockdown states, though the gap has narrowed a bit since February 1st, when lockdown states had 5.7% more deaths per million, to 4.2% on March 13th.
Lockdowns were sold to the public as a way of suppressing the virus that would otherwise kill many times more people than it would under lockdown conditions. The data from a year of lockdowns clearly contradicts the models which predicted such an outcome. With no-lockdown countries and states recording fewer Covid deaths per million than those which locked down, such models evidently massively over-estimated both the deadliness of the virus and the efficacy of lockdowns.
A clear-headed Government would now learn from this data and reject any advice based on such unreliable modelling and insist any models to be used for policymaking be calibrated against real-world controls such as Sweden and Florida. If models cannot accurately predict the death toll for places which do not implement interventions then they must be rejected. This is the bare minimum that must be asked of our scientific advisers and their mathematical models.
Lockdowns were first imposed by China and introduced into the West by Italy, having been peremptorily endorsed by the WHO, despite having no evidence to support their efficacy and being contrary to official guidance and pre-prepared pandemic plans.
As an increasing number of states in America reject lockdowns as a means of infection control, we need to do all we can to ensure the lockdowns of the last year become a blip in history and not a permanent feature of Western disease management.
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Beautifully expressed, Jack. I have a child your age and thank you for speaking up on his behalf.
Seconded…except my kiddo is still in primary school. Always enjoy reading Jack’s articles as it’s so important and insightful to hear from a kid’s perspective just how much this whole fiasco impacted them. Never ever to be repeated. :-/
A suggestion I feel like making here: Can we perhaps stop making a topic out of the age of this guy? He tends to write sensible stuff and that’s what matters. Compared to that, whether he’s 14 or 1400 isn’t important.
It’s the perspective that matters, as Mogwai rightly says. my year 9 certainly couldn’t write like that so it’s great that Jack can represent his generation so eloquently.
”The origin of all correlation is causality.” I like that and think I’ll start using it. Anyway, here is a recent research paper which shows a strong relationship between the death jabs and infection/mortality in Europe. Any data-heads in the house may want to scrutinise it further as it gets very technical so here’s the abstract;
”This report investigates short-term causal vaccine-mortality interactions during booster campaigns in 2022 in 30 European countries (population ~530M). An infection-vaccination-mortality model is introduced with causal aspects of repeatability, random chance, temporal order and confounding. The model is simple, has few or even zero prior model parameters and is unbiased in causal mechanisms and strengths. Confounders are taken into account explicitly of mortality-caused fear incentivizing vaccinations and four related to covid infections, and generically for all long-term confounding. Bayesian probabilities quantify all interactions, and from
observed weekly administered vaccine doses and all-cause mortality, mortality on short-term caused by a vaccination dose is estimated as Vaccine Fatality Ratio (VFR).”
#VFR results are 0.13% (0.05%-0.21%, 95% confidence interval) in The Netherlands and 0.35% (0.15%-0.55%) in Europe, subtantially transcending covid IFR. Additionally, sewer-viral-particle experiments suggested vaccination induces covid-infections and/or reactivates latent viral reservoirs.”
#The evidence of a causal relationship from vaccination to both infection and mortality is a very strong alarm signal to immediately stop current mass vaccination programmes.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368777703_Causal_effect_of_covid_vaccination_on_mortality_in_Europe
During the Covid years children were treated appallingly; our authorities most certainly took advantage of their ‘good nature’ and tolerance of authority.
IMO the worst aspect of this abuse was in the deliberate (and documented) use of peer pressure to force hesitant children to comply with state diktat (eg, in making peers socially isolate children who didn’t get a dose of vaccine) — this is deeply unethical and I can only hope that there is a review of the way in which psychological techniques were used to manipulate (relatively) innocent children.
Adults should be reminded that today’s children are tomorrow’s adults. It is always a mistake to treat children unfairly, as in time they’ll be making decisions on our behalf.
The way that children were treated was child abuse. I had regular training in child protection throughout my career, the frequency & quality of which decreased over time, it was emotional abuse & neglect.
Incredibly few professionals working with or advocating for children called it out for what it was. Abuse. Pure & simple.
Agreed. And delivered solely to support the fragile ego of an incompetent politician and the power trip of teaching union leaders. And none of the above will be called to account and suffer any sanctions for the suffering they caused. See you next Tuesdays the lot of them. A plague on all their houses.
Jack … this is a very well-written testimony to the damage done to a generation of schoolchildren by the egotistical idiots in Government. There is no justification for what was done to you and your cohorts.
However, I am very confident that you will “survive and thrive” and have a great career. Anyone who can write and express themselves so fluently at age 15 (or thereabouts) has a bright future.
Whilst I’m not trivialising the situation you have had to deal with, my late father who lived in a rural location in Hampshire, was age 13 when WW2 broke out. That’s when his education was permanently terminated …. he and the other older boys were needed to work on the farms, replacing the men who had been called up.
He continued to educate himself throughout his life.
What a sensible young man and well written. I wept just reading how that imbecile of a health minister has ruined so many young lives spuriously and idiotically.
Judging by the recent disgusting behaviour of those in our Parliament walking out during Andrew Bridgen‘s speech it would appear things haven’t changed much.
The really worrying thing is that governments are full of Hancocks.
My daughter dropped out from her degree in music technology because despite that her last year and a bit was supposed to be heavily biased towards practical work, she was told it was all going to be on-line and there would be no practical work due to covid. The course had already had less practical work than she expected and as the practical aspect was what she had hoped to be instructed in and was the reason she took the course, once this was eliminated from it, she saw no point in continuing with it. I imagine there are many similar cases in many courses that needed similar person to person interfaces, which became inadequate or not completed due to educational establishments following Hancock’s unnecessary restrictions.
Hancock and I agree about one thing: Teachers are lazy buggers who don’t want to work.