A new paper in BMJ Global Health purports to debunk lockdown sceptics’ claim that “the cure is worse than the disease”. However, it misses the big picture; in fact, it hasn’t shifted my priors one jot.
The paper contains no new data or analysis. Rather, it comprises a review of the existing literature. The authors focus on the claim that “lockdowns cause more health harms than COVID-19 by examining their impacts on mortality, routine health services, global health programmes and suicide and mental health”.
In other words, they attempt to show that lockdowns do not cause more health harms than they prevent. Notice: this is not the same as showing that lockdowns pass an overall cost-benefit test. Even if lockdowns were a net positive for public health, they could still be a massive net negative for society (taking into account their effects on the economy, education and civil liberties).
The strongest argument the authors make (with which I was already familiar) is that excess mortality in countries like Australia and New Zealand – which managed to contain the virus – was zero or negative last year. Since these countries did not experience an epidemic of COVID-19, but did see weeks or even months of lockdown, the lack of excess mortality suggests that lockdowns themselves do not cause many deaths.
However, some lockdown sceptics would argue that – even if lockdowns don’t cause many deaths in the short-term – they do cause more deaths in the long-term, via missed cancer screenings, drug overdoses etc. And here the authors are much less persuasive.
They concede that “the connection between lockdowns and missed contact with health systems is very well established”. However, they claim this association “may be related to lack of capacity of healthcare services or impacts of the pandemic itself rather than measures taken by governments”.
There is “no doubt”, the authors admit, “that global health programmes have been disrupted”. But they argue such disruptions were caused by “multiple complex direct and indirect consequences of COVID-19, not just stay-at-home orders”.
So they acknowledge that lockdowns do have harmful long-term effects. And given that those long-term effects are yet to be quantified, the authors have little basis for concluding that lockdowns are “unlikely to be causing harms more extreme than the pandemic itself”.
But this is mostly academic, since – as noted above – the positive health effects of lockdown could be massively outweighed by impacts on the economy, education and civil liberties. Society has functions other than simply extending people’s lives for as long as possible. If it did not, we’d spend a much higher fraction of GDP on healthcare, and we’d ban alcohol, smoking and extreme sports.
Moreover, the authors set up a false dichotomy between lockdowns on the one hand and an “unmitigated epidemic” on the other. Yet I and most other lockdown sceptics weren’t in favour of simply “letting the virus rip”. Rather, we backed a focused protection strategy – like the one outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Outside of countries that managed to contain the virus, there is little evidence that lockdowns have substantially reduced mortality from COVID-19. And in the West, all the countries that did achieve containment are small, less dense and/or geographically peripheral – basically Norway, Finland and a handful of islands.
In this regard, the authors neglect to consider any countervailing evidence. For example, they claim that “government interventions have a strong impact on COVID-19 cases and deaths”, citing three studies, including the heavily criticised paper by Flaxman et al. But they don’t mention any of the studies finding little or no relationship between lockdowns and mortality.
They also claim that Sweden – which took the most relaxed approach of any Western country – had “large numbers of excess deaths throughout the pandemic”. Yet if they’d looked at age-adjusted excess mortality, and had taken account of the “dry tinder” effect, they’d know that Sweden did not have an exceptionally bad year.
The authors of the BMJ Global Health paper set out to show that the health benefits of lockdowns outweigh the harms. However, all they really prove is something that most of us already knew – lockdowns do not cause many deaths in the short term.
When we consider things like disruption to vaccination programs in the developing world (which the authors concede were at least partly due to lockdowns) it’s not at all clear that any health benefits will outweigh the long-term harms.
What’s more, available evidence suggests the costs of the U.K.’s lockdowns almost certainly outweighed the benefits, and a focused protection strategy could have saved more lives with far less collateral damage.
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its a long term thing
reduce economy and you reduce health
plot life expectancy against gdp per capita
fit a line
now assume gdp reduces and work out the years of life lost
its much bigger because i) it just is ii) lockdowns never save anyone
Covid and the Death of Democracy: “You will own nothing and you will be happy”
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRwWKCNHPKo
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
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Florida, Texas, South Dakota. I’m with them.
And we could lower our mortality rate tomorrow, by completely banning all use of the roads, thereby achieving the Vision Zero goal.
This is an entirely true statement, if we only consider tomorrow, and not next week.
ban smoking and abortion and you’d ‘save a lot of lives’ but its about human liberty and dignity, not extending lives at all costs
I could add to that when you reach a certain age put you in a sterile bubble
Aye Lock ’em in, down, up, or whatever in a sterile bubble, box, wardrobe, let’s give them that choice at least..
Maybe not – what about ambulances and fire engines?
Forget that 12 million long waiting list for a ration of NHS treatment.
That those 12 million have already paid for, and are now being denied.
this paper feels like the ‘every death was 10 years lost’ paper
complete and utter junk but gives lockdown fanatics something to point at that ‘proves’ their point
This is a Commentary not a scientific research paper. Nothing to stop you writing the opposite and backing it up accordingly. Be interesting to see if it got published. So Australia and NZ could have turned out like Brazil and India……? Come off it. This must be one of the most dismal pieces of ‘advocacy research’ since the Oxford mask meta-analysis (the one paid for by the Royal Society)
no comment necessary.
luckily the delta variant is almost completely benign
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1001358/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_18.pdf
page 11
CFR 0.2-0.3% with IFR being much lower
I suggest that people should read the article and draw their own conclusions about the value of the journal BMJ Global Health. It is simply an opinion piece which says (at the end) that “There is no data in this work”. Nonetheless it has 12 authors of whom 4 are affiliated with the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group (what is the relevance?) and4 are affiliated with Imperial College (but with no conflicts of interest declared). As someone who used to manage a highly rated academic journal I can only despair at the state of academic publishing revealed by such journals and articles.
Of course, it is the way of things that such articles will garner large numbers of citations and news reports, but that is the state of too much of the academic world today illustrating the longstanding computer aphorism – garbage in, garbage out.
In short, this is nothing more than a press release from the zero covid extremists.
This is literally toilet paper. A few paragraphs in and they are seriously trying to argue that Sweden had high levels of excess deaths throughout the pandemic. They had an increase last spring, but only relative to the previous 5 years!
How does anyone have the right to dictate to me how much risk I am willing to take?
“For the greater good” leads to a very dark place.
It kind of misses the point (as well as being very flakey anyway).
Lockdowns affect far more than health, so for them to be justified purely on a health basis there would need to be significant evidence of overwhelming benefit. Nothing in here – even if taken at face value – is significant or overwhelming.
In fact there’s probably a good rule of thumb as to whether lockdowns are justified – if you need to carefully study and analyse data to know, then they aren’t justified. Unless there were huge differences between places that locked down and those that didn’t, and those differences were clear and obvious, then there can never be justification for such a destructive and unprecedented action.
There is literally no justification for lockdown whatever you look at it – this is pure snake oil.
Such articles/ papers aren’t supposed to contain anything actually sensible. They’re exercises in throwing dust in the air to cloud the sky: Putting them together, especially if it’s also a teamwork, is much cheaper than refuting them. Refutations will be complicated enough that many people won’t understand them. And while someone’s still working to refute yesterdays load of bullshit, today’s load is already being dished out.
The intent is solely to keep “the lockdown debate” going in order to maintain the impression that lockdowns might actually be good for something.
120 million people thrown back into abject poverty and hunger already, solely through our Western lockdowns.
All country by country analyses have come up with a multiple of net QALYs lost in excess of 200.
What is it with the lockdown zealots?
What is it with the so called progressives?
Have they all suddenly and in unison gone totally mental, sadist, racist and psychopathic, or have they always been that way?!
Similar genetic make up to the new human variant, Homo-Bovinus-Bacillariophyceae; if not in fact identical..
Covid and the Death of Democracy: “You will own nothing and you will be happy”
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRwWKCNHPKo
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
HOME EDUCATION – Ex-Primary School Teacher on Resistance GB YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5oS2ejye0
https://www.hopesussex.co.uk/our-mission
Funny how they overlook that Australia had particularly high excess deaths in 2019 so of course would have negative excess deaths in 2020.
They don’t provide much in the way of measuring the effects of lockdown. What little they do seems to look solely at deaths.
But there’s more to life than death.
Am sick to death of hearing about the gloating and disgusting Aussie and NZ projects – I am almost struck dumb by the dumbness of the arguments which 1. Fail to take account of the proven high T-cell memory in Oceania and much of Asia, and high vitamin D levels. It’s a fact that corona viruses are common there and the reason so few people have died in so many of these countries has ZERO to do with lockdowns – 2. Due to this, There are almost more deaths from vaccines now in Australia than the virus and they are going to kill many more people due to their stupidity 3. I lived in Australia for 26 years until 5 years ago and I speak to people and I know these lockdowns are killing the economy and livelihoods and ultimately lives. The political leaders over there take first spot on the idiotic scale. I feel sorry for the brainwashed population.
Clearly depression, acute anxiety, outright fear, feelings of alienation and the resulting mental heath issues and large increase in suicides, aren’t considered health “harms” then?
Who knew?
“The strongest argument the authors make (with which I was already familiar) is that excess mortality in countries like Australia and New Zealand – which managed to contain the virus – was zero or negative last year. Since these countries did not experience an epidemic of COVID-19, but did see weeks or even months of lockdown, the lack of excess mortality suggests that lockdowns themselves do not cause many deaths.”
This really doesn’t stand up to scutiny. There was nothing unique about the Australian (and NZ) authorities’ particular calibration of lockdown and other NPIs that found the magic lockdown formula – we know from the global experiment in lockdown that regardless of the harshness, length, time of introduction and level of population compliance, lockdown made diddley squat difference to the inevitable bell-shaped progression of the virus.
What the authors overlook is that the virus first visited Australia during the southern hemisphere’s spring/summer: Sept/October 2019 (if reports of the virus’ global circulation, fed by the usually massive Chinese tourist trade, are correct, as antibodies in archived blood amples from numerous countries strongly indicate) and certainly by December/January 2020, when the blazing Australian summer with its virus-busting UV rays and Vitamin D kept the Australian Covid casualties suppressed compared to the winter-shrouded northern hemisphere.
This tempted the Downunder politicians into ‘Zero Covid’, believing it was their brilliant policies, and not seasonality, that held the virus in check. Now three of Australia’s six states states, covering over half the country, are in hard lockdown again as we grind through our winter, in the elusive and damaging pursuit of ‘Zero Covid’.
Discussing the effect of lockdown at the present time is akin to guessing the ending of a thriller by watching the first 10 minutes. Sorry Jacinda Adern but your present role of Queen of Covid has yet to be given a full script What planet are politicians and the silly science group on.? Either you are immune by getting SARS-CoV-2 or by vaccination-
If you lock people in a room then you need universal vaccination if the threat remains or you stay locked up! The only lockdown which would be useful is a room where they put all the epidemiologists,Public Health lockdown fanatics, and any politicians without a science degree.
you miss the main point: It isn’t about saving lives. It is about getting rid of those who remember what was and the ones who won’t ‘comply’ with the new regime.
Then the rest that don’t fit in to those above categories will be too dumb and feeble to fight back and will instead become serfs for the rest of their lives. Then, the guillotines…