I previously reported on Youyang Gu’s analysis of Covid death rate and average stringency index across U.S. States. As you may recall, Gu found essentially zero association between the two variables: there was no evidence that states with longer and more stringent lockdowns had fewer Covid deaths.
One weakness of Gu’s analysis is that he used the official Covid death rate as a measure of mortality. This is problematic for two reasons. First, different states may count Covid deaths in slightly different ways. And second, the official Covid death rate doesn’t account for differences in the age-distribution across states.
Since older people are much more likely to die of Covid, states with more old people will tend to have more Covid deaths. For example, more than 20% of Floridians are over 65, compared to only 12% of Alaskans. Hence you’d expect more Floridians to die of Covid, all else being equal.
Incidentally, Gu did find an association between average stringency index and the unemployment rate. (States with longer and more stringent lockdowns had higher unemployment.) This suggests that average stringency index at least partly captures the extent to which different states curtailed economic activity.
As I noted before, the ONS recently published estimates of age-adjusted excess mortality for most of the countries in Europe, covering the entire period from January 2020 to June 2021. And this measure doesn’t suffer from the two problems outlined above.
I therefore decided to check whether there’s a negative association between average stringency index and age-adjusted excess mortality. Other commentators have produced similar plots before, but I haven’t seen one based on the latest estimates from the ONS.
Results are shown in the figure below. The left-hand chart corresponds to the ONS’s earlier estimates, covering the period up to 18 December. The right-hand chart corresponds to the latest estimates. (The reason I included the left-hand chart is that the one on the right is somewhat affected by the vaccine rollout.)
In any case, neither chart shows any hint of a negative association between average stringency index and age-adjusted excess mortality. States that had the longest and most stringent lockdowns do not have lowest mortality. In fact, both the correlations are positive.
This doesn’t mean lockdown had no effect on the epidemic’s trajectory in any country. But it does suggest that any effect it did have was swamped by other factors (e.g., geography, population density, household structure).
The countries clustered at the bottom of the right-hand chart are the Nordics, Cyprus and Malta. As I noted last time, these are all geographically peripheral countries that used border controls to contain the virus. The only one that made extensive use of lockdowns was Cyprus (see lower right-hand corner). And this appears to have paid off.
However, larger countries that made similar use of lockdowns (see centre of chart) have had much higher mortality. I take this evidence that lockdowns may work in countries like Cyprus or New Zealand when combined with border controls. But that they don’t seem to do much in large, dense, highly connected countries like Britain.
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Viruses do what viruses do.
They exist to exist!
Why would a piece of RNA inside a capsid do any of ths?
The key point remains that SARS-Cov-2 does not warrant any exceptional measures, anyway. Let’s not forget the fundamental con.
I can’t remember exactly where, so don’t have a link, but there was a peer-reviewed study posted a long time back that concluded the same, that there was no correlation between lockdowns and mortality, except in geographically isolated countries that could shut their borders *before* the virus arrived, NZ being the obvious example. This would make sense: if you have a very low incidence, then localised lockdowns can nip the breakouts in the bud, so to speak. But once the virus is endemic, good luck with that.
BTW: I think NZ is a s**tfest for other reasons.
We have family in New Zealand, including our only grandchild who is three and a half, that we haven’t seen since January 2020.
Closing borders like New Zealand has was and could only ever have been a temporary measure. The virus has embedded itself as a worldwide endemic disease ad now NZ has to go through what we have been through to achieve any sort of natural resistance.
In the meantime its economy, fsmily life’ health and particularly mental health all suffer.
I’m in NZ and matters are grim here in my view. People who are still asleep may disagree. At best IMO all that our draconian lockdowns and border closures have done is delay the inevitable. We are at the beginning of our first real wave but still in an effective lockdown, with “vaccine” passports, loads of “vaccine” mandates leaving sectors that were already under pressure like Health and Education scrambling for staff, nearly everyone wears a mask everywhere (we have mask mandates for most things). Mental health, which was strained before Covid seems terrible. People seem angry and scared (either of Covid, or of the State). Businesses are going under at unheard of rates. Our healthcare system is very strained. We have tens of thousands of kiwis who can’t get home because of the border controls. Whilst the wave we are in seems to be declining, probably because of summer and a freshly jabbed population, when the jabs wear off in time for the winter I suspect we will see a massive outbreak.
My partner/girlfriend has just told me that at the church in the next town northwards (it’s the town this village is joined to) there’s a Christmas Carols thingy coming up – but – you guessed it – only for the ‘vaccinated’. The ‘unvaccinated’ are NOT welcome. My partner is ‘vaccinated’ (double jabbed) and could go but says she’s not, out of principle.
It’s quite disgusting how these ‘Christians’ are tending to their flocks. Why don’t the vicars and bishops just cart the ‘unvaccinated’ off to the gas chambers and get rid of the lot?
This is in Finland, where the ‘News on the television keeps bleating out “Corona passes” “Corona Passes” “Corona Passes” “cases!” “cases!” “cases!”…
It’s “THE LOVE OF”
sorry this thing get me annoyed.
Money is just an aid to temporal barter, i.e you can get things when you need them, not just when you have something to exchange (as in normal barter). i.e. you can store you time*productivity until you actually need someone else’s time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_cleansing_a_leper
Just protest outside by reading all three of the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew 8:1–4, Mark 1:40–45 and Luke 5:12–16.
And maybe wear some sort of yellow badge – perhaps one with “ungeimpft” on?
Given that the covid mortality figures are a palpably fraudulent fantasy, then yes, I’d say that was a weakness.
A lot of the counter-analysis floating around suffers from the same problem: accepting, as a core premise, some aspect of the official narrative. What surprises me is that, after two years of lies, otherwise critical thinkers still mount arguments that fail to trace back assumptions to the root.
I would suggest that readers track back to the original papers, or direct analysis thereof, that claimed the existence of a new virus in the first place. It’s full of holes you could drive several coaches through. It’s barely credible.
The Corman-Drosten paper that managed to deliver a ‘test’ for the elusive new virus, without having a sample of supposed virus to work on? Methodically questionable, to say the least. And that’s before we get to the blatant conflicts of interest, or the 24-hour peer review. This too is not a credible piece of work.
Dr Andrew Kaufman has given Sayer Ji (find it on Odysee) a review of the (absence of) ‘science’ underpinning the new variant. You owe it to yourselves to check it out.
This crap will continue until more people get over their last vestiges of cognitive dissonance, and take a sober look at the first principles, the root narrative. After all, if many now accept that their governments and establishment institutions have engaged in a 2-year campaign of fraud and lies, it seems appropriate to go ‘full red pill’ and reassess the starting point for all this.
The holy of holies for those promulgating this barrage of bullshit is that the core narrative must be believed. The house of cards rests on that. In our vestigial faith that, somehow, our institutions can’t be that cynical, we are complicit in the cover-up. It’s like a disappointment too far: the final realisation that much of what you experience in life is someone else’s narrative. But blow down the house of cards, and you can begin to think more clearly.
Are the dates correct on those charts?
Noah
Another great analysis. Why on Earth do other journalists, government scientists and politicians not do this work, or at least pick it up and repeat it or discuss it?