One of the great things about America is that it has 50 states that can set their own policy across a broad range of areas, including on public health and lockdowns. This has allowed some to resist the stampede to impose swingeing restrictions on normal life in the hope of limiting transmission of SARS-CoV-2, and this provides us with a valuable control group in the great lockdown experiment that can give us an idea what might have happened if we hadn’t made some intervention or other.
During the autumn and winter a new surge in Covid infections prompted most US states, like most Western countries, to reimpose restrictions. But a few resisted. Eleven states did not impose a stay-at-home order and left people at liberty to leave their homes whenever they wished. Of these, four – Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and South Dakota – did not impose any restrictions at all and treated it pretty much like any other winter.
Although there are various differences between states that might have affected Covid outcomes, because they all form part of one country there are enough similarities to make comparisons useful. In particular, if lockdowns are effective and necessary to prevent hundreds of thousands of extra deaths (or the equivalent for the size of the population), then those states which didn’t lock down should have a far worse death toll. If the death tolls are not much worse, but about the same (or better), then lockdowns cannot be having a large impact on preventing Covid deaths.
In the chart above I have used data from Worldometer to plot the current total Covid deaths per million for each state. I have coloured the 11 states which did not lock down (i.e., impose a stay-at-home order) this winter in red. I have also calculated the average for the two groups of states, those which did not lock down over the winter and those which did, and coloured them in yellow.
As you can see, states which did not lock down over the winter, far from having many times more Covid deaths, have actually had fewer – 1,671 vs 1,736 deaths per million. There may be demographic or other reasons that some states have a higher or lower number of deaths than others so we shouldn’t read too much into the precise differences. But even so, if lockdowns are supposed to suppress the virus to low levels and thus prevent ‘hundreds of thousands’ of deaths (or the population equivalent), then how is this possible? The only conclusion is that lockdowns do not work as intended and do not suppress the virus.
This conclusion is reinforced by looking at the death tolls in the four states which imposed no restrictions at all over the winter, the average of which is 1,716 deaths per million, which is still below that of those which imposed lockdowns (1,736). Florida reopened in the autumn, Georgia and South Carolina in the spring of 2020, and South Dakota never closed. Yet overall they have suffered fewer Covid deaths per million than the states which imposed stay-at-home lockdowns this winter.
Those academic teams which produce models predicting doom for places which don’t impose the measures they recommend should be challenged to apply their models to these states and hindcast the last winter. Any model which cannot accurately reproduce the known outcomes for these states should be calibrated until it can. Otherwise, if it can’t get the answer right for the past, why should we trust it for the future?
The modelling teams at Warwick, Imperial and LSHTM can be found on Twitter (as can LSHTM’s Adam Kucharski) if anyone feels like putting these questions to them.
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More powerful voices for sanity, but ‘Nett Zero’ is a runaway steamroller. It has its own momentum and the lies are stronger than the truth. The only way to stop it is to convince one person at a time. The more people who realise the narrative and the facts don’t join up, will eventually topple this. How much damage will have been done to our society and economies by then though.?
While I completely agree “the more people who realise the narrative and the facts don’t join up” and I do occasionally find the opportunity to speak with people who “believe” the narrative, I find when I point out the disconnect with the facts/data/reality most people get very angry. Carrying the conversation further, when I try to get a discussion about comparing the risk of what the computer says vs. the risk of what we seem to be doing to mitigate what the computers say about “climate change”, the concept of comparing risk mitigation alternatives goes way over their heads (even though I never use those words).
I fear that depending on convincing one person at a time is not quick enough. I of course am probably wrong.
The issues are unnecessarily, probably deliberately so, conflated. Relies on “I believe” and “Don’t you believe?”.
Don’t family ties make it worse as well….whether it’s Covid or Climate?…
I never agree with my niece on these two things, she’s a total believer in both, and as much as I love her, she is a fine example of a ‘sheeple’……
I do say what I think, but quietly, and then leave it alone, because I love my sister (her mum) and couldn’t bear a fall-out.
I imagine this scenario is played out all over the country….
“Family ties” can be a curse when there is a difference between deeply held opinions. It becomes problematic whether or not a family member suffers from mental illness or simply has an eccentric worldview: indeed the difference can sometimes be unascertainable and a matter of convention, religion, or climatism. In these situations I am reminded of Dinsdale Piranha, who, though a really nice guy (deep down) was episodically convinced he was being stalked by a ten-foot long hedgehog called Spiny Norman. Now imagine the problem facing Dinsdale’s wife. So long as Dinsdale’s position was that he “knows”[1,2] that the hedgehog was imaginary and that he was seeking help, he was merely neurotic, and she could probably cope with Dinsdale, and would be quietly be confident that there is no hedgehog. However, if Dinsdale’s position is that he “knows” that the hedgehog is real, he is psychotic and will believe that he is correct and his wife is either mistaken, stupid or psychotic. His wife now has a dilemma. If she openly denies his reality she will provoke a divorce. If she openly agrees with his reality while privately rejecting it she is colluding in his delusion and will make it worse but will remain sane herself, though at risk of cognitive dissonance. If she herself comes to sincerely believe in the reality of the hedgehog she preserves the relationship but at the expense of becoming brainwashed and will wind up in a happy folie à deux in which both are psychotic and will never recover without external assistance[2]. This process can be extended to groupthink, mass formation and psychotic delirium[3], and applies as much to climate and corona as it does to giant hedgehogs.
There is no happy and healthy relationship between a non-psychotic person and a psychotic person. “It is difficult to get a person to believe something if their marriage depends on not believing it”, as Upton Sinclair nearly said.
[1] Eric Berne: Games People Play
[2] Thomas Anthony Harris: I’m OK – You’re OK
[3] Michael Cook: French philosopher decries corona ‘madness’
Jonathan Swift: you can’t reason someone out of something they haven’t reasoned themselves into.
Same problem with CoVidians.
Covid madness also felt like an unstoppable runaway train at one point.
I trust chipping away at the Net Zero stupidity will work. We have the fact that it is insane and will cause a lot of damage on our side. Like with Covid.
I agree Stewart..those boosters are not flying off the shelf are they? We just have to keep chipping away, as you say…
I hear you. I was at a corporate Town Hall this week and they were pushing it ridiculously hard. There were so many blatently absurd statistics quoted that I had to leave the room and pretend I needed the loo otherwise I think I might have exploded. And everyone seemed to lap it up. God help us.
An example of the problems faced by the “enlightened”.
Good friends of ours, decent people, have purchased an EV.
Do we point out the child labour, Uyghur slave labour, “climate change” garbage to them and destroy the friendship, or allow them to feel they are “saving the planet” and keep on happy terms.
I’m yet to figure that one out.
The steam roller is about to run out of road particularly when the lights go out.
Maybe. I think there is a good chance that when the lights go off the mainstream media, especially BBC, will focus on “victims and their hardships”, recollections of the 1970’s from “old” people who now sort of fondly remember when this happened before, etc. If any connection to “cause” they’ll mention without elaboration “climate change” a few times without touching the true cause(s) of failure to delivery power. They will jump to “solutions” which means more “renewables” and ask why is the government holding back fixing this, looking for those to blame, etc.?
It would be a surprise if climate model forecasts were any better than weather forecasts when it come to accuracy versus time. https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/forecast-accuracy-time.html might be of interest, but it’s well known that forecasts are guess work after a week or so.
Yes, easily debunked by the fact that if mathematical models had ANY predictive powers then someone would have applied them to the stock market and become the richest man (or woman) on planet earth.
That’s not occurred yet for a very good reason, they don’t work.
It might be rather unkind, but I really hope we have a particularly nasty winter with plenty of power cuts, because I think that would have some good outcomes, even if it seems like hell at the time. Three that come to mind are;
It will make people question the ideas of net zero and AGW. Especially if MSM starts printing stories of people freezing to death.
It gives people a new focus to take their minds off covid.
It will show the severe limitations of EV’s when people can’t charge them up.
We need people to wake up and get angry, very angry. Mind you, we could all be nuked or broadsided by a massive solar storm as well. I think the world will be a very different place by next spring, assuming we are all still here.
The great majority of us will survive even a harsh winter. The most damaging effects are on the poor in developing countries who are denied affordable energy. Botswana is selling coal to Europe at the moment ironically.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europe-seeks-million-tonnes-per-year-botswana-coal-says-president-2022-05-10/
Monckton has published a paper (with distinguished colleagues) pointing out that the ECS is miscalculated because the feedback is only applied to the difference between a theoretical earth without an atmosphere and current measurements. His team’s contention (which seems correct) is that the feedback calculation should be based on the whole temperature rise from absolute zero. His flat line calculation (currently no warming for eight years by least squares linear regression) has some value but is partly to have a bit of fun at the expense of the eco-loons.
https://phys.org/news/2015-01-peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator-climate-exposes-errors.html
On Earth Day 2017 weekend seven shots were fired at the NSSTC building at UAH. The eco-loons don’t plan to give up their scam without a fight.
‘A total of seven shots were fired into our National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) building here at UAH over the weekend.
All bullets hit the 4th floor, which is where John Christy’s office is (my office is in another part of the building).’
https://www.drroyspencer.com/2017/04/shots-fired-into-the-christyspencer-building-at-uah/
Prof John Christie put together a chart of the results of running all the major climate model temperature ‘predictions’ starting from the same base at ~1970. All overstated the subsequent temperature record except for the one from Russia, which was pretty well spot on. The Russian computer model is based on zero influence (ECS=0) of CO2.
Anyone following this subject and getting their info from sources other than MSM and Government and Eco-Propaganda, as I have for the last 25 years, will recognise this as old ‘Fake News’.
All the climate models have consistently over-estimated warming compared to reality, the Urban Heat Island effect and the artificial warming bias in the surface record was researched and reported (published) years ago by Anthony Watts. The purported rate of global warming flat-lined after 1996, then about 15 years ago went into slight decline prompting ‘global warming’ (measurable) being abandoned as the war cry to be replaced by climate change (not measurable).
Years ago the Climate Sensitivity was put at around 1C per doubling of CO2, ignoring all other compensating factors which when taken into account meant the warming effect of C02 was approaching zero.
The parallels of the CoVid ‘Science’ and Climate ‘Science’ are irresistible, even now to the point that at last, the ‘not consensus’ are beginning to speak out and report the facts, the uncertainties and irrefutable data from observation which underline the non-evidence based claims.
May we expect grudgingly the MSM and other ‘experts’ to start claiming they knew all along it was a fake and they really never said Mankind was causing global warming/climate change just as so many are lining up to deny they ever said vaccinations were 100% effective, or that lockdowns and masks worked?
Dare we hope we are in the final days of the climate scam and Net Zero?
Dare we hope we are in the final days of the climate scam and Net Zero?
I fear we are in the mere beginning of it. Famine in the sub-Sahara, is coming now, and will produce a great northern march. If we dislike forcible illegal immigration we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Climate change, plus historic colonialism, will be blamed for the desperate emigration. The censorship and suppression of debate we have seen so far are a mere foretaste.
Net Zero is like a false god. Politicians say they believe in it despite all scientific evidence showing the Climate Change agenda is a pack of lies.
Grand ‘Renewables’ Delusion: Hard Reality Keeps Smashing Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Myth
https://stopthesethings.com/2022/10/08/grand-renewables-delusion-hard-reality-keeps-smashing-wind-solar-transition-myth/
by stopthesethings
Embrace humanity, Reject the cold anti-human agenda.
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The Climate Change scam is the UN’s Agenda 2030 in action. The intention is to transfer wealth from the developed, western first world to the undeveloped third world….. to pay for the “original sin” of colonialism.
The likes of China and India, who are ignoring the instruction to cut CO2 and are growing their fossil fuel energy production, are simply exploiting the opportunity it gives them.
The UN is controlling the Agenda. There is no evidence to support it, but (as we have learned from Covid) if any Opposition is silenced and the sheeple are bombarded with fear-based propaganda, they will act as the Praetorian Guard.