The prolific blogger Scott Alexander has written a long post about lockdowns. It’s not too objectionable from a lockdown sceptic’s point of view. For example, he concedes that “lockdowns weren’t necessary to prevent uncontrolled spread” and says that it’s “harder to justify strict lockdowns in terms of the non-economic suffering produced”.
Nonetheless, I do disagree with him on several points, which I will highlight here.
First, he ignores most of the academic studies that have found little or no effect of lockdowns on mortality. For example, he doesn’t mention Simon Wood’s studies finding that infections were in decline before all three U.K. lockdowns. Nor does he mention the paper by Christopher Berry and colleagues which observed “no detectable health benefits” of shelter-in-place orders in the United States.
Despite ignoring these studies, he dedicates a whole section of his post to something called CoronaGame, which he oddly classifies as “Actual Evidence”.
Second, he compares the official COVID-19 death rate up to August 2020 in Sweden with various other countries, and claims that “Sweden comes out looking very bad, but not the literal worst”. He then claims that “it looks even worse when you compare Sweden to other Scandinavian/Nordic countries”.
However, if he had used age-adjusted excess mortality, and had extended his window of analysis up to the end of 2020, Sweden would not have come out “looking very bad”. As I’ve noted several times, Sweden saw age-adjusted excess mortality up to week 51 of just 1.7% – placing it 14 out of 22 European countries.
And there are several reasons why the “neighbour argument” – the argument that we have to compare Sweden to its immediate neighbours rather than the rest of Europe – isn’t very convincing. Sweden saw unusually low mortality in 2019; border controls (not lockdowns) made the difference in the first wave; and once you include the Baltics, Sweden no longer stands out.
Third, he claims the cost of lockdown “is measured in psychological suffering and economic decline”, noting that in order to do a cost-benefit analysis “we should figure out how much stricter lockdowns affected the economy”.
While the economic impact of lockdown certainly constitutes a major entry on the costs side of the ledger, Alexander neglects to mention another negative impact of lockdown, namely the switch to remote learning. As several studies have shown, this resulted in sizeable learning losses, which were concentrated among children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
Alexander’s post offers a decent overview of the debate, but he’s too charitable to the lockdown side, leading him to overstate the benefits of lockdown and understate the costs. Not his best piece of work, in other words.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
So the jabbed/zealot/manic/covindians Covid-19 crew have suddenly gone silent?
Let me guess!
I was wrong, Holy God! How could that be possible??????
say it a little louder honey!
I can’t here you!
I got me a crysler it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to lie through it’s teeth (baleen) again!
I’m full of anticiparatty! …go figure
“Teachers’ strike not about pay but controlling ‘brutally racist state’, union leader says”
Where is this..?
“The New Pause lengthens to eight years nine months”
The writer of this excellent article concludes by saying;
”I have set out these new calculations in some detail because once it is more widely known it will help to bring the climate nonsense to an end.”
Well now, there’s optimistic for you! I wish that logic and rationality was a factor in this climate business but I am afraid it has gone way beyond that and seems to have become a religious cult driven with all the ferocity of the Spanish Inquisition.
Sounds like more Government propaganda masquerading as news.
In the comments section of https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/how-many-deaths-were-caused-by-the/comments , this one caught my eye:
Dan Shaw – Liked by Norman Fenton
The Yellow Card system is a passive monitoring system by government choice. On behalf of the government, the Royal College of GPs Research and Surveillance Centre at Oxford University runs active monitoring of respiratory viruses, such as influenza and SARA CoV 2. Active monitoring of all vaccines would expose the dirty secret of modern medicine that vaccines are not the ‘safe and effective’ miracle popular myth holds them to be. So long as doctors, bureaucrats and other well-meaning health practitioners believe vaccines are a miracle, they will go knees to chest to suppress anything ‘anti-vax’ in the false belief they are doing good.
Peter Murrell, husband of Nicola Sturgeon, reportedly arrested over SNP finance probe
https://f7td5.app.goo.gl/AFLhPv
Sent via @updayUK
Aye, aye. Smells a bit fishy.
Saw it on GBN around midday; top item on the news, with police Scotland taking an interest in offices in both Edinburgh & Glasgow. M’s £600K donation being spent on the odd campaign etc, by the sound of it.
“Say ‘pregnant people’, NHS watchdog tells staff in gender neutral drive”
I’ll say ‘pregnant person’ the day they show me a bona fide XY ‘person’ with all his physical accoutrements – including dangly bits and testosterone levels – who who has become naturally pregnant.
Anyone else bothered by this? NHS to give our medical health data – you know, that thing we signed petitions about and instructed our GPs to withhold only a couple of years ago – to Palantir, that entirely corrupt ‘big data’ company. Were we informed? Do we get a choice any more? Clearly not. (It’s from Open Democracy so there might be a bit of nose-holding to read it.)
“In November, lawyers working for Foxglove wrote to NHS England on behalf of the National Pensioners’ Convention, Just Treatment and the Doctors Association UK, to raise concerns about the sharing of pseudonymised data.
The lawyers questioned whether consent requirements – which are needed to process pseudonymised data – had been violated, and what safeguards, if any, had been put in place to protect patient privacy.
NHS England has still not sent a substantive reply after more than three month’s but has now instructed all trusts to implement Faster Data Flows.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/palantir-peter-thiel-nhs-england-foundry-faster-data-flows/
Following a story on GBN the other day, those who operate an iPhone might like to adjust their settings before April 23rd, to avoid the Gov’s trial “emergency” alarm game, allegedly to be tried on that day. In Settings/Notifications/EMERGENCY ALERTS, both Extreme Alerts and Severe Alerts, can be switched off. Mine have been.
Those who use Android ‘phones might wish to do likewise. It is really just a test of compliance.