Extreme Lockdowns do not reduce COVID-19 deaths! Over 25+ empirical research articles show the truth

BY SIMONE J. SMITH

I am going to start by saying that this was the easiest article that I have ever written.

Why?

Well, I am going to give our readers, and the government of Canada a chance to take a look at what the global implications of lockdowns have been. The lockdowns have led to a significant halt on the economic and social life of so many countries. However, there is very little empirical evidence about which COVID-19 measures have the most impact.

The lockdowns were initially billed as short-term measures to “flatten the curve.” It has morphed into something catastrophic. The current policies implemented by governments around the world have altered every aspect of our lives. These policies are imposed by the: local premier, governor, or top health official with little oversight.

It seems now that lockdowns have become conventional wisdom, and are the accepted ideology, even though they continue to prove as anything but a short-term fix to a much larger issue. In Ontario, these restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) have caused psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses, and suicides), and could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, and exacerbations of chronic diseases.

Canadians are intelligent people, and I would like to think that instead of going with the popular opinion, we would take the time to do our own research. Research does not mean turning on CP24, or CNN. What I mean is taking the time to figure out why our lives have been turned upside down.

Forget conspiracy theories. I want our readers to have empirical evidence so that they can put their feet down, and demand for the reopening of our country. What I have provided for you is over twenty-five different scientific articles that show the issues that have come with lockdowns. What makes this so powerful is the fact that this data is coming from all over the world.

Are you ready? Let’s dig in.

• “There is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (“lockdowns”) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484
• “Government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30208-X/fulltext
• “Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions become effective” https://advance.sagepub.com/articles/preprint/Comment_on_Dehning_et_al_Science_15_May_2020_eabb9789_Inferring_change_points_in_the_spread_of_COVID-19_reveals_the_effectiveness_of_interventions_/12362645
• “The decline in infections in England…began before full lockdown…[S]uch a scenario would be consistent with…Sweden, which began its decline in fatal infections shortly after the UK, but did so on the basis of measures well short of full lockdown” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.02090.pdf
•  “Stay at home orders, closure of all non-essential businesses and requiring the wearing of facemasks or coverings in public was not associated with any independent additional impact” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20088260v2
• “These strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures … experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20078717v1
• “The case of Sweden, where the authors find the reduction in transmission to have been only moderately weaker than in other countries despite no lockdown having occurred, is prima facie evidence”
• https://nicholaslewis.org/did-lockdowns-really-save-3-million-covid-19-deaths-as-flaxman-et-al-claim/
• “Current policy can be misdirected and can therefore have long and even short-term negative effects on human welfare and thus result in not actually minimizing death rates (incorporating externalities), especially in the long run.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3607803
• “For example, the data…shows a decrease in infection rates after countries eased…lockdowns with >99% statistical significance. Indeed…infection rates have declined after reopening even after allowing for an appropriate measurement lag.            https://imgcdn.larepublica.co/cms/2020/05/21180548/JP-Morgan.pdf
• “Restrictions imposed by the pandemic (eg, stay-at-home orders) could claim lives indirectly through delayed care for acute emergencies, exacerbations of chronic diseases, and psychological distress (eg, drug overdoses).” https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768086
• “Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665588
• “Consistent with observations that .. lockdown has not been observed to effect the rate…of the country reproduction rates significantly, our analysis suggests there is no basis for expecting lockdown stringency to be an explanatory variable” https://pandata.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Exploring-inter-country-variation.pdf
• “Whether a county had a lockdown has no effect on Covid-19 deaths; a non-effect that persists over time. Cross-country studies also find lockdowns are superfluous and ineffective (Homberg 2020). This ineffectiveness may have several causes.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00779954.2020.1844786?journalCode=rnzp20
• “There are no historical observations…that support.. confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods…The negative consequences…are so extreme…this mitigation.should be eliminated from serious consideration” http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2006/2006-09-15-diseasemitigationcontrolpandemicflu.html
• “Sweden is worthy of particular attention, given…no lockdown took place.” “Notably, the estimated effectiveness of…[merely a]…public events ban in Sweden is comparable to that of lockdown in the 10 countries in which one was implemented” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3025-y
• “For the first time in human history, lockdowns were used as a strategy to counter the virus. While conventional wisdom, to date, has been that lockdowns were successful…we find not one piece of evidence supporting this claim.” http://ssbhalla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Lockdowns-Closures-vs.-COVID19-Covid-Wins-Nov-4.pdf
• “Measures can substitute for a full lockdown in terms of effectiveness, while reducing adverse impacts on society, the economy, [humanity]” “Less disruptive and costly NPIs can be as effective as more intrusive, drastic, ones (eg, a national lockdown).”  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0
• “Japan took the atypical step of not instituting a mandatory lockdown. During this time, businesses, restaurants, & transportation were kept open, & public life continued relatively unabated. Nevertheless, the second wave peaked and subsided on its own” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v1.full.pdf
• “The stay-at-home orders…seem to have made no observable tangible impact on the daily cases & deaths. Further the most severe restrictions, such as prolonged lockdown…in California in Nov, did not prevent the subsequent spike in cases or fatalities”  https://c2cjournal.ca/2021/03/do-lockdowns-make-a-difference-in-a-pandemic/
• “Life loss due to lockdowns themselves has never been taken into consideration” “pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin & based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3784709
• “All regions have peak incidence prior to the first lockdown with total incidence for England in decline well before lockdown” “Furthermore all regions have R < 1 by either lockdown, with average R < 1 some days before either lockdown” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.03.21251112v2.full.pdf
• “Social isolation at a given date showed a strong positive correlation to COVID-19 deaths 39 days later” “strong empirical evidence that adoption of restrictive measures increasing social isolation have worsened the pandemic instead of mitigating it”  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3706464

Whew!

That is a lot of evidence, and I know that you won’t be able to go through all of it, but I hope that you do have a chance to at least take a look at some of it.

To the Canadian government, I respectfully ask you to take into consideration that less disruptive and costly NPIs can be as effective as more intrusive, drastic, ones (for example, a national lockdown).

We need to pose an important question: Did the lockdowns actually work? Did it actually alter the course of the virus through the population? Our government needs to rationally assess the cost and benefits of imposing similar social and economic policies if we were to ever face another serious pandemic.