COVID-19 and Ireland – Part 6

In 2020, unprecedented measures were implemented in Ireland in response to the declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic. Collectively these measures were characterized by the name lockdown, a technical term borrowed from penology. Lockdowns included the following measures:

The economy was largely shut down for months on end. Only businesses and industries deemed to be essential were allowed to remain open. Fast-food restaurants were deemed essential, but gyms were not.
Healthy people were required to stay at home. They could only leave home if they had a legally valid reason to do so. And if they were permitted to leave home, they were obliged to remain within a certain distance of their home (eg 2 km, 5 km, 10 km, or within their county boundary).
The wearing of face masks was mandatory on public transport and in places of business (those that actually remained open).
Hospitals were cleared of patients to make room for the expected tsunami of Covid cases. People were encouraged not to go to hospital unless it was absolutely necessary. Many elderly patients were transferred to nursing homes.
The number of mourners allowed to attend funerals was strictly limited. Similarly, the number of guests allowed to attend weddings was capped. Other religious services were outlawed.
Everyone was encouraged to wash and sanitize their hands continually.
Surfaces were repeatedly sanitized and wiped down.
When people were allowed to meet, they were obliged to practise social distancing (2 m).
The use of cash was discouraged, for fear that it would spread the virus. Newspapers and magazines, however, were immune from this risk.

Prior to 2020, few if any of these measures were recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) as appropriate responses to a deadly global pandemic. The guidelines for the SARS outbreak in 2003, for example, were significantly different from those that were eventually imposed for Covid-19:

WHO Guidance for Mass Gatherings

Personal Preventive Measures included:

Frequent hand washing, using soap or alcohol-based disinfectants.
For those with a high risk of contracting the disease, such as health care workers, the use of personal protective equipment (N 95 mask, goggle, apron etc) is mandatory. Whenever possible household contacts should also wear a mask.

Containment Measures included:

Prompt detection of cases through good surveillance network including early warning system.
Isolation of suspected or probable cases with good infection control using barrier nursing technique in health care institutions.
Backward tracing to identify the source of infection and forward tracing to detect contacts that may develop the disease.
Voluntary or mandatory quarantine of suspected contacts for 10 days.
Exit screening for outgoing passengers from areas with recent local transmission by asking questions and temperature measurement.
Disinfection of aircraft and cruise vessels having SARS cases on board using WHO guidelines.

Because of—or, possibly, in spite of—these comparatively mild measures, the SARS outbreak was quickly contained:

SARS: How a Global Epidemic was Stopped 49

Similarly restrained measures were recommended by WHO in 2019 to mitigate the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza: Non-Pharmaceutical Public Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza. Among the measures not recommended were:

Contact tracing
Quarantine of exposed individuals
Screening of people arriving from abroad (entry screening) or leaving the country (exit screening)
Border closures

Internal travel restrictions are only conditionally recommended during the early stage of a localized extraordinarily severe pandemic for a limited period of time. Needless to say, the term lockdown does not appear anywhere in this publication: Workplace closures may only be warranted as an extreme social distancing measure in an extraordinarily severe pandemic.

The extremely onerous measures imposed in 2020 seem to have done little to halt the spread of Covid-19. In this article, however, we will concentrate on the other side of the coin: What were the unwanted side-effects of the lockdowns? In particular, did lockdowns cause a death toll of their own? And if they did, how did this death toll compare with the death toll due to Covid-19?

Ivor Cummins

Lockdowns Examined

In the course of 2020, several papers—both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed—were published on this very subject. On his website, the independent Irish researcher Ivor Cummins has collated eighteen of these papers. There are dozens more on the Collateral Global website. According to these reports, the collateral damage done by the lockdowns include the following:

Significant delays in the detection and treatment of cancers
Increased malnutrition, undernutrition and even starvation in developing countries
Increased “deaths of despair” due to substance abuse or suicide
Increased deaths from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, and other conditions due to the cancellation of “nonessential” care
Increased deaths among sufferers of dementia and severe mental illness due to the lockdowns

A study by the Department of Health and Social Care, the Office for National Statistics, the Government Actuary’s Department and the Home Office in the UK estimated that 41,000-45,000 Covid-related deaths would take place in the six months beginning 28 March 2020 (while noting that this range of estimates for excess deaths is likely to be an over-estimate due to insufficient data on background mortality of COVID- 19 victims). In the same period, the study estimated that the number of non-Covid excess deaths due to the lockdown measures would be in the range 21,000-25,000.

Another study in the UK concluded that the downside of lockdowns would outweigh the benefits after just a few months:

The lockdown is a public health policy and we have valued its impact using the tools that guide health care decisions in the UK public health system. On that basis, and taking a wide range of scenarios of costs and benefits of severe restrictions, we find that having extended the lockdown for as long as three months is likely to have generated costs that are greater than likely benefits. (Miles, Stedman & Heald 75)

The case for lockdown deaths is now indisputable and so well established that even mainstream outlets can no longer ignore it. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) claimed that there were 299,000 excess deaths in the US from late January through early October 2020, but as many as a third of these were not Covid-related (Rossen et al 1522).

Jeffrey Tucker

This estimate is in line with a prediction made in late March 2020 by two economists at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a prediction which the Institute’s former Editorial Director Jeffrey A Tucker subsequently claimed had been vindicated:

On March 28 [2020]—very early in the pandemic—AIER published an article that I felt at the time received far too little attention. “Drugs, Suicide, and Crime: Empirical Estimates of the Human Toll of the Shutdown” by economists Audrey and Thomas Duncan cited empirical literature on the human toll of economic devastation.

This article forecasted more than 100,000 excess deaths due to drug overdoses, suicide, alcoholism, homicide, and untreated depression—all a result not of the virus but of policies of mandatory human separation, economic downturn, business and school closures, closed medical services, and general depression that comes with a loss of freedom and choice.

These two economists demonstrated that as bad as a virus is, policies that wreck normal social functioning will cause massive and completely unnecessary suffering and death. Because the article was so well-cited, with references to all the available literature, I thought it would make a difference. But after it appeared, it was crickets. I was amazed. Here you have a beautiful piece of research that perfectly forecasted the nightmare being created by politicians and their advisers and it made no dent in the national narrative.

Here we are seven months later [2 November 2020] and the worst has come true. These two economists should be considered prophets. Sure enough, the Centers for Disease Control has documented a shocking number of excess deaths not from Covid. (Tucker)

Even Sky News has conceded that for every three deaths caused by coronavirus, there were another two caused by the impact of the lockdown. Their source for this assessment is a “government report” (which is not linked to in the article).

Lockdown

There is no shortage of evidence, then, that lockdowns are extremely harmful in themselves and leave a deadly trail of collateral damage in their wake. But, the argument runs, if we had not imposed these lockdowns, the deaths from Covid-19 would have been several orders of magnitudes greater than the collateral deaths due to the lockdowns. In the long run, then, the lockdowns have actually saved innumerable lives.

But have they? How effective were the lockdowns at containing the spread of the disease? That is what we will be looking at in the next article in this series.

And that’s a good place to stop.

References

Thomas K Duncan, Audrey Redford, Drugs, Suicide, and Crime: Empirical Estimates of the Human Toll of the Shutdown, American Institute for Economic Research, 28 March 2020, Online (2020)
David Miles, Mike Stedman, Adrian Heald, Living with COVID-19: Balancing Costs against Benefits in the Face of the Virus, National Institute Economic Review, Number 253, Pages R60-R76, National Institute of Economics and Social Research, London (2020)
L M Rossen, A M Branum, F B Ahmad, P Sutton, R N Anderson, Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19, by Age and Race and Ethnicity—United States, January 26–October 3, 2020, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Volume 69, Number 42, Pages 1522–1527, US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA (2020)
Jeffrey A Tucker, Death by Lockdown, American Institute for Economic Research, 2 November 2020, Online (2020)
World Health Organization, SARS: How a Global Epidemic was Stopped, WHO Press, Geneva (2006)
World Health Organization, Non-Pharmaceutical Public Health Measures for Mitigating the Risk and Impact of Epidemic and Pandemic Influenza, WHO Press, Geneva (2019)

Image Credits

Lockdown: Copyright Unknown, Fair Use

Lockdown Deaths?

Lockdowns Examined

References

Image Credits

Online Resources