Lockdowns are seen as prudent precautions against Covid-19. But in reality they are the most risky experiment ever conducted on people. A lot of doctors and scientist have always warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus. People losing jobs and businesses lead to an increase of deadly drug overdoses and suicides. Evidence already exists that many more will die from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia, tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented the illnesses from being diagnosed early enough and then treated successfully.
So far, politicians and public-health officials have paid little attention to these risks. Politicians claim they are following scientists but no ethical scientist would conduct such a risky experiment without carefully considering the dangers and monitoring the results. Finally, a group of leading scientists this week called for an end to the experiment. In a joint statement, the Great Barrington Declaration, they predict that continued lockdowns will lead to excess mortality in years to come and warned of irreparable damage.
While the economic and social costs have been enormous, it’s not clear that the lockdowns have brought any significant health benefits beyond what was achieved by people’s voluntary social distancing and other actions.
In a study, the University of Toronto found that Covid was deadlier in places with older populations and higher rates of obesity, but the mortality rate was no lower in countries that closed their borders or enforced full lockdowns. The analysis of Andrew Atkeson of UCLA confiirmed that the mortality trend was similar everywhere once the disease took hold: the number of daily deaths rose rapidly for 20 to 30 days, and then fell rapidly. Similar conclusions were reached in analyses of Covid deaths in Europe. By studying the time lag between infection and death, Simon Wood of the University of Edinburgh concluded that infections in Britain were already declining before the nation’s lockdown began in late March. In an analysis in Germany, Thomas Wieland of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology confirmed that infections were waning in most of the country before the national lockdown began and that the additional curfews imposed in Bavaria and other states had no effect.
None of these facts gets as much as attention as the daily case counts for Covid. Nor do all the unseen casualties: the people dying from heart disease, cancer, suicide, and other causes related to lockdowns and economic distress. Early in the pandemic, Scott Atlas at the Hoover Institution and researchers at Swansea University independently calculated that the lockdowns would ultimately cost a lot more years of life than Covid-19. The World Bank estimates that the coronavirus recession could push 60 million people into extreme poverty, which inevitably means more disease and death.
The lockdowns may have been chosen as an option in spring this year, when so little was known about the virus and the ways to contain it. But now that we know more, there’s no ethical justification for continuing this failed experiment. There are better ways of shielding the elderly and vulnerable in our society. May be, we should take a look at Sweden. So far, the country seems on the right track to fight this pandemic without a lockdown.
Sven Franssen