05/01/2024
The lack of interest by nations, international "health" orgs and the like in even reflecting on, exploring and doing a serious debrief on what of the responses may have worked and what may have only exacerbated harm should tell us all we need to know about the legitimacy of both the ad-hoc approaches and those mandating them.
Luckily a few smaller orgs have been looking into this most important of questions and finding things like shown below. TLDR Clif notes: Lockdowns have caused at least 5x as much harm as the virus itself by this point in time (which is a fraction of the long tail harm compounding from the affects of destroying so many small businesses and increasing poverty more than was ever accomplished previously in such a short span of time).
"Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results are in line with the World Health Organization Writing Group (2006), who state, “
Our findings are also in line with Allen's (2021) conclusion: “The most recent research has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid- 19 deaths.” Poeschl and Larsen (2021) conclude that “interventions are generally effective ininfluenza pandemic indicate that social-distancing measures did not stop or appear to
Reports from the 1918dramatically reduce transmission [...] In Edmonton, Canada, isolation and quarantine wereinstituted; public meetings were banned; schools, churches, colleges, theaters, and other publicgathering places were closed; and business hours were restricted without obvious impact on the epidemic.”
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mitigating COVID-19 spread”. But, 9 of the 43 (21%) results they review find “no or uncertain association” between lockdowns and the spread of COVID-19, suggesting that evidence from that own study contradicts their conclusion."
Another study:
"The cost-benefit analysis is shown in Table 6, finding on balance the lockdowns cost a minimum of 5X more WELLBY than they save, and more realistically, cost 50–87X more. Importantly, this cost does not include the collateral damage discussed above (from disrupted healthcare services, disrupted education, famine, social unrest, violence, and su***de) nor the major effect of loneliness and unemployment on lifespan and disease. Frijters and Krekel have estimated that “the [infection] fatality rate should be about 7.8% to break-even and make a radical containment and eradication policy worthwhile, presuming that would actually eliminate the disease (page 422)” (180). A similar cost-benefit analysis for Canada is shown in Supplementary Table 5, with the cost at least 10X higher for lockdowns than the benefit. A different analysis for Australia is shown in Table 7, estimating the minimum cost is 6.6X higher than the benefit of lockdown (181, 182). "
