I expect that everyone thought the lockdowns were more effective:
Apparently, according to the article:
The report has not been peer-reviewed.
The researchers â who deal in the field of economics, rather than medicine or public health â originally identified 18,590 global studies into lockdowns, which they claim had to be whittled down to just 24 to answer their research question.
Critics have accused them of âcherry-pickingâ studies to suit their narrative and have raised doubts about the biases of its authors, who have been vocal about lockdowns and vaccine mandates on social media.
The report was led by Steve Hanke, a founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Applied Economics.
He has been an outspoken critic of economically-damaging restrictions throughout the pandemic, describing jab mandates as âfascistâ and an open supporter of the Great Barrington Declaration - a controversial alternative strategy endorsed by thousands of top scientists at the start of the pandemic.
The GBR - signed before vaccines were on the horizon - advocated shielding the most elderly and allowing the virus to spread in younger age groups, to build up natural immunity.
Also:
To come to their findings, the researchers said they whittled down 18,590 global studies on lockdown and lockdown restrictions to 117.
The criteria for the studies to be eligible were they must measure the effect of lockdown on mortality and use an âempirical approachâ - meaning to use real-world data.
These were then boiled down to just 34 papers, with the others discarded for various reasons, including being duplicates or papers written by student papers.
Reasons for excluding others were vague, however, with nine papers left out because they had âtoo few observationsâ and nine more because they âonly looked at timingâ.
At least two studies - one in the UK - that found clear drops in Covid deaths by comparing the rate directly before and after a lockdown were left out because the researchers claimed they may have been biased by âtime-dependent factorsâ such as seasonality.
A popular paper which claimed 3million lives in Europe had been saved due to the spring 2020 lockdowns was also excluded - because it relied on modelling.
Crucially, the researchers also left out studies which looked at early lockdowns in countries which managed to suppress Covid and record extremely low death rates during the pandemic through incredibly strict lockdowns and border controls â such as China, Australia and New Zealand.
Concerning the UK:
Earlier this month, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the end of all pandemic related restrictions, including the end of mask mandates, some capacity restrictions, and work from home orders. Testing requirements for Britons to return to the nation will be dropped in the coming weeks as well.
This comes after a miraculous (sic) turnaround for the nation that was struck early by the variant, and was struck so hard some officials feared the nationâs hospital system would be overwhelmed.
The UK is averaging just under 90,000 Covid cases per day as of Monday morning, a far fall from the peak of over 180,000 cases earlier this month.
That â90,000 Covid cases per dayâ (2,700,000 per month) is a far cry from the low of 2,000 cases per day of May last year:
IMO, âCOVID mortalityâ is just one aspect of the effects of the pandemic and one which is, more or less in the UK, under control, a far cry from the appalling casualties of 2020 and 2021:
If 90,000 cases per day are now being recorded then, if rules are being followed, each of those cases must self-isolate for 10 days:
What to do if youâre told to self-isolate
If youâre told to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace or the NHS COVID-19 app because youâve been in contact with someone who has COVID-19:
- self-isolate straight away and get a PCR test on GOV.UK as soon as possible â only leave your home to get a test
- try to avoid contact with anyone you live with as much as possible
Donât
- do not go to work, school or public places
- do not go on public transport or use taxis
- do not go out to get food and medicine â order it online or by phone, or ask someone to bring it to your home
- do not have visitors in your home, including friends and family â except for people providing essential care
- do not go out to exercise â exercise at home or in your garden, if you have one
Now, my maths isnât brilliant but I calculate that 10 days self-isolation for reported new cases per month in the UK totals 27,000,000 âlostâ days, whether at work, home or in education, for that month.
It seems to me that accepting the new high number of cases of 90,000 per day, is more costly than lockdown which reduced the cases to 2,000 a day.
Itâs not easy to find figures but hereâs an example:
Q2 is April-June
This is according to FirstCare, the absence management company, Index report which found that these absences cost UK businesses ÂŁ4,262, 890, 284.
It also stated that the retail industry saw the greatest increase in absence with a 363 per cent increase from the previous quarter. The NHS has also seen an increase of absence rates of 108 per cent.
Across the UK, businesses have seen a significant increase in long-term mental health-related absences.
That was, again, when new reported cases were only averaging 2,000 per day in the UK.
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I still strongly believe that the booster jab contains the Omicron variant, and because the covid 19 virus will not survive in someone who has Omicron, and as I mentioned elsewhere, the dominant strain, in this case Omicron, will overcome the covid 19 virus, thereby greatly reducing the mortality and hospital admissions.
Logically, there are only two reasons why the Omicron infection rate has gone through the roof, and that is:- Because it has been purposely spread through booster vaccinations, or because people have ignored the advice to isolate.
I must point out that this only my own personal theory, but it seems logical to meâŠ
Always wondered about transmissiblity factors, each strain was more transmissible, by that reckoning we should now be standing 5 metres apart.
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Welcome to the world of genetic engineeringâŠ
Did we all think it ended with Dolly the sheep and disease resistant crops.
These vaccines are nothing like the vaccines of old that we have all put our faith in, they have been developed at a molecular level, and not even people like Whitty know whatâs going on.
Just a handful of people know about the development and use and the people who have financed the research.
The booster is not a vaccine but an antidote. Iâm not sure about covid 19 thoughâŠCould it have been created?
Jacinda Ardern want to put the vaccine in the drinking waterâŠ
Well Foxy, if Omicron was in the booster, the vaxed and the unvaxed virus catchers are all in the same boat now.
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Everyone is entitled to an opinion, of course, but it does not sound logical to me.
Omicron is the virus that causes Covid-19. Itâs just another strain of the same SARS-COV-2 virus. The idea that âtheyâ would deliberately put a live pathogenic virus into a vaccine and inject it into the whole population, when it is a virus which is already known to mutate into a variety of strains that may be more or less harmful is pretty far out there in the realms of âconspiracy theoriesâ
Unless you think âtheyâ are also mis-labelling vaccine phials, the booster jab I had was the same Pfizer vaccine that I had for vaccines 1 & 2. I saw each phial and have a record of the batch numbers etc.
If it had contained the whole SARS-Cov-2 virus of the Omicron strain or any other strain, would I have not contracted Covid-19 from it? Would the virus not have shown up on the tests I did during the week or two after my jab?
Yet I didnât. I do regular lateral flow tests every couple of days, before going to work in a hospital or before meeting friends and they were all negative after my booster jab - surely one of them would have been positive if Iâd been injected with the virus?
About week after my booster, I was asked to go for a PCR Test, after being in contact with someone who had tested positive but my PCR was also negative.
If I had been injected with the Omicron strain of the virus, Iâm pretty sure it would have showed up on one of those tests, even if I had no symptoms.
Also, consider the timing of when the booster roll out started - it was months before the first case of Omicron was detected in UK.
The booster rollout started in mid September 2021 - Omicron was first discovered in UK end of November, which coincides with the rate of transmission suddenly causing a massive spike in the number of new Covid cases beginning around the beginning of December.
I think the more logical explanation is that this strain is more readily transmitted, it is less pathogenic so people may not notice symptoms or think they just have a mild cold, so they do not test and realise they have Covid, so do not isolate - or they have already infected other people before symptoms appear.
Add to that the Winter season always increases transmission, plus the lifting of lockdowns, the fact that being triple boosted gave a lot of people more confidence to resume normal life, especially as Omicron is being reported as not so severe.
It doesnât surprise me that numbers of cases increased so much.
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As I posted on another thread:
And if we hadnât locked down the NHS would have been overwhelmed and so there would have been even more deaths from non-covid illnesses.
In the beginning they werenât going to lockdown until they realised this.
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I appreciate your comprehensive reply, Omah.
We were told over here that the initial lockdown was to spread out infection, not to prevent it, so I questioned the premise of the report in the first place. I tend to think that the more important reason to lockdown was to flatten the curve and set aside economic concerns for a short time. There was no real way to assess mortality in those early days. Flattening of the curve did work in helping the medical sector prepare to create more bed space, get ventilators in place, and start the race for prevention/cure. It was a reasonable call given that no one knew what was coming (though I did think at the time that the first wave of lockdowns were too early). As long as the government was willing to pay businesses and employees for the economic impact of that mandate, that first lockdown was reasonable.
That said, I donât think this report should be applicable to every future pandemic in terms of mortality; each will depend on the nature of the disease at hand.
I fall into the category mandated lockdowns for Covid at this point are no longer justified - and that is said with an elderly mother and daughter who is immunosuppressed. We are making personal isolation decisions every day. Those who want to self-isolate should; we make personal decisions about our familyâs risk aversion every day. The reality is that Covid is a virus, and viruses mutate for years and sometimes forever (thanks common cold, yet another Coronavirus). We just canât shut down the world forever because of the vulnerability of a small group of people, who are sadly at risk of other conditions, or are at statistically higher risk for hospitalizations because they have chosen not to be vaccinated. The mortality rate of Covid and the present mutations do not now justify the economic, social, and personal impacts, IMHO. Itâs time to get kids in schools, twenty somethings out meeting each other, families getting together, people visiting elderly family members, consumers out stimulating the economy, and businesses running.
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You may be right ⊠but the cost of âfreedomâ may yet come dear ⊠those infected are still dying - 10,000 a month in the UK - and long-covid sufferers are still afflicted - nearly 2,000,000 in the UK.
In the 6 years of WWII, 70,000 civilians died in the UK, in 2 years of COVID, 160,000 civilians have gone to an early grave.
In the USA, nearly there have been nearly 60,000,000 cases and nearly 1,000,000 have died
While there are so many cases there will continue to be so many casualties.
You raise some good points Boot, excellent responseâŠ
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We have just heard the sad news that one of our neighbours a man of 45 with two small children has died of Covid ( we donât know if he had any underlying health problems ) he always looked ok .
This has shaken us .
Itâs still about and it kills donât anyone let you believe otherwise .
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Oh hugs Muddy, thatâs awful, my thoughts are with his family.
Thatâs very sad @Muddy, covid has destroyed that family. 
Just goes to show we still have to be very careful and itâs not worth taking chances if you value your life.
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