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The Science Is Clear: End the Lockdowns
Our response to the Covid pandemic continues to be incoherent and ineffective. No matter how many interstate comparisons prove that lockdowns confer no permanent benefit, no matter how much economic devastation we endure and how many lives are ruined, we soldier on, refusing to learn from experience.
Our panic-driven approach was originally in reaction to an apparent overall death rate of 3% and the need to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. But we now know that 82 studies worldwide have found a median death rate of 0.2% of all those infected by Covid and supplemental hospital units were mothballed.
Even more encouraging, the virus is not equally threatening to all. The mortality rate for people over 70 is 1000 times greater than for children, who are almost totally protected. In fact, over twice as many children have died from seasonal flu this year than from Covid.
The sparing of the young is of course a great blessing. Yet we continue to pursue policies of blanket restrictions as if all groups are at equal risk.
This is the folly addressed in the Great Barrington Declaration, authored by Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford epidemiologists, now signed by 50,000 medical practitioners and 664,000 concerned citizens worldwide. The declaration calls for “focused protection” in place of the one-size-fits-all lockdowns that have wreaked havoc everywhere.
Societies are urged to concentrate isolation strategies on those most at risk: the elderly, obese, and already ill, who comprise the vast majority of fatalities. Those who would likely experience Covid as a flu-like infection, or nothing at all, follow basic prevention hygiene protocols but otherwise resume their lives.
Unfortunately, what should be a stimulus for rational scientific discovery and discussion has deteriorated into another of the partisan brawls Americans have come to despise. Fights break out over masks. Police block the entrance to gyms and bars. Protests over mandates become unruly. Nut cases threaten public officials.
In this hyper-politicized environment, the right to peaceably disagree goes out the window. Although epidemiology is normally not influenced by political ideology, the reliably left-wing media has been reflexively hostile. Google initially shadowbanned GBD.
Many scientists have resorted to name-calling and silencing rather than reasoned debate. One of the GBD authors was accused of “Trumpian epidemiology” by a colleague. Another doctor charged the GBD was the work of “COVID-19 deniers” similar to “creationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, and climate science deniers.” Meanwhile, 1300 epidemiologists signed a letter assuring that BLM protests were harmless but all the rest of us should self-quarantine.
Lockdown critics are frequently charged with a heartless over-emphasis on economics. But the UN estimates that 130 million additional people internationally will starve as a result of the economic damage resulting from lockdowns.
Moreover, the fixation on one disease at the expense of all others has severe consequences. Childhood diseases like diphtheria, pertussis, and polio are beginning to reappear because parents are over-focused on Covid. Deaths from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are also trending up from patients’ reluctance to seek routine care.
Mental well-being is in steep decline. Seven in ten teenagers report struggling with their mental health and crisis hotlines are reporting a surge in suicide-related calls. Suicide deaths far outnumber Covid deaths among the young.
School shutdowns may be the most harmful and senseless of all. Since school children very rarely get sick from Covid, they neither endanger themselves nor are contagious to others. The spectacle of millions of children staying home or struggling with distance learning, because the teachers’ unions insist upon it, is an outrage.
The vaccine will help of course, but those expecting a permanent eradication of Covid anytime soon are likely to be disappointed. For starters, 46% of Americans, partly in response to the disparagement of the president who oversaw its development, intend to refuse the vaccine. Moreover, most flu-type viruses mutate freely so immunity, even when achieved, may not be permanent.
We’ll likely be dealing with the virus for some time yet and will need realistic science-based guidance. But science can’t do its job in an environment where anyone challenging the politically dominant status quo gets demeaned or canceled.
Published in Economics, Healthcare
Old Bathos- the Nature article I included does refer to studies that show areas with mask mandates or mask use was the norm DID do better. Several other articles I have linked to in the past have done so as well. But, as I stated above, looking at gross data comparing different areas and assuming any observed differences are to mask use/mandates ALONE is probably not wise-one can easily see confounding variables (which are by definition not controlled) influencing the outcome. Furthermore, if area A did worse than area B (and area A had mask mandates) you can not be sure that the mask mandates didn’t prevent area A from doing far worse than they actually did. The whole problem of looking at mask mandates and gross/aggregate data remains.
the good news is that over 1.1 million people have been vaccinated so far..
Because the people who oppose masks would definitely oppose the expense to build thousands of additional ICU beds- and claim it was all a scam to enrich the hospitals & doctors etc…. and say the approx 20,000 deaths this week are all a “big yawn”…..
@mimac
And it is also interesting to note, now that the vax has been given emergency approval, the AMA has decided that the HCQ protocol is effective and that there should be no reason to stop doctors from prescribing it for their patients.
I very much agree. Like I said earlier this week, in England, a group of people demanded officials show them the evidence they were basing their restrictions on.
The reply was not a pretty one. Great Britain’s officials let the people know that they are the government and they don’t need no stinkin’ science to bring about “needed policies.”
Where do you get your medical news from? Any actual proof of the claim the AMA has backed down on HCQ? If you check the AMA twitter post for 12/16 they absolutely deny any change:
In March, AMA urged caution about prescribing hydroxychloroquine off-label to treat #COVID19. Our position remains unchanged. Evidence-based #science & practice must guide these determinations. Thank you @Poynter for the #FactCheck to set record straight http://spr.ly/6019HuJkN
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2020/12/17/fact-check-does-american-medical-association-now-support-hydroxychloroquine/3943008001/
I don’t buy your logic. The Newsom administration is very controlling and into central planning. This is as much about reserving capacity as prevention.
You are asking why aren’t we better prepared, all the while opposing any mitigation steps- including the cheap and easy ones- like masks ( much less difficult & expensive like building more hospitals) and you have problems with my logic?
We aren’t going to agree about how much masks change anything for the better.
I think this thing has to be more fought with resources, especially when you factor in how some of these actions destroy human and financial capital.
I’m sure we will be 110% reserved for the next pandemic
Using such comparisons presumes there are no other differences between the locales except for mask mandates- which may be untrue and is also clearly not proven- ie it is poor science. Secondly, you can not be sure the numbers in the area with masks might have been even worse w/o them. We do not know for sure the effectiveness of masks in the real world but the best data we have does back it- as I have said many times the data isn’t great but it is supportive of masks use. We must use the best data we have in an imperfect world. Masks are cheap and are certainly preferable to many other steps like lockdowns. With an end in sight via vaccination easy mitigation steps make sense since there is a clear end point. It will take time to clearly sort out what was the best strategy for the pandemic but we can’t possible know except in hindsight and we aren’t nearly thru this current wave.
Please find the cite in the Nature article with a real-world population study other than the usual articles about now much from a sneeze or cough is or isn’t blocked by this or that fabric.
”Gross/aggregate data” is another way of saying the real world.
The more controlled the group, the higher the quality of the mask, the better informed the judgment of the wearer, the less diverse and less physical the activities of the subjects, the fewer social contacts and the more control over the physical environment, the more likely there will be significant measurable reductions in spread. That strongly argues in favor of masks as a key element in a focused protective program in an LTC. It also suggests that population-wide mask mandates are not likely to accomplish much even with large-scale compliance. Jurisdictions with reported compliance of over 90% should see a result of some kind. They don’t.
The argument that we can assume it would have been worse without masks is akin to the joke about the guy with the amulet that keeps elephants way and the proof is that you don’t see any elephants, do you? Why am I wrong to expect to see some deviation in the highly consistent slope of the curve of COVID cases or deaths from an intervention alleged to be meaningful?
My main objection to mask mandates (other than an empirically validated opinion that they accomplish little) is that (a) they are now mostly about signaling a willing compliance with the broader, disastrous Doing Something About It government overreach; (b ) foster the unnaturalness of the fear-maximized life conditions with a distorted daily visual with others in masks; and (c) create another precedent for granting authority to “experts” who don’t have professionalism to deal with data that does not comport with their working hypotheses.
Lastly, if serious masking were instead reserved to be a part of the regimen of homes and facilities where the most vulnerable live it would affect behaviors more rationally across the board. A rational approach to dealing with a disease that poses minimal risk to 99%+ but requires thoughtful precautions for the few was always the best policy basis.
Instead, bright guys like us with the best of intentions are debating the misuse of a proven, useful technology within the broad context of bad policy-making. Cheers.
Old Bathos- as an example (in the Nature article):
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.22.20109231v5
the conclusion of the article:
In countries with cultural norms or government policies supporting public mask-wearing, per-capita coronavirus mortality increased on average by just 15.8% each week, as compared with 62.1% each week in remaining countries. Conclusions. Societal norms and government policies supporting the wearing of masks by the public……are independently associated with lower per-capita mortality from COVID-19.
there are many other articles out there with similar conclusions
Several problems. First, the cutoff is August. Mask use is now vastly higher in western countries but so is the number of cases. Would love to see if that early correlation survives the new data.
Second, the vast majority of countries selected as effective-mask usage are Asian. It has been argued that greater proximity to China means greater long-term exposure to various coronavirus varieties across generations producing more natural resistance. A meaningful correlation would compare ethnically and geographically similar countries with different policies.
Japan continues to do much better than the west in terms of COVID cases and fatality rate even though cases there are higher now than in earlier outbreak. Their deaths/million are 50 X less than ours. I suspect more than masks are at work. A former student of mine now living in Japan and I have speculated ad nauseam about larger health differences between Japan and the US for some time and all I know is that simpler summaries of causes are invariably wrong.
Japanese scientists are sanguine about the overall efficacy of generalized mask use: https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-17-06484/article_deploy/ijerph-17-06484.pdf
Your second& third points are that the aggregate data on mask use may not be a good comparison b/c the locales may differ in ways other than mask use- exactly my earlier point! And it also applies to all the graphs you are drawing up attempting to show masks do not work.
Old Bathos- the Japanese article you cited did not doubt that masks work, only that the efficacy was lowered by poor use. There is no doubt that poor use of masks isn’t as effective as good use of masks-but that is still better than no use of masks.
No. I offered jurisdictions of great similarity, same region, highly similar demographics but identical COVID outcomes despite differently timed but equally ineffective mask mandates. There was no noticeable downtick at any stage. Comparing Mongolia (in August) to Sweden is not persuasive.
Maybe. But I don’t see it. I doubt it is a linear relationship between overall effectiveness of mask use versus rate of spread. If we reasonably assume 100% compliance with high end masks used as would a physician would effectively kill the spread, 70% effective usage would not necessarily yield 70% reduction. More likely, not much difference. It looks like it is more like a binary outcome rather than gradations. It seems from the data, that mask policies require a very high effectiveness (maybe above reported Japanese practices) to have a measurable impact on those dreaded “aggregate” numbers.
I have written legislative language ( I was the author of several arcane sentences in the Clean Air Act which were short-lived, extinguishing by subsequent amendments) and lobbied regulators. Whether a program as designed can reasonably expect compliance is fundamental. “It should have worked if everybody behaved ideally” is for zealots and fanatics. Real policies can’t assume that, especially if they are costly.
Old Bathos-yes. the areas you compare are MORE similar but still you have to assume away possible differences for which you cannot account-poor scientific methodology. Such results aren’t persuasive enough to overcome all the other data showing masks work-especially when faced with a pandemic -if we didn’t have that other data your analysis would be of more weight. Data such as you are presenting are more useful in guiding the design of studies rather than for making sound conclusions.
I bet people like Blaylock get under your skin, because on some level you know, perhaps subconsciously, that they have expended the effort to find out the truth about situations such as physicians being taught that vitamin supplements are not worthwhile, that physicians have not been taught how vaccines contain dangerous heavy metals and other toxins.
So perhaps you have a guilty conscience. At this point, you probably could never go where Blaylock has gone as you have followed policies that have endangered the live s of patients in ways they tried to explain to you, but then you dismissed them, or in ways you never even knew about.
Here is one doctor who has been posting about the dangers of using masks improperly which is how most people are wearing them:
No the people who oppose the masks would say, “Why doesn’t the USA do as India is doing and release for general over the counter use, a $4 kit containing HCQ + zinc, plus ivermectin plus Vitamin D.”
Many of us know the whole reason the real remedies are not being used is on account of one and only one entity: Big Pharma and its cohorts.
Meehan is an ophthalmologist he hasn’t diagnosed nor treated a case of pneumonia in years or more likely decades…he doesn’t diagnose facial rashes etc. That is the problem with the so called frontline doctors-they aren’t frontline doctors in the COVID battle. I don’t ask my plumber to fix my laptop nor my urologist to treat my chest pain-altho each maybe an expert in their field they have the good sense to try to stay near it.
His data on pneumonia is almost as accurate as your claims about the AMA and its position on HCQ.
Blaylock is a retired neurosurgeon (apparently since 2006) trying to make a go of it in nutrition-not exactly the kind of MD with much familiarity with critical care medicine.
BTW- note that Dr Meehan provides no evidence-he cites NO data-he is attempting to make a claim based on his authority(he is a doctor)-in a field in which he has no expertise.
****see post #54 for more information on Dr Meehan’s status as an expert.
CarolJoy- as far as your attempts at psychoanalysis-don’t quit your day job. I sleep much better attempting to stop medical charlatans (such as Meehan, Blaylock, Gold, the Bakersfield “ER docs”, etc)-they are a true stain on the profession. They are up there with Dr Oz.
Don’t take my opinion on Dr Meehan- here is a court ruling on his attempts to be an expert witness in a case involving masks:
”The state had sought to disqualify Meehan in part based on his past statements……. The state also objected to his marketing and profit from vitamin sales as an alternative to face masks.
Moukawsher said it was not Meehan’s beliefs that disqualified him, it was his professional background. The judge said the group could have sought the testimony of any of the 12,000 members of the Infectious Diseases Society of America but instead chose a doctor whose specialty was in eye diseases and vision problems.
“The illusion that most expert testimony comes from dispassionate sages faded from the courthouse a long time ago. The trouble here is not Dr. Meehan’s passion. It is his qualifications,” the judge wrote.”
the article starts “ a Superior Court judge ruled Tuesday they were unqualified to serve as expert witnesses.” They referring to Meehan and another physician.
https://www.ctpost.com/news/coronavirus/article/Judge-rejects-doctors-testimony-in-student-15607158.php
more on his practice- not pretty- an associate’s prior prescription practices were problematic :
http://oklahoman.com/special/article/3949859/addicted-oklahoma-probation-continues-for-prolific-prescriber-linked-to-deaths
While I am obviously viewing this from afar- and therefore have no definitive knowledge-that pattern has many of the markings of a pill mill operation-impossible patient volume-sky high # of prescriptions- little to no documentation- read this to see the parallels:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-06/american-pain-the-largest-u-dot-s-dot-pill-mills-rise-and-fall
#MINNESOTASTASI lol
If I were Mr Hansen I’d lose that source-its bunk.
He’s fighting back with other data. I have no opinion on it.
Other than using the National Guard, it fits their MO here.
Other data? Or other wild, unsubstantiated rumors?
OK I have to be fair. I wish it was true. lol