Science Confirms: Lockdowns Don’t Stop The Spread

[Kamaji]

Science Confirms:  Lockdowns Don’t Stop The Spread

Nearly every country in the world enacted authoritarian measures that proved to be useless. The data show lives were not saved.

BY: DAVID WILLHITE
SEPTEMBER 07, 2022

A spike in pneumonia cases in December of 2019 in Wuhan, China was quickly found to be caused by a new coronavirus. Coronaviruses usually cause the common cold, but this one could be lethal. It would eventually come to be called Covid, as I will call both the virus and the disease.

Covid was very contagious. Someone with the flu infects, on average, about 1.1 other people. The first estimate for Covid was 2.5. Think of how many times you’ve had the flu, and you can see the problem. What lessened the blow was that Covid is not very lethal. In 2019, about 0.85 percent of the U.S. population died, in 2020 and 2021 it was just above 1 percent, meaning about 0.15 percent probably died of Covid.

The deaths mostly occurred in the older subset of the population. If you were over the age of 80 and got infected, you had a one in six chance of dying. Odds improved dramatically the younger the person. 75 percent of the deaths were people over 65, less than 1 percent under 30.

Experts knew that with these characteristics, the virus was going to spread very rapidly. Most people would probably be infected at some point. It took only one month from its discovery in China to identify the first case in the United States, from a sample collected on January 18, 2020.

The Great Lockdown Experiment
Governments worldwide responded to the Covid pandemic with different levels of authoritarian measures. They used various mixes of forced business closures and personal mandates to try to control the spread. Cases may spike once again in the fall, so we should examine the data to see how those measures fared.

Sweden did basically nothing in terms of governmental mandates. On the other end of the spectrum, Australia had some of the most draconian measures outside of China. Since we can’t rely on the numbers from China, let’s use Australia as the king of lockdowns. We’ll examine the data from Johns Hopkins as compiled here. We’ll compare Sweden to the United States and the European Union as a whole (who arguably had medium-level lockdowns), and Australia.



Oops, Sweden wins. It was a bit surprising to me that the lockdown measures would do much of anything, and they didn’t for the United States or the EU, but apparently Australia was authoritarian enough to at least delay the prediction that most people would get the virus. But wait, aren’t we interested in deaths, not infections?

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/07/science-confirms-lockdowns-dont-stop-the-spread/

[Kamaji]

Nearly every country in the world enacted authoritarian measures which proved to be useless. Sweden resisted the trend, and the data just flat does not lie – they had fewer infections and deaths than the U.S. or EU.

There never was and there never will be a justification for authoritarianism, not from an infectious disease. If a virus comes along that is more deadly than Covid, there will be no need to order lockdowns. At some point of lethality, people would not go to work or send their kids to school, no police actions necessary. I don’t know exactly what that tipping point may be, 1 percent? 5 percent? It is not my business nor the government’s to dictate.