Collateral Damage Canada
Covid lockdowns did more harm than good
What China did in early 2020 - throwing entire cities and provinces into lockdown - was unprecedented in human history.
Though Western countries initially condemned China’s harsh tactics, within a matter of weeks every Western nation save one adopted Chinese-style lockdowns as their primary strategy to rein in the COVID pandemic. This sudden about-face has never been adequately explained. One has to suspect a contagion of panic.
Only Sweden resisted the pressure to impose lockdowns. Sweden remains a reasonable proxy for how the pandemic could have been handled using the public health norms that existed prior to COVID. A lockdown-free control group, in other words.
In normal times, overall death rates are remarkably stable from one year to the next, rising or falling only a few percentage points, mostly depending on whether the winter flu season is severe or mild.
Statisticians refer to deaths above the normal or expected deaths in a given year as ‘excess deaths.’
The OECD has a website which tracks excess deaths in all the OECD countries: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676.
It’s easy to modify the OECD data to show particular countries and/or age cohorts. The OECD database also tracks COVID deaths. The site allows users to download the data into an Excel spreadsheet, so it can be tallied, or turned into bar graphs.
We can use this data to compare the public health outcome of Sweden’s traditional approach versus Canada’s heavy lockdown-based model in five areas:
1) COVID Deaths
Those who instituted Canada’s COVID lockdowns can claim some level of success:
Canada’s COVID deaths were about 40% lower than in Sweden over the three years of the pandemic. That said, a big chunk of the difference in COVID deaths is almost certainly due to the fact that Sweden has proportionately more seniors than Canada.
Which leads to the next question: what effect did lockdowns have on overall deahs rates? Did the COVID lockdowns cause collateral damage?
2) Deaths in Seniors
A second argument commonly used to justify society-wide lockdowns, was that lockdowns would better protect the old and vulnerable. Lockdowns would supposedly keep Granny from dying.
The OECD dataset also lets us measure how well seniors fared with and without lockdowns:
The rate of excess deaths among seniors in Canada was more than three times what it was in Sweden.
A total of 98,852 Canadian seniors more than normal died over the past three years. With only 48,768 total COVID deaths during those three years, we can be sure that less than half of the Canadian seniors who died in excess of normal over the past three years died of COVID. What killed the other 50,000+ seniors? Was it loneliness and despair?
If the goal of the lockdowns was to prevent seniors from dying, they failed spectacularly.
3) All Ages Excess Deaths
Next, let’s look at changes in overall mortality over the past 3 years:
Sweden’s excess deaths were only 3.3 percent above normal during the last three years. That’s remarkably low, the equivalent of what would be expected if Sweden, instead of experiencing COVID, had had one bad season of ordinary flu sometime during the past three years.
Canada suffered a rate of excess deaths between 2020 and 2022 more than four times that of lockdown-free Sweden.
If Canada had had the same rate of excess deaths as Sweden had over the past three years, more than 91,000 fewer Canadians would have died.
4) Collateral Damage
The collateral damage of lockdowns on the Canadian economy was massive. So was the damage to the mental health of Canadians. Was there also a mortality cost? Did lockdowns kill?
Only 48,768 of Canada’s 118,733 excess deaths over the past three years can be explained by COVID. What killed the rest? It’s as though Canada was hit by a second pandemic, a stealth pandemic that killed an additional 69,965 Canadians.
That’s larger than the total number of Canadian soldiers who died in all of World War II. What killed all those people? It is disturbing to think that lockdowns killed far more Canadians than COVID did, but how else can we explain what happened?
What other change in Canada can we point to that would have resulted in so large, sudden, and sustained surge in the number of Canadians dying of a cause other than COVID?
5) Deaths in the Younger Population
OECD data also lets us measure the number of excess deaths in the under 65 age group:
Sweden actually saw modestly fewer deaths than normal during the three years of the pandemic in its under 65 population. For non-senior Swedes, it’s as though the COVID pandemic never happened.
In Canada, on the other hand, Almost 20,000 Canadians under the age of 65 died in excess of normal.
How on Earth do we explain that carnage when Sweden saw no increase in deaths at all in the same age group? Is this another measure of the collateral damage caused by lockdowns?
A great many Canadians would like nothing better than to forget the COVID pandemic now that its over. But it is crucially important to understand what this data is telling us - not because of the past, but because of what might happen in the future.
There are probably millions of Canadians who still believe that the lockdowns, though difficult, were necessary, and saved lives. If a deadly new variant of COVID were to emerge tomorrow, we can guess that most of those people would grudgingly accept a new round of lockdowns. Some would even clamor for new lockdowns.
Canadians need to understand that the lockdowns were a public health disaster. The evidence is clear: tens of thousands more Canadians died than if Canada had kept its cool.
The more Canadians understand that, the less willing they will be to allow their Government to succumb to panic a second time.