Collateral Damage USA
COVID lockdowns did more harm than good.
Note: This post was first published as a guest post on Stephanie Brail’s Wholistic substack. That post, in turn, was an upgrade from an earlier post I did: Did America’s COVID Lockdowns Save Lives?. I replaced the data tables with bar charts, which makes the post more accessible for visual learners.
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
Americans have been repeatedly told, without evidence, that millions more Americans would have died of COVID if lockdowns had not been imposed. What does the OECD data say?
Sweden had no lockdowns, yet the death rate from COVID in America was 53% higher than in Sweden over the past three years.
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 Sweden was less than one-quarter of what it was in the US. If the goal of the lockdowns was to prevent seniors from dying, they failed spectacularly.
3) 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.
The US suffered a rate of excess deaths between 2020 and 2022 more than six times that of lockdown-free Sweden.
If America had had the same rate of excess deaths as Sweden had over the past three years, 1,489,000 fewer Americans would have died.
4) Collateral Damage
The collateral damage of lockdowns on the American economy was massive. So was the damage to the mental health of America. Was there also a mortality cost? Did lockdowns kill?
Only 1,094,782 of America’s 1,766,764 excess deaths over the past can be explained COVID. What killed the rest? It’s as though America was hit by a second pandemic, a stealth pandemic that killed an additional 671,982 Americans.
That’s the mortality equivalent of a September 11th tragedy every five days for the past three years. What killed all those people? It is disturbing to think that lockdowns created such an immense amount of collateral damage, but how else can we explain what happened?
What other change in the US can we point to that would have resulted in so large, sudden, and sustained surge in the number of Americans dying of a cause other than COVID?
5) Deaths in the Younger Population
OECD data also lets us measure deaths above normal 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 the US, on the other hand, the death rate in the under 65 population was almost 22 percent higher than normal. Almost half a million Americans under the age of 65 died in excess of normal.
That death toll is the equivalent of eight Vietnam wars over the past three years. 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 Americans 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 Americans 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.
Americans need to understand that the lockdowns were a public health disaster. The evidence is clear: hundreds of thousands more Americans died than if America had kept its cool.
The more Americans understand that, the less willing they will be to allow their Government to succumb to panic a second time.