In two previous posts, I set the context:
1) In February, 2020, Anthony Fauci realized that COVID was created in a Chinese lab with American funds.
2) America could have spent 1/1000 of the cost of lockdowns on traditional pandemic control protocols - inconveniencing only a tiny percentage of the population - to keep COVID infections extremely low for several months as was done by Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. Instead Fauci's America allowed COVID to blow out to more than 5,000 cases by the middle of March - belatedly realizing what had happened as hospitals began filling up rapidly.
These two precursors set the stage for an epic panic attack.
On March 16th, 2020, Imperial College's deeply flawed projection of future pandemic deaths burst on the world like a bombshell. Neil Ferguson predicted there would soon be 510,000 COVID deaths in Britain and 2.2 million deaths in the US if nothing was done.
The United Kingdom went into lockdown the next day. Voluntary, then involuntary lock-downs spread across the US during the following week. The first US schools were closed on March 17th.
The contagion of panic spread rapidly and relentlessly. No-one at the CDC or the National Institutes of Health bothered to challenge the assumptions behind Ferguson's projections.
Which is a damn shame, because Ferguson's study was a classic example of what data scientists call GI-GO: Garbage In - Garbage Out.
Ferguson assumed a death rate for COVID of 3.5%, which would translate to ten million dead if everyone in the US caught COVID - hence the panic.
But this estimate was doubly flawed. Epidemiologists are concerned with two numbers. The case fatality rate is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. The infection fatality rate is the number of deaths divided by the total number of actual cases, a number that can only be calculated after widespread community testing. It is only the latter which will give an accurate measure of true fatality rates. Ferguson made the bonehead mistake of conflating the case fatality rate with the infection fatality rate.
The other bonehead mistake Ferguson made was extrapolating from a very skewed sample. The majority of the people in hospital diagnosed with COVID were over the age of 70. (Going into hospital was a good way to get tested when tests were in short supply.) The death rate that Ferguson used was based on a population sample heavily skewed towards the old and frail.
The sensible thing to have done at that point would have been to quickly do some widespread community testing on a representative sample of the American population - testing for both the virus, and for antibodies to the virus - to get an accurate number for the overall infection rate, and solid estimates of the risk of death in the various age cohorts. That would quickly have exposed how massively in error Ferguson's assumption of an overall 3.5% death rate was.
We know now that the death rate from COVID in the 90 percent of the population under age 70 was 0.35%: ten times lower than Ferguson's presumed death rate. Furthermore, the risk was incredibly stratified by age. The death rate in children was three in a million. There was no reason to close schools. If we'd done just a little more science we'd have found that out.
Instead, public health officials in both Canada and the US went into a blind panic. Governments quickly pulled the lever on four massive changes:
1) Lockdowns and Social Distancing:
Most countries had Pandemic Preparedness Plans that were made years before COVID struck. None of those plans involved community-wide lock-downs.
The idea of shutting down whole countries for weeks or months at a time was not something that was actively considered prior to COVID. Not during massive outbreaks of smallpox, typhus, or cholera. Not even during the Black Death in the Middle Ages.
There was no science to know how effective lockdowns might be, because they'd never been used before.
There was only one model for lockdowns: China. After months of bad-mouthing China as 'totalitarian' and 'overreacting', Canada and the US overnight started aping the Chinese model.
Initially, we were told it was just 'two weeks to flatten the curve', but Deborah Birx has told us in her recent book that first two weeks was always intended as the foot-in-the-door for longer lockdowns.
2) Terrify the Population:
China could impose lockdowns with brute force. In North America, we were somewhat limited in that regard. The solution was to use the media to scare the bejeezus out of everyone.
Then people would self-police. They'd police their neighbours too. If you got them scared enough they'd demand that lockdowns be stricter, for longer.
I think the authorities were so successful at terrifying the general population that it became the tail that wagged the dog. People would self-isolate obsessively even in jurisdictions where COVID numbers were low. Teacher's unions would prevent schools from re-opening because teachers were terrified they catch COVID from a student, even after it was clear that children weren't very effective vectors for spreading COVID. Hell, people would drive around alone in their cars, wearing masks. Millions still have COVID PTSD to this very day.
3) Control Information Flow:
Governments convinced the mainstream media that COVID was the moral equivalent of war. Information needed to be carefully controlled to support the war on COVID.
Canada was more successful in this regard than the United States. It the US, the Liberal media was fully and enthusiastically on board. Conservative media was somewhat more skeptical, but was restrained in attacking lockdowns, school closures, and masking.
I suspect this control of information extended the duration of lockdowns. Those who spoke against lockdowns were silenced. Data that militated against lockdowns was suppressed. The social and economic costs of lockdowns was under-reported.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya did community COVID antibody testing in Santa Clara County in April of 2020. His research indicated that somewhere between 2.8% and 4% of the population already had COVID antibodies. There were only about 1,000 confirmed cases of COVID in Santa Clara County at the time. Bhattacharya's research indicated that the actual number of COVID cases in Santa Clara County was between 50 and 85 times higher than that. That meant the actual death rate due to COVID in Santa Clara County was a tiny fraction of the official death rate. That information should have instantly called into question the need for draconian lockdowns. Instead, Dr. Bhattacharya was demonized and information about his study was suppressed.
In October of 2020, The Great Barrington Declaration made very careful and cogent arguments against further lockdowns. It should have stimulated a long-overdue public debate. Instead its (extremely well-qualified) authors were dismissed as 'fringe epidemiologists.'
4) Buy Us Off:
Governments were aware that lockdowns had devastating economic consequences. They knew they would soon face massive public opposition.
Their solution: buy us off. Give people money to stay home and do nothing. Even better, give them more money than if they were working.
Again, it was a very effective technique for undercutting public opposition to lockdowns.
The sad part is that all that money - TRILLIONS of DOLLARS - was borrowed.
Trust me, borrowing vast amounts of money to pay for lockdowns will come back to haunt us. (It's already haunting us in the form of inflation and higher interest rates - but that's just the beginning.)
I would argue that these four measures - lockdowns, terrifying the population, information control, and buying us off - all have had negative long-term impacts.
One has to ask: what would have happened, if, instead of panicking into lockdowns, we had relied on the more limited and traditional pandemic control strategies suggested in the Great Barrington Declaration?
Sweden is our closest real-world example of this general approach. Sweden never closed its schools. Most of Swedish society - and the Swedish economy - stayed open.
Here's a comparison of cumulative COVID deaths in the US and Sweden:
Add in all the deaths of despair that lockdowns caused in North America, and lockdowns look even more counterproductive.