Excess deaths of course are not only from COVID, but also includes numerous "collateral" deaths as well due to delayed or denied medical treatment, poverty, starvation, loneliness/isolation, suicide, substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, elder abuse, and things like that. Either way, a net increase in excess deaths regardless of cause means that lockdown has well and truly backfired on balance.
No honest cost-benefit analysis could dispute that. The very best lockdowns can do is merely delay infections a bit, which we ultimately end up having to pay for later. And once the virus is already fairly widespread, the supposedly inverse correlation between lockdowns and infections has been shown to be essentially spurious even in the short run too. That is, they tend to impose or tighten restrictions at or close to the peak of infections, and often after it has already begun to slow down and decline on its own, and likewise tend to lift or loosen them close to the nadir of such infections. It is basically like doing a sun dance at 5:30 am and then speciously taking credit for it when the sun comes up.
To put it another way, if lockdown were a drug, it would never have been approved, as it has proven to be not only no better than a placebo, but in fact the "cure" is clearly worse than the disease itself.
I mean, it's not like Team Reality hasn't been pointing all of this out repeatedly since, well, 15 months ago. Even the later-onset skeptics who initially (naively and regrettably) supported some flavor of lockdown in the thick fog of pandemic understood that it was supposed to be both a short-term, last resort, second chance kind of policy, not an indefinite own-goal or end in itself. Little did they know, Team Apocalypse and the powers that be had other plans though.
And once it became bleeding obvious that the horse was well out of the barn and that "Zero COVID" was thus a pipe dream at best, then the Plan B of herd immunity thus became inevitable. The only question left was how to get there with the minimum number of casualties overall. As the Great Barrington Declaration has repeatedly noted, lockdown is functionally the same thing as "let it rip" in practice, only a bit slower, a lot more painful, and with more collateral damage, while Focused Protection of the most vulnerable members of society is clearly the least-worst way to get there, particularly when also combined with early treatment and prophylaxis.
Lockdowns are also extremely classist as well, disproportionately shifting the burden of both disease AND collateral damage from the rich onto to the poor and working class, while making the rich even richer. They rob from the poor, give to the rich, and hollow out what is left of the middle class, with the elites literally making a killing off of the rest of us. How anyone on the left who identifies as anything even remotely close to progressive could possibly support that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Thus, they are actually REgressives.
It is long past time to go "cold turkey" and end all of these restrictions and the declared "state of emergency" that props it all up. More and more places are ending it. And yesterday is not soon enough. So what the hell are we waiting for?
UPDATE: The very same Youyang Gu whose COVID model has consistently been the most accurate if all during this pandemic, has notably also found (when comparing US states) that while there was no correlation between the Oxford Stringency Index and COVID death rates, he did find a rather strong correlation with higher unemployment rates. Once again, we find that these lockdowns and related restrictions are essentially all pain and no gain.
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