Do Lock Downs Work to Stop Coronavirus? Studies, Facts and Sources

Do Lock Downs Work to Stop Coronavirus? Studies, Facts and Sources

The consensus against lockdowns is growing day by day, although the major new networks are trying to ignore it, as it does not fit their agenda. Cases are way up, deaths are down... but these facts do not seem to matter to some mayors and governors. There persist in imposing lockdowns.. which makes everything worse.

Medical experts who are opposed to lockdowns

A petition has been signed by 15,000 scientists urging an end to pandemic lockdowns. The letter, named the Great Barrington Declaration after the town in Massachusetts where it was written, was authored by University of Oxford epidemiology professor Dr Sunetra Gupta, Harvard University's professor of medicine Dr Martin Kulldorff and Stanford's Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist, all saying lockdowns do more harm than good and called for a different approach to dealing with the coronavirus other than the lockdown model. See this in the Washington Times, October 8, 2020 and also reported by the BBC and the NY Post:

The Great Barrington Declaration, which was released Tuesday and continues to gather signatures, was spearheaded by doctors from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford University.
"As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection," said the declaration.

A news story in mid-October 2020 regarding a WHO representative, Dr David Nabarro, the WHO's Special Envoy on Covid-19 pointing out that lockdowns should be used more carefully, and not as a primary means of controlling Coronavirus, has been controversial. Dr. Nabarro emphasized the consequences of lockdowns for increasing poverty. Nabarro said,

"We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we'd rather not do it... Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer. Look what's happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. Look what's happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition."

The Forbes article linked to above, downplay the claims that lockdowns don't work. But , many other studies and sources say lock-downs do not work.

In October 2020, a Stanford Professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Professor of Medicine said Lockdowns ares More Harmful Than COVID. Yet another Stanford professor, Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the world's most renowned epidemiologists, said in December that the coronavirus might be less dangerous than assumed and that News media were overhyping the disease. He said the greater risk lay not in COVID-19 but in overzealous lockdowns to prevent its spread.

"We' re falling into a trap of sensationalism,. We have gone into a complete panic state", the Stanford University medical professor said.

And a report about quarantine measures in the United Kingdom in the British Medical Journal has suggested that as a result of the new coronavirus may have already killed more UK seniors than the coronavirus has during the peak of the virus.

The best quote on the subject is from American Enterprise Institute: April 21, 2020,

The burden of proof is to show that they do work! If you're going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work. And there, lockdown advocates fail miserably, because they simply don't have evidence.

Lockdowns DON'T work, study claims:
Researchers say stay-at-home orders made no difference to coronavirus deaths around the world - but prior health levels DID.

Lockdowns DO cause great economic harm and increase poverty

First, substantiating what Dr. Nabarro said look at these sources: States with the tightest lockdowns have the worst economic recoveries.

May 19, 2020: More than 600 doctors signed onto a letter sent to President Trump urging him to end the lockdowns:

The letter outlines a variety of consequences that the doctors have observed resulting from the coronavirus shutdowns, including patients missing routine checkups that could detect things like heart problems or cancer, increases in substance and alcohol abuse, and increases in financial instability that could lead to "poverty and financial uncertainty," which "is closely linked to poor health."

Lockdowns cause physical and emotional harm

Fullfact.org says:

Even so, some people are confident that lockdowns in general are a bad idea. They “cause more harm than good” in the opinion of Nigel Farage and Richard Tice. They would prefer a strategy of “focused protection” of high-risk individuals, as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration - although in the opinion of the government’s scientific advisors, and many experts in the field, this strategy would not work.

“[Lockdowns] don’t solve anything, they don’t break any circuits, they don’t break any fires,” the journalist and broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer said on Question Time on 10 December. “All they do is delay the problem.” Yet delaying the problem until a cure or a vaccine is ready for widespread use might be a good idea.

 

Whatever happened to "Flattening the curve"?

The point of lockdowns, we were repeatedly told, was to flatten the curve to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed at one time.

Dr. Mark McDonald, a California psychiatrist, said in a news story in May 2020;

"The very initial argument ... which sounded reasonable three months ago, is that in order to limit the overwhelmed patient flux into hospitals that would prevent adequate care, we needed to spread out the infections and thus the deaths in specific locales that could become hotspots, particularly New York City... It was a valid argument at the beginning based on the models that were given," McDonald said. "What we've seen now over the last three months is that no city -- none, zero -- outside of New York has even been significantly stressed."
McDonald is referring to the misconception that business closures and stay-at-home orders aimed at "flattening the curve" are meant to reduce the total number of people who will fall ill because of the coronavirus. Rather, these curve-flattening measures are meant largely to reduce the number of people who are sick at any given time, thus avoiding a surge in cases that overwhelms the health care system and causes otherwise preventable deaths because not all patients are able to access lifesaving critical care.

Senator Rand Paul (who IS a medical doctor) talking about Lockdowns and Face Masks:

On Saturday, December 19, 2020, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Breitbart News:

It' d be one thing if we were told you have to give up your liberty, you have to give up your freedom, we' re going to save your life. But what if you have to give up all your freedoms and they' re wrong on the science?

Every one of the mandates - and you look in country after country, state after state - you look at when the mask mandates went in - the incidents went up exponentially after the mandates. Restaurants, nobody can eat in a restaurant, there' s no science behind any of that.

Middle seat missing on the airplane, you really think you' re like 12 inches from the other guy instead of six inches, it really makes a difference? None of it really makes any sense, and there' s no epidemiological evidence. You know, it' s like, 'Wash your hands, stand six feet apart.'

There' s no evidence that that slowed down the [spread]. � The trajectory of the virus hasn' t been altered at all by any of these things. I think the vaccine will, and this is why I really despise people like the CNN Doctor [Sanjay] Gupta, who I think is committing television malpractice by saying, 'Oh, your mask is a much better thing than the vaccine.' Well, no, it isn' t. The masks aren' t working at all. The thing' s going through the roof and people are dying.

Studies that say lockdowns do not work:

The evidence that lockdowns not only cause great economic harm, but also simply are not effective at stopping the spread of coronavirus has been mounting for months.

• The Print - CDC new Covid guidelines: Was lockdown necessary or did epidemiologists get it wrong?
  The US' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released a 60-page document revising its Covid-19 guidelines and offering suggestions on how the US can reopen.
  22 May, 2020
• Lockdowns didn't work, according to a new study - Jul 24, 2020 - News report on YouTube
• Greg Gibson - NINE STUDIES AGREE LOCKDOWNS DON'T WORK
• 66% of New York state coronavirus hospitalizations are people staying at HOME
  by Jennifer Smith Daily Mail.
• The Wall Street Journal - NINE STUDIES AGREE LOCKDOWNS DON'T WORK Study: 80% of Covid-19 Outbreaks From Home, Only 1 Outside "�Home outbreaks were the dominant ...
  The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns - WSJ
• Full Lockdown Policies in Western Europe Countries Have No Evident Impacts in the COVID-19 Epidemic,
  By Thomas Meunier, Phd.
• Indoor Transmission of SARS-CoV-2
  by Prof. Hua Qian, PhD.
• Closed Environments Facilitate Secondary Transmission of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
  by Prof. Hiroshi Nishiura, M.D., PhD., et al. https://www.medrxiv.org
• There Is No Evidence Lockdowns Saved Lives. It Is Indisputable They Caused Great Harm
  by William M. Briggs, PhD.
• There Is No Empirical Evidence for These Lockdowns
  by Prof. Wilfred Reilly, PhD.
• American Enterprise Institute: April 21, 2020, Lockdowns don't work. Lyman Stone, Adjunct Fellow
  My findings are striking: for every eight days (including weekends) since school cancellations began, a county tends to have one less death per 100,000 people. For every nine days a ban on gatherings over 500 people has been in place, there's one less death per 100,000 people. These policies work. But the correlation flips for bans on gatherings of fifty people or for stay-at-home orders. For every two weeks a stay-at-home order is in place, the death rate rises by one person per 100,000. For bans of gatherings of fifty people, it's every eleven days. Because I controlled for how long it's been since the first county death, this is probably not being driven by harder-hit places choosing to adopt tougher policies. But just to check, I also added a control for the deaths per 100,000 people in each county on March 31. This does reduce the size and significance of effects for each policy, but not the relationship between them. Nor are my findings changed by excluding the New York City metro area, or adding or removing a handful of other variables related to climate, industry or occupation mix, rurality, etc. All the underlying data can be downloaded publicly.
•  Ivor Cummins - the real reason that daily deaths declined in the spring was that the UK was reaching “herd immunity”

News and opinion about Coronavirus lockdowns

1. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, OCT 13, 2020 5:21 AM - Do Lockdowns Work? Let's discuss the efficacy of lockdowns.
   "Initially, experts and modelers suggested the death toll would be catastrophic if areas didn't lock down. Too rapid an increase in cases could overwhelm hospital systems, and so the initial strategy was not to stop the virus but to slow the spread.This seems like common sense: Separate people so they don't infect one another. Researchers later followed up with additional articles "proving" that they were right using further projections, though they acknowledge the difficulty in distinguishing between variables that impacted virus spread."
2. The Wall Street Journal - The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns
   By Donald L. Luskin. Sept. 1, 2020. "New data suggest that social distancing and reopening haven't determined the spread. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn't contain the disease's spread and reopening it didn't unleash a second wave of infections."
3. The Conversation - Lockdown didn't work in South Africa: why it shouldn't happen again
   October 14, 2020 9.24am EDT, Updated October 15, 2020.
   "We recently reviewed the evidence for the effectiveness of the lockdown at slowing the spread of the pandemic. The mitigation strategies initially implemented may well have gone some way to "flattening-the-curve" - that is, reducing the rate at which the virus spreads through the population. But we found no decline in either daily new cases or deaths between around 27 March, which was the first day of level 5; and the latter part of July, when cases began to tail off during level 3.Lockdown level 5 in South Africa was one of the world's strictest. Citizens weren't allowed to leave their residence except for essential purposes such as grocery shopping and medical care. All non-essential businesses were shut down, and cigarette and alcohol sales were banned."
4. The Guardian UK - The pitched battle over lockdowns is missing the point: Covid-19 is a class issue, all about basic inequalities - and lockdown makes these worse
   John Harris, Sun 18 Oct 2020 09. "What has not been discussed nearly as much is the plain fact that the coronavirus crisis - even more so in its second phase - is all about basic inequalities, and the kind of questions of work, housing and poverty that deep crises always bring to the surface. In other words, Covid-19 is a class issue. That may sound simplistic, but what it actually denotes is an intricate set of considerations that the argument over lockdown is not acknowledging.
5. The New York Post - Medical experts: Lockdowns do more harm than good
   By Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya, October 6, 2020.
   "On Oct. 4, 2020, three preeminent experts - Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist at Stanford University - delivered the following declaration, calling for a different approach to dealing with the novel coronavirus than the lockdown model: As infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection."
6. CNN - Lockdown or a drip feed of Covid restrictions? One path is better for the economy
   By Zamira Rahim, Pierre Bairin and Ga�lle Fournier, CNN Business, Updated 6:38 AM ET, Thu October 15, 2020.
   "Governments across Europe are choosing between two vastly different strategies as a second wave of Covid-19 arrives in force. Most are imposing limited local restrictions and keeping their economies open. But in the UK and Ireland, scientific advisers have pushed for second national lockdowns, despite fears of an economic shock. The crisis, which hit Europe for the first time in early spring, is back - but this time around, many people feel that locking down society is too high a price to pay. "
7. MedRXiv - Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic.
   Thomas A. J. Meunier, May 01, 2020.
   Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.
   Competing Interest Statement: The authors have declared no competing interest.
   Funding Statement: No external funding was received.

We URGE that this lockdowns be stopped. Those who are at risk (or perceive that they are at risk) should lock themselves down!