Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2: Update and Examination of Lockdowns as a Strategy
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And in a talk on July 14, Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, put the risk of deaths in children under 18 at 1 in 1 million.
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Despite the lack of evidence for them, they have become uniquely important symbolically as a way for the media and politicians to shame people who challenge the official narrative that Sars-Cov-2 is an extraordinarily dangerous disease.)
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That is especially true in the case of respiratory viruses, which have short transmission cycles. (In other words, they make people sick quickly, but those people are infectious for only a few days.)
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Lost in the panic was the fact that Italy has had several recent severe flu epidemics. In both the 2014-15 and 2016-17 flu seasons, so-called influenza-like-illnesses killed more than 40,000 Italians – the equivalent of nearly a quarter-million Americans.
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But the most likely explanation is the simplest. Faced with a risk of hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths, the public health experts who for decades had counseled patience and caution flinched. They found they could not live with acknowledging how little control they or any of us had over the spread of an easily transmissible respiratory virus. They had to do something – even if they had been warning for decades that what they were about to do would not work and might have terrible secondary consequences.
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Following infection with Sars-Cov-2, the average time to develop symptoms like fever or cough is five days.
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Most people then recover relatively fast. But some get sicker. Within five to eight days, they need hospitalization. For an unlucky few, intensive care follows a day or two after, then intubation and death. In all, in the tiny fraction of cases when the novel coronavirus kills, death comes at roughly 18 days after symptoms begin and 23 days after infection.
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What no one in the media or at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation seemed to care about – or even notice – was that the model had failed completely. It was failing not just to predict the future but accurately measure of what was happening in real time.
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The simulations designed by the world’s top epidemiologists failed in every way.
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But they misunderstood the fact that lockdowns failed utterly to protect the people most at risk.
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Unfortunately, coronavirus spreads most efficiently inside, especially in households living in poorly ventilated apartments or small houses, their windows closed against winter cold or summer heat.
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Similarly, in examining a week of cases from June 28 through July 4, the Health Ministry of Quebec reported fewer than 15 percent could be traced to workplaces, stores, or bars and restaurants. 35 percent were intra-familial. Another 25 percent were of health care workers, patients, or prison inmates, and a similar number could not be traced. Particularly
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striking about the Quebec figures is that they occurred after the province’s lockdown had ended.
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Worst of all, broad lockdowns do not appear to make much difference to the spread of the virus in nursing homes.
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But in both the United States and Europe, nursing home residents have accounted for 40 to 50 percent of all Covid deaths, well over 100,000 in all.
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Six months into the epidemic, the data are clear: the overall number of people infected with Sars-Cov-2 is less relevant to the number of people who die than which people are infected. Only when nursing home and hospital
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Lockdown or not, a simple theory did a far better job of predicting the course of the epidemic there than powerful computer simulations.
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The trend suggests lockdowns are irrelevant, and that protecting nursing homes makes far more difference.
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What matters is breaking spikes that can cause hospital overrun, while protecting the vulnerable. General lockdowns do neither. And because of the fear they provoke and the leadership attention they require to promote and implement, they are a distraction from focusing on those in need of protection at the worst possible time.
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Lockdowns have failed as badly as the experts warned us they would, for precisely the reasons those experts spent their careers predicting. But the hysterics have learned nothing from the last four months.
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Those words are as true now as they were in 2006. We have forgotten them once already this year. We can’t afford to make that mistake again.