Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 2: Update and Examination of Lockdowns as a Strategy

by Alex Berenson

I’ve had a strange few weeks. Maybe you have too. On Wednesday, June 3, I finished editing Part 1 of “Unreported Truths,” about coronavirus death counts. I decided to publish the booklet through Amazon’s self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. I’d written twice for an Amazon program called “Kindle Singles,” where the company publishes pieces from professional writers. So, although I knew Unreported Truths might anger some people in the media, I figured Amazon would be fine with it. After all, Amazon sells “Mein Kampf” and “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” and “Bestiality and Zoophilia: Sexual Relations with Animals.” As it should. Amazon should not judge the books on its digital shelves, except in very rare cases where they offer specific advice on criminal behavior. Amazon seems to agree it should err on the side of making books available. In a statement in April, a company spokesman wrote that “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important, [including] books that some may find objectionable.”

He’d retweeted me before, and we had been in touch over text sporadically since early May. I told Musk what had happened. Just before 2 p.m., he spoke up, as only he can – posting below my original tweet, “This is insane.” He followed up with a second tweet, “Time to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong.” Musk’s comments put a spotlight on Amazon’s censorship. The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and even the Washington Post – which Bezos owns – wrote articles. And someone at Amazon got the message. At 2:59 p.m., 65 minutes after Musk’s tweet, I received an email from “Kindle Direct Publishing – Executive Customer Relations” telling me Amazon would publish Part 1. Maybe Amazon would have backed down anyway. I don’t know. But Musk’s throwdown surely sped the process. (Amazon told reporters it had banned “Unreported Truths” in error, but it never said so to me. And it continues to ban COVID-19 books. As far as I can tell, the only error it made was censoring someone with a big enough megaphone to fight back.)

The epidemic was fading across most of the world. European countries had reopened without problems. In the United States, southern states had begun to reopen more than a month earlier – Georgia on April 24, Texas not long after – without much trouble. Even in the Northeast, the hardest-hit region, states were edging towards partial reopenings. Hospitals were closing COVID-specific units and instead getting back into the business of elective surgeries and other ordinary health care. Newspapers and cable networks were reduced to hyping case counts in countries like Peru, or writing speculative articles about potential post-infection syndromes. The most troubling example came in May, as reporters focused on a disease in children that looked very much like Kawasaki disease, which can lead to serious heart problems in kids. The New York Times led the way, writing more than a dozen articles in May. Its headlines quickly moved from claiming the illness might be “related to” coronavirus to calling it a “baffling virus syndrome.”

For months, I had referred to articles hyping the dangers of Covid as “panic porn” (and people writing them as members of “Team Apocalypse”). The Kawasaki articles were worse, frightening parents based on the thinnest possible science. I called them “kiddie panic porn,” an ugly name for an ugly media game. Yet the stories also hinted at the media’s desperation to find bad news as the epidemic waned. Thus when the Floyd protests exploded I imagined the media would move away from Covid doomsaying. I was wrong.

Meanwhile, testing has skyrocketed. Some employers are requiring tests before employees can return to work. Hospitals are testing everyone who comes in for elective surgeries. The result has been a huge surge in positive tests, which the media insists on calling “cases.” But using the word “case” implies someone has a clinically significant illness – that they are sick enough to need hospitalization or at least medical attention. In fact, many people infected with the coronavirus do not even know they have it, especially if they are under 50 and in decent health. They most often have either no symptoms at all or a low fever or cough, symptoms indistinguishable from a bad cold or mild flu.

Two big media-fed misrepresentations – I won’t call them lies – work in concert to drive our policies. First, the media has hidden the reality that anyone who is not extremely elderly or sick has a miniscule risk of dying from the coronavirus. In Part 1, I offered the real numbers and risks, based on the best government data. And since Part 1 was published, even more studies have emerged. A new Swedish government report puts the risk of death from Sars-Cov-2 at 1 in 10,000 for everyone under 50 – including those who have chronic conditions. 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.

Understanding what lockdowns actually are is crucial. Media outlets often use the terms lockdown, quarantine, and social distancing interchangeably. But to public health experts they are very different. Scientists use the term “quarantine” to describe confining people exposed to someone else with an infectious disease. Those quarantined people aren’t even necessarily sick, but they might be. The person who actually has the disease is properly said to be not quarantined but “isolated.” A lockdown is a broader response, perhaps more accurately described as a “mass quarantine,” covering a community, state, or even country. It can include canceling public gatherings like sporting events and closing schools or workplaces. In a worst-case scenario, it can even extend to ordering everyone to stay at home. It may be enforced by a national border closure or “cordon sanitaire,” a police or military-enforced boundary around a region to prevent anyone from entering or exiting.

So in March, as the Sars-Cov-2 epidemic jumped to Europe and the United States, epidemiologists and public health experts told governments to lock down – fast and hard. Not just mass gatherings, but schools, offices, malls, even parks and beaches. To do anything less would be to sentence millions of people to death, the experts said. Most infamously, the Imperial College London report of March 16 – written by researchers who were working with the World Health Organization – predicted more than 2 million American coronavirus deaths without immediate action. It called for a policy of what Professor Neil Ferguson, the report’s lead author, termed “suppression”: [S]uppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures…

Yet he was neither physician nor virologist. His PhD was in theoretical physics, arguments about the structure of the universe that are something close to pure math.

At their core, these models are simply software programs designed to simulate reality, based on the assumptions that the person who creates them inputs into them. They are as realistic as a game of SimCity, though less colorful.

Efforts in past epidemics to slow – much less stop – the spread of the flu had largely failed, the authors wrote. They attacked quarantines, travel bans, and school closings of more than two weeks as likely counterproductive. They did not even mention full lockdowns, presumably because they viewed those as so unlikely. Near the end of the paper, they made a heartfelt plea: 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.

The report repeatedly discussed the limitations of the research on how epidemics spread. “A major limitation of the models is the uncertainty in many of the assumptions,” the report’s authors wrote. “There is little evidence to support many of the key parameters.” At best, “models should be viewed as aids to decision-making, rather than substitutes for decision-making,” the report warned. Unfortunately, “there is a real risk that in the midst of a crisis, there will be pressure for government to employ public health interventions, even in the absence of proven benefits.”

Journalists and historians will be sorting through the March panic for years. Only when governments fully declassify meeting notes and emails will we gain a more complete picture of what happened. 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.

No one knew just how quickly infections had increased between March 10th and 20th, but the potential numbers were terrifying. Hospitalizations had risen 3.6-fold in five days. If they increased again at that rate over the next 10, the city would have almost 9,000 patients a day by March 30 before the lockdowns finally kicked in. Thus Cuomo projected that coronavirus patients would soon overrun every medical center in New York. On Tuesday, March 24, he projected New York would need 140,000 hospital beds and 40,000 ventilators for them within two to three weeks – an unfathomable catastrophe.

The IHME works closely with the Gates Foundation, which gave it $279 million in a 10-year-grant in 2017. Its mission statement says it “provides rigorous measurement and analysis of the world’s most prevalent and costly health problems.” Its model purported to forecast deaths, hospitalizations, and ventilator needs for every state and many countries. IHME’s forecasts predicted a terrifying future, with a sharp and unstoppable rise in cases. Within three weeks, the United States would need nearly 250,000 hospital beds for coronavirus patients, as well as more than 30,000 intensive care beds – far more than were available in many states.

In the 10 days after the institute released the model, it repeatedly revised upwards its forecasts for hospitalizations and ventilator use. For example, on April 5, the revised IHME model projected that New York would need 69,000 hospital beds and almost 10,000 ventilators that day. 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. On April 5, New York actually had about 16,500 people in hospitals – fewer than one-quarter the number the model claimed were hospitalized that day.

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 outbreaks burn out do deaths decrease.

Several different and plausible explanations for the Sunbelt spike have been offered – including the heavy use of air conditioning, young people deciding not to protect themselves because they now know they are at low risk, and possibly even some importation of cases from Mexico. That confused reality has not stopped media outlets from insisting that the end of lockdowns must have been responsible for the rise in infections – even though the rise began between five and eight weeks after the lockdowns ended. Even more importantly, the media has largely failed to report that the Sunbelt spike in hospitalizations is over. Arizona, Florida, and Texas have all seen big drops in hospitalizations in late July. The drop is most stunning in Arizona, where cases peaked first. Between July 13 and August 3, hospitalizations fell to just over 2,000 – a drop of almost 50 percent. In Texas, hospitalized Covid patients fell from their July 22 peak to under 9,000 by August 3, a drop of almost 20 percent. In all three states, hospitals were stressed, but none faced overrun and the overall quality of care either Covid or other patients received appeared unaffected.

If New Zealand offers the strongest case for lockdowns, Japan offers the opposite. Japan should have been ground zero for the epidemic. It has one of the world’s oldest populations, one of its largest cities, heavy reliance on mass transit, and close air links to China. Its poor performance quarantining the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship in February suggested its authorities lacked basic infection control awareness.