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

by Alex Berenson

But reporters at traditional media outlets – including friends at The New York Times, where I had worked for a decade – mostly stayed quiet. Their

California has about 40 million people. Since the epidemic began almost five months ago, the state has had about 9,000 deaths from the virus, none in anyone under 18. That’s correct: Not one person under the age of 18 has died in the largest American state from Sars-Cov-2.

If R is 1, each infected person infects on average one other person before losing the ability to pass the virus along. If R is greater than 1, an epidemic is growing. If it is less than 1, the epidemic is dying out.

But even a lockdown that merely slows the growth of an epidemic – reducing R from 3 to 2, for example – can help, by reducing strain on hospitals.

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.

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.

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.

Following infection with Sars-Cov-2, the average time to develop symptoms like fever or cough is five days.

Most people then recover relatively fast. But some get sicker. Within five to eight days, they need hospitalization. For

The empty streets and shuttered stores were eerie, as I saw for myself on repeated trips. No, the failure or success of lockdowns can’t be blamed on lack of compliance.

On April 7, Chinese researchers published a paper that looked at 318 outbreaks with 1,245 Sars-Cov-2 infections. They found that 80 percent took place in homes or apartments. Another 34 percent occurred on public transportation

All other venues, including stores and restaurants, accounted

for less than 20 percent of infecti...

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.

The shape of the hospitalization curves in Arizona couldn’t fit Farr’s law better – a bell curve with a rounded peak and a sharp drop. Lockdown or not, a simple theory did a far better job of predicting the course of the epidemic there than powerful computer simulations.

Overall, the course of the epidemic in Sweden has essentially tracked that of countries like Italy and Spain – a big early spike, followed by a slow decline. The trend suggests lockdowns are irrelevant, and that protecting nursing homes makes far more difference.

Yet Japan has had an almost bizarrely easy time with Sars-Cov-2. It has reported about 250 cases per million people, even fewer than New Zealand, and 8 deaths per million – about 1 percent of Britain’s rate.