Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Combined Parts 1-3: Death Counts, Lockdowns, and Masks

by Alex Berenson

Yesterday’s news wraps tomorrow’s fish,

Nine days later, on March 25, the lead author of the Imperial College report, professor Neil Ferguson, testified about coronavirus to a committee of the British Parliament. Ferguson calls himself an epidemiologist, though he is not a physician and his doctorate is in theoretical physics. He was testifying remotely, since he had contracted the coronavirus a week before and was in a self-imposed home quarantine. (Later, a British newspaper would break the news that Ferguson had violated his isolation to have sex with a married woman he met on OKCupid; he was forced to resign in disgrace from a scientific committee advising the British government on the epidemic. But at the time his reputation was sterling and his previous forecasting mistakes – which are legion and in some cases comical – largely forgotten.)

Investigative reporters have an old saw: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. In other words, question everything.

But a “case” of coronavirus refers only to a positive test result showing someone has been infected. It does not mean that a person will become sick – much less that he or she will be hospitalized, need intensive care, or die. Thus discussing the age distribution of infections, while technically not untruthful, is extremely misleading.

Washington state reported on May 21 it had included five people who had died of gunshots in its total of roughly 1,000 coronavirus deaths.

If 600,000 people die of coronavirus by the time everyone is exposed to it, but two-thirds of them would have died anyway from other illnesses, the “excess” mortality from coronavirus – people who would not have died during that period – would be 200,000 people.

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.

What went all-but-unnoticed in the push for lockdowns was the fact that major public health organizations had for decades rejected them as a potential solution to epidemics.

dozens of countries that supposedly valued individual rights and democratic freedoms had jumped into an experiment in state control unlike any since at least World War 2.

In general, mutations that make the virus more transmissible but less dangerous to its hosts will help the virus survive better over time.

Efforts to force people to stay inside are legally problematic. Governors must instead rely on fear and public pressure. But people will resist – to protect their rights, out of boredom, or because they need to work.

The stunning impact of the Imperial College report made Ferguson arguably the most important public health expert in the world. 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. But he and the other Imperial College researchers appeared to believe a handful of relatively simple equations would predict the coronavirus epidemic. To be correct, the modelers would have to understand not only how the virus spread but the complex behavioral changes lockdowns would inevitably produce. Yet the models are hardly based on any real data about either spread or lockdowns. 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.

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 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. Of those, about 4,000 patients, not 10,000, were on ventilators. (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/why-some-doctors-are-moving-away-ventilators-virus-patients-n1179986)

panic itself drives vulnerable people to hospitals and thus increases transmission among them. And nothing causes panic to spike faster than the serious consideration of lockdowns.

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 (some outbreaks occurred in more than one place, or could not be placed at a single venue). All other venues, including stores and restaurants, accounted for less than 20 percent of infections combined. “Sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk,” the researchers wrote.

In other words, in the short run, increasing the amount of time family members spend with each other may drive up transmission. Even worse, the people most vulnerable to that intra-familial transmission of coronavirus – the extremely elderly and people with severe health problems – rarely work and are the least likely to spend time outside. They are naturally somewhat protected, until lockdowns confine them with family members who have been infected elsewhere and bring the virus home.

Even during lockdowns, nursing homes and other “congregate care” facilities cannot close. How to protect them, then? Measures such as frequently testing staff members and patients, ensuring the homes have adequate cleaning equipment, and quickly hospitalizing infected residents may help contain outbreaks. But the effort required to promote and manage lockdowns can distract governments from the crisis in nursing homes.

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.

Germany made containing outbreaks in nursing homes a priority. And it wound up with a fraction of the nursing home deaths – or overall deaths – in Britain, Italy, or Spain.

Denmark was the first European country to end its lockdowns, reopening schools in April and stores by early May. More than a month later, on June 10, the Danish national health authority reported that “there is no sign yet of noticeable changes.” Switzerland and other European countries noted similar trends.

In the United States, southern states began lifting lockdowns as early as April 24, led by Georgia. The decision led to predictable media hysteria. The Atlantic magazine infamously called the decision “Georgia’s Experiment In Human Sacrifice.” Yet the United States saw no spike in coronavirus cases in May or early June. On May 20, Marko Kolanovic, a senior strategist at J.P. Morgan (like Neil Ferguson, a physicist by training), analyzed reopening and transmission data. He concluded that the virus had actually spread more slowly in the United States after lockdowns ended.

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. Further, in all three states, the drop in hospitalizations came despite the fact the states did not reimpose widespread lockdowns, though they did take minor steps to slow the spread of the virus and reduce the strain on hospitals. Arizona closed gyms and bars, for example, while Florida closed bars and Texas postponed elective su...

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.

Sweden’s high death rates were driven almost entirely by the fact that the country didn’t just fail to protect nursing homes but in some cases actually discouraged physicians from offering care to the extremely elderly. In a June article headline, “Coronavirus Is Taking a High Toll on Sweden’s Elderly. Families Blame the Government,” The Wall Street Journal detailed disturbing cases in which older patients had been refused hospitalizations.

Sweden’s coronavirus deaths skew extremely elderly. Almost two-thirds of deaths occurred in people 80 or over, and almost 90 percent in people 70 or over. The Swedish government has acknowledged that its failure to protect nursing homes was a huge and preventable error. 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.

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.

scientific journals have recently published several papers purporting to show that lockdowns saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives. Not to put too fine a point on it, these papers are junk – mathematical models created in some cases by the very same epidemiologists whose forecasts four months ago proved entirely wrong. And these models are even more useless, because they aren’t even trying to predict the future but instead describing an alternative past that didn’t take place and thus cannot be proven true or false.