Mass self-isolation has not found any benefit and scientific justification

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The forced shutdown of the economy, accompanied by fines, arrests and revocation of business licenses, is not a natural consequence of the pandemic. It is the result of decisions by politicians who have suspended constitutional institutions and the legal recognition of fundamental human rights. These politicians imposed a new form of central planning based on an unsubstantiated set of theoretical ideas about "social distancing" controlled by the police.

The suspension of civil rights and the rule of law will have profound consequences in terms of human lives, such as suicide, drug overdose deaths and other serious health problems caused by unemployment, denial of “selective” health care and social exclusion.

However, these consequences are not taken into account, since today it is believed that governments must determine whether people can start their own businesses or leave their homes. So far, the strategy to deal with the economic collapse has boiled down to record spending on deficits, followed by the monetization of debt through the printing of money. In short, politicians, bureaucrats and their supporters believe that in order to achieve a single political goal - to stop the spread of the disease - they are allowed to destroy all other goals that people aspire to.

Did this approach work? There is more and more evidence that no.

Swedish infectious disease physician (and World Health Organization (WHO) advisor Johan Gieseke writes for The Lancet

It became clear that a hard lockdown did not protect old and fragile people living in nursing homes - the very people the lockdown was designed to protect. It also does not reduce mortality from COVID-19, which is evident when comparing the UK experience with that of other European countries.

At best, lockdowns carry the disease into the future; they do not reduce overall mortality. Giesek continues:

Curve smoothing measures can have an effect, but blocking only carries serious cases into the future, not prevents them. Admittedly, countries have been able to slow the spread of the disease and this has allowed them not to overload their health systems. Indeed, effective drugs may soon be developed that save lives, but this pandemic is spreading rapidly and these drugs must be developed and tested in a very short time. Great hopes are pinned on vaccines, but their development will take time, besides, the immunological response to infection is not clear, there is no confidence that vaccines will be very effective.

The lack of evidence that blockages work must somehow be correlated with the fact that economic disruption has serious consequences for life expectancy.

However, in the public debate, lockdown enthusiasts argue that any deviation from it will result in overall mortality far exceeding those where the lockdown occurs. However, so far there is no evidence of this.

In a new study, titled “Western European lockdown policies have no apparent impact on the COVID-19 epidemic,” author Thomas Munier writes: -to life compared to the softer social distancing and hygiene policies in place prior to lockdown. " That is, "the policy of complete blocking of France, Italy, Spain and the UK did not give the expected results in the development of the COVID-19 epidemic." Additional analysis was published in Bloomberg on May 19. The author concludes: “The data show that the relative severity of containment measures in the country had little effect on its membership in any of the three groups listed above. Although Germany had softer restrictions than Italy, it was much more successful at containing the virus."

The issue here is not that voluntary “social distancing” has no effect. Rather, the question is whether “police-assisted home retention” works to limit the spread of disease. Munier concludes that this is not the case.

A study by political scientist Wilfred Reilly compared lockdown policies and the number of deaths from COVID-19 in US states. Reilly writes:

The question that the model must answer is whether states with lockdown actually have fewer cases and deaths from Covid-19 than states with social distancing, taking into account all of the above variables? The answer is no. The impact of the government's response strategy on both my cases and the death rates was completely negligible. The “p-value” for the variable representing the strategy was 0.94 when it regressed on the death metric, which means there is a 94 percent chance that any relationship between the various rates and Covid-19 deaths is pure chance. Overall, however, it is noteworthy that large regions from Utah to Sweden and most of East Asia escaped hard lockdowns and were not captured by Covid-19.

Another study on blocking - again, we're talking about forced closures and orders to stay at home - is a study by researcher Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute. Stone notes that in areas where lockdowns were introduced, there was already a downward trend in mortality before the lockdown could show results. In other words, supporters of blocking point to trends that were already observed before restrictions were imposed on the population.

Stone writes:

Here's the thing: There is no evidence that lockdowns work. If strict blockages really saved lives, I would be all for them, even if they had negative economic consequences. But the scientific and medical rationale for strict lockdowns is very shaky.

Experience increasingly suggests that those who truly want to limit the spread of the disease to the most vulnerable should take a more targeted approach. The vast majority - almost 75 percent - of COVID-19 deaths occur in patients over sixty-five years of age. Of these, approximately 90 percent have chronic diseases. Thus, limiting the spread of COVID-19 is most important among older people who are already connected to the healthcare system. In the United States and Europe, more than half of COVID-19 deaths occur in nursing homes and similar settings.

This is why Matt Ridley of The Spectator rightly notes that testing, rather than blocking, appears to be a key factor in limiting COVID-19 deaths. In regions where testing is widespread, things are better:

It is not obvious why testing matters, especially for mortality rates. Testing does not cure disease. Germany's consistently low mortality rate seems incomprehensible until you think about where the first patients got infected. The answer is in hospitals. A large number of tests have allowed countries like Germany to partially prevent the spread of the virus through the health system. Germany, Japan and Hong Kong have implemented effective protocols from day one to prevent the spread of the virus in nursing homes and hospitals.

The horrible truth is that in many early cases of infection, victims received their virus in hospitals and emergency rooms. And it was here that he would often be picked up by the next visitor, including many medical professionals. Many of them may not have understood what they were sick with or thought they had a mild cold. They then passed it on to elderly patients who were in the hospital for other reasons, then some of those patients were sent back to nursing homes when the National Health Service made room for an expected wave of coronavirus patients.

We could contrast this with the policy of Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York, who ordered nursing homes to accept new patients without testing. This method almost guarantees that the disease will spread rapidly among those most likely to die from it.

The same Governor Cuomo saw fit to impose a forced lockdown on the entire population of New York, resulting in economic collapse and health problems for many non-COVID-19 patients who have been deprived of life-saving treatment. Sadly, lockdown fetishists like Cuomo are considered wise statesmen who “act decisively” to prevent the spread of the disease.

This is what the regime we live in now looks like. Many believe that pursuing fashionable policies with unproven effectiveness can abolish human rights and plunge millions into poverty. The lockdown party even turned the foundations of political debate upside down. As Stone points out:

At this point, I usually hear the question: "What is your evidence that lockdowns do not work?" This is a strange question. Why do I have to prove that the lockdown doesn't work? The burden of proof is to prove that they work! If you're going to essentially abolish the civil liberties of an entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work. And here the lockdown defenders fail miserably, because they simply have no proof.

With global output falling and unemployment rising to the level of the Great Depression, governments are already looking for a way out. We are already seeing governments move rapidly towards voluntary social distancing, non-blocking strategies. This is happening even though politicians and disease “experts” insist that lockdowns should be administered indefinitely until a vaccine is available.

The longer the destruction of the economy continues, the greater the threat of social unrest and a deep economic crisis. The political reality is that the current situation cannot be stable without a threat to the ruling regimes. In a Foreign Policy article titled “Sweden's coronavirus strategy will soon be adopted globally,” authors Nils Carlson, Charlotte Stern, and Daniel B. Klein suggest that states will be forced to adopt the Swedish model:

As the pain of national lockdowns becomes unbearable and countries realize that a pandemic, not a victory over it, is the only realistic option, more and more of them are starting to remove lockdowns. Reasonable social distancing to prevent congestion in health systems, better treatment for victims, and better protection for at-risk groups can help reduce casualties. But in the end, herd immunity may be the only reliable defense against the disease if vulnerable populations can be protected along the way. Whatever makes Sweden different in managing the epidemic, other countries are beginning to realize that it is ahead of them.