Covid-19 and Life

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/18/evidence-lockdowns-kill-people-lock-kill/



A study found that, from 2020 to 2022, Sweden had the lowest excess mortality rate
in Europe, despite eschewing lockdowns CREDIT: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP
It’s their sheer smallness that is so striking. Their banality. Their triteness. I had
hoped, reading The Lockdown Files, to find some explanation for the miseries that
were inflicted on us in 2020. Perhaps decisions that looked imbecilic to the rest of us
might make sense to those in the control room, able to survey information that we
could not see. Perhaps there was a grand plan.

But not a bit of it. What we see in the leaked WhatsApp messages are petty,
frightened men at the mercy of events. They obsess over tweets and news reports.
They fret about how they are coming across.

Again and again, decisions are made for presentational rather than medical reasons.
Quarantine could safely be cut from 14 to five days; but the problem, says Matt
Hancock, is that this would “imply we’ve been getting it wrong”. “Imply”?

Care home testing is initially rejected because the bigger issue is meeting the
100,000 tests a day target. What is so important about that target? In medical terms,
nothing. In political terms, everything, since some self-important broadcasters have
decided that this is the measure by which the Government’s success will be gauged.
Schoolchildren are forced wear masks, not because they do the slightest good, but
because the Tories don’t want to look weaker than Nicola Sturgeon, who has imposed
this dystopian requirement in Scotland.

This being 2020, there is also inevitably some nonsense about whether a lockdown in
areas with lower white populations would look racist.

People often say that Yes, Minister is a documentary not a comedy. But what we
really see here is a hideous, two-year, real-life episode of The Thick of It. “CALLED
FOR THIS TWO MONTHS AGO,” exclaims Hancock at one point, in a line that could
have come straight from Armando Iannucci’s ingenious script. “This is a Hancock
triumph!”

The problem is not with one politician, but with a dysfunctional system. Hancock
comes across as (no other phrase quite fits) a bit of a plonker. But he also seems
energetic and diligent. Having insisted on lockdown because he believed that
vaccination would be the way out, he did at least stick to his logic and argue for a
removal of restrictions once the jabs came in – a surprisingly lonely position when
BBC reporters, public sector unions, Labour MPs and assorted malingerers were
clamouring to keep it going.

What we see is not a bad man, but a well-intentioned man caught up in a machine
that might have been deliberately programmed to generate bad outcomes. Britain
was driven into abandoning its proportionate, cool-headed epidemic plan, not just by
shrieking TV presenters, but by perverse incentives. Put simply, decision-makers
knew that they would not get into trouble for excessive caution. They could blow
away billions, bankrupt businesses, ruin children’s education, and none of it would
be a resigning matter. But make the slightest mistake the other way, and they would
be done for.

Easy to say in hindsight? Maybe. But those of us who said it at the time were roundly
denounced as granny murderers. In February 2020, I recalled the ridiculous
forecasts that had accompanied bird flu and swine flu, and cautioned against panic:
“Politicians, like most people, are bad at calculating risk, and almost every minister
would rather be accused of over-reacting to a threat than of having done too little.
There is a similar bias, albeit a less pronounced one, among the various medical
advisory bodies”.

Every time I criticised the lockdown – and this column was one of only three or four
doing so in March 2020 – I would steel myself before pressing send. I knew that
demanding a reopening was hugely unpopular. What if it also turned out to be
wrong?

Yet the facts remained stubbornly at odds with the policies. As the disease spread
from China, Chris Whitty pointed out that it was not dangerous enough to merit an
acceleration of the vaccine approval process (no one, at this stage, was contemplating
a UK lockdown).

“For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1 per cent) mortality a vaccine has
to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut,” he messaged on February 29
2020. Reader, the mortality rate for Covid in this country never rose as high as 1 per
cent.

Why, then, were we panicked? What happened to the original epidemic plan, which
was to allow infections to seep gradually through the population so that hospitals
would not be overwhelmed at any one moment?

The answer can be glimpsed in a message on March 8 from James Slack, Boris
Johnson’s calm and measured spokesman: “I think we’re heading towards general
pressure over why our measures are relatively light touch compared to other
countries.”

Too bloody right. And the pressure – cretinous rants from Piers Morgan, false
rumours of hospitals being overrun, “Go Home Covidiots” signs – grew until, two
weeks later, a prime minister who hated nannying with every bone in his body felt
obliged to sentence the population to house arrest.

Could he have resisted that pressure? Other countries had already closed, 92 per cent
of the electorate wanted to be confined and the scientific advisers, sniffing the wind,
had switched to arguing for tougher measures.

But one country held out. Sweden, lacking its own pandemic plan, had adopted
Britain’s – and, unlike Britain, it did not crack under criticism. Sweden is our
counterfactual, a laboratory quality control showing what would have happened here
had we held our nerve. And the evidence it presents looks damning. A study has
found that, from 2020 to 2022, Sweden had the lowest excess mortality rate in
Europe.

That finding blows the case for lockdowns out of the water. In the early days of the
pandemic, when the Government was being criticised for what looked like a high
death rate (largely because it had sent NHS patients into care homes), ministers and
medical advisers urged us to wait until all the evidence was in.

They had a point. Covid was a new disease, and countries had wildly differing
approaches to measuring it. There was a row about whether people had died “of
Covid” or “with Covid”. Some nations did not have the capacity to test even this.

But one thing that no one can fake is the overall number of deaths. We know how
many people die annually in each country, and we can predict, on the basis of
population size and age, what the figure should be for any given year. The excess
mortality figure is the percentage above that expected baseline. It can be calculated
with the same methodology the world over. It is, in short, the one statistic that there
is no getting away from.

Judged by this metric, Britain did not do badly. Our overall excess death rate was
behind Scandinavia, in line with Germany and the Netherlands, and ahead of most of
southern and eastern Europe. But the real outlier was Sweden, which had the lowest
excess mortality in Europe, and one of the lowest in the world, throughout 2020 and
2021.

During the pandemic, I assumed that Sweden would emerge with a slightly higher
death rate, but a much stronger economy. Since poverty correlates with lower
longevity, I expected that, over time, Sweden would see fewer deaths from other
causes, so ending up healthier as well as wealthier. But I underestimated the lethal
impact of the lockdowns themselves. Sweden did not just do better over time; it
actually killed fewer people during the pandemic.

How did Britain’s leaders respond to the evidence that they should have stuck to Plan
A? They took it as a personal affront. Hancock referred in his messages to the
“f***ing Sweden argument”, and asked officials to “supply three or four bullet
[points] of why Sweden is wrong”.

But Sweden was not wrong, and no amount of desperate deflection about Norway
also having a low death rate can disguise it. The horrible truth is that lockdowns
killed people. Sweden had lots of coronavirus cases but relatively few excess deaths.
Australia had few coronavirus cases, but a strict lockdown. It ended up with higher
excess mortality than Sweden.

Are people ready to believe it? Are we prepared to admit that the disasters we are still
experiencing – undiagnosed diseases, absenteeism, debt, lost education, price rises,
mental health problems – were self-inflicted?

It seems not. We will go into the next crisis with the same skewed incentives. And all
because, like so many Hancocks, we don’t want to “imply we’ve been getting it
wrong”.

 

This data is for the whole of Europe.

No one cares that the excess deaths in 2022 were virtually the same as in 2020, the year of the "worst pandemic for 100 years".