Source: ONS
Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.
That's the exact opposite conclusion the article finds while taking into account more countries and just one.
If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking .... Like go to the store and buy identical pens but of 100 different colors. Now throw them down the stairs and record which goes the farthest. Now repeat it again. Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest. That pen isn't actually superior, you're just doing garbage analysis.
> I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was
I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.
It was not selected post-hoc, it was selected in 2020.
The result was more death early and less death later, while suffering no learning loss or adverse effects on the children and little loss in quality of life.
Here's an article from 2020 disparaging the high costs [0].
If you find any major news giving an update now that Finland and Norway have caught up in excess death, please share.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surr...
But there has now been no excess mortality in Sweden compared to it's neighbors Finland and Norway (and all 3 blow the US and Europe out of the water.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
You are not considering how positivism works. If you say lockdowns work you have to prove that in all instances. I just need one (1) counter example to disprove your theory completely.
> Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest.
Cherry-picking. Yeah, that's what focusing on Australia and NZ while ignoring Peru and Sweden is, exactly.
Finding two patients who got better after blood-letting is not enough to prove blood-letting works. Your theory has to fit all the available quality data (so no China or model "data" allowed).
> I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.
Yeah that was the extend of lockdowns. Go tell that to the people that where locked up without visitors in nursing homes for months on end.
They had some constitutional limit on lockdowns, and a Health official who was a bit overenthusiastic about 'herd immunity' but they also had lots of recommendations and an expectation that people would actually obey them.
> As the outbreak reached Sweden, authorities responded with limited measures, in contrast with lockdowns and legal restrictions introduced in other countries. The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
"non-voluntary recommendations"? Note 2 is:
> A Swedish government agency is an independent body with delegated power to pass binding regulations as well as recommendations on how someone can or should act to meet a law or binding regulation within the agency's area of activity (in this case The Swedish Communicable Diseases Act). Although there is not a legal framework for a governmental agency to impose sanctions on someone for going against its recommendations, they are not optional as they work as guidelines on how to act to follow a law or regulation (in this case an obligation to help halting the spread of an infectious disease). The Swedish Constitution prohibits ministerial rule – politicians overruling the advice from its agencies is extremely unusual in Sweden – and mandates that the relevant government body, in this case an expert agency – the Public Health Agency – must initiate all actions to prevent the virus' spread in accordance with Swedish law, rendering state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a central figure in the crisis.
It only takes one person in an apartment building to infect the whole building if the ventilation is poor.
It boggles my mind that people don't understand how to act under uncertainty.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises, is it underway?”
-NIH director Francis Collins in an email to Anthony Fauci about the Great Barrington Declaration
"So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating?" Of course we do in case of a pandemic, since we are dealing with a completely different underlying distribution of effects.
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...
Contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening and border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances."
It is possible to support lockdowns while still recognizing this.
The blanket lockdowns of individuals not at risk was the height of tyranny!
We also had data that strong action can stop an outbreak (i.e. Aviation flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc). Sure when we took those actions early enough to curtail the outbreak it leads to people thinking the actions were useless (see Y2K debate) but it doesn't actually mean the actions were useless. People only notice when the dam collapses, not when it doesn't.
Not only did we never do anything like COVID measures for any of the diseases you mentioned but the WHO described the individual NPIs that would later make up the COVID "lockdowns" as "never recommended under any circumstances" in their 2019 flu pandemic recommendations.
What happened with COVID was an unprecedented overreaction by historical standards where we threw overboard everything we knew to try authoritarian gobbledygook on the back of the carefully cultivated FUD around COVID coming out of China.
Thinking about it lockdowns could definitely help with climate change, should we just lock down for the next 20 years?
In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible.
This is the WHOs evaluation of NPIs in 2019 (PDF Warning): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...
It says Contact tracing, Quarantine of exposed individuals, Entry and exit screening and Border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances".
The experts thought about and decided it was not worth it.
I repeat myself, at that point We didn't know much about SARS2.
Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time. They are also good at reducing social contacts for transmissible disease and the best evidence of this was the almost total lack of a flu season in the northern hemisphere.
While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.
Objection, arguing facts not in evidence.
Edit: in response to the part you added after your original post:
>While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.
The social and economic costs were mostly predictable back before the lockdowns ever happened. People opposed to the lockdowns were practically screaming what the consequences would be. They were ignored with calls of "If it saves one life!" and "You're killing grandma!"
Meanwhile it's come out that several (if not all) countries that imposed lockdowns didn't even attempt to do a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis prior to locking everything down.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lockdown-files-rishi...
The effects of people dying and the unchecked spread of illness were ignored with calls of "you're killing the economy!".
Turns out non-covid mortality is significantly higher in unvaccinated.
This seems to imply they only need to protect the most vulnerable. You wouldn't sacrifice strong for weak, that is not duty of care.