Covid Rates Were Falling Across Europe Before Lockdowns
Covid infections were falling across Europe before lockdowns, new research shows, making the Covid Inquiry’s claim that locking down a week earlier could have saved 23,000 lives “complete hokum”
The Telegraph has the story.
Statisticians at the University of Edinburgh compiled figures from 10 countries where accurate daily death numbers were available, and calculated when those people must have become infected.
Out of 17 lockdowns introduced between March 2020 and March 2022, only the first Belgian restriction, and the second Italian, preceded a fall in infections.
For all the others – including England’s three lockdowns – infections had already peaked before the country was ordered into isolation, raising questions about whether such harsh restrictions were required.
The study found people had already begun to voluntarily change their behaviour before lockdowns were introduced.
Prof Simon Wood, of Edinburgh’s School of Mathematics, said it challenged claims that locking down sooner could have saved thousands of lives.
Last November, the Covid Inquiry published a second report suggesting that locking down one week earlier could have saved 23,000 lives, based on modelling by Imperial College London.
“It’s complete hokum,” said Prof Wood. “Infections were already falling before we locked down and that should give pause for thought.
“People had already restricted their activity quite a bit, and they were altering their behaviour because they were worried about the disease.
“It’s not that lockdown wasn’t doing anything, it was squishing things down further, but in retrospect looking at the figures, full lockdowns were largely unnecessary for turning around the waves of infections.
“They were an overreaction and a political response to what people were clamouring for, in spite of the data.”
The new figures were calculated by looking at the average time from an infection to symptoms – roughly 5.8 days – and then on to death, which tended to occur about 15 days later.
Although death rates all peaked after lockdowns, infections had begun to slump weeks earlier, in countries including England, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark.
In Sweden, which did not lock down, the figures showed that cases peaked at roughly the same time as the countries that did isolate their populations.
The paper, which was published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, also criticised the government for “intentionally distorting” the risk of Covid for healthy young people.
One widely-displayed government poster pictured a healthy woman in her mid-20s wearing a mask with the slogan ‘I wear this to protect you. Please wear yours to protect me.”
But researchers said it was clear early on that young, healthy people were not in danger from the virus.
Of course, even this overstates the case for restrictions, as it still implies that the pre-lockdown restrictions were necessary for “turning around the waves of infections”.
When it’s clear from every wave of flu-like viruses that’s ever been recorded that they naturally peak and subside after only a fraction of the population (somewhere between 10 and 20 percent) has been infected – probably due to variations in individual susceptibility.
But this study does at least move the dial in the right direction.
Worth reading in full.
See more here dailysceptic.org
Header image: Paul-Alain Hunt
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very old white guy
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The flu usually has limited time frame.
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very old white guy
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A lies is still a lie and covid was and still is a lie.
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very old white guy
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edit feature……lie, not lies.
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