UK’s Epic Fail in COVID19 Lockdown Strategy

Written by John O'Sullivan on May 4, 2020. Posted in Current News

Official  data reveals the COVID-19 lockdown – imposed on 65 million Britons by Prime Minister Boris Johnson – has proved an unmitigated disaster. By comparison with the five nations NOT forcing citizens to stay home, Britain has an appalling death rate in the pandemic.

Moreover, the drastic measures imposed, including canceled surgeries, medical examinations missed on top of the financial and emotional stress of the lengthy lockdown, may cause tens of thousands of ADDITIONAL  and unreported deaths.

Five countries (Sweden, Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea) refused to experiment with this never-before tried strategy of mass quarantine of both the healthy and the sick.

Instead, those nations chose the traditional option of encouraging a herd immunity policy. By not enforcing a quarantine per se – but allowing common sense individual responsibility – citizens’ immune systems naturally adapted to the virus.

Logic and reason tell us that time and again history shows quarantines save lives. But never in history have whole national populations – whether sick or healthy – been kept week after week shut up inside their homes and denied the right to work and move freely.

Seemingly crazier –  all five ‘no lockdown’ nations are shown to have performed substantially better than a leading first world nation (UK) which boasts one of the best health services in the world. 

Johnson’s wholesale house arrest not only has crippled Britain’s economy, it has not permitted the British public the opportunity to acquire the natural herd immunity already developed in those non-lockdown countries. This may be why there are fears of a second wave of infections when the Johnson lock down is lifted.

What is clear is that the UK performs very poorly by comparison to all five nations that had no lockdown (as shown in the green column). NOTE: India is added as another ‘lockdown’ nation (but with a population of 1.35 billion).

The official numbers and graphs are provided by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the University of Oxford (screenshots below). They reveal the death rates from COVID-19 as per million of each nation’s population. As such, variation in a country’s overall size of population will not unduly confuse the comparison, which is proportionate.

• India has just ONE death per million while the UK has 419 deaths per million.

• The WORST performing non-lockdown nation (The Netherlands): only around 2/3 the death toll of the UK.

The green column (deaths per million of population) reveals that EVERY nation that did NOT order a lockdown had a significantly lower death rate than the UK.

For a visual impression of the dramatic rise in UK deaths between March and May, see the graph below.

As we enter May there are no new reported cases in the far east and China. By medical definition the global pandemic is thus into its final stages.

UK Ministers claimed, as they did with climate change, that they were being ‘led by the science.’ But their chosen ‘experts’ relied on the same kind of junk computer models that projected wholly exaggerated scenarios for man-made global warming.

Citizens across two thirds of the planet followed UN World Health Organisation (WHO) advice and were, in effect, kept under medical house arrest.

In what is undoubtedly the most stupid and financially costly medical experiment ever undertaken, hundreds of nations have ruined their economies and triggered myriad other unintended consequences (including the unaccounted hidden death toll caused by the lockdowns themselves).

Britain’s Legacy of Pandemic Panic and Pain

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s key error appears to be in relying on the very same ‘expert’ blamed for past medical national travesties – Professor Ferguson of Imperial College, London.

Ferguson had a history of wildly overestimating death rates – his 2001 disease model was criticized as “not fit for purpose” after it predicted that up to 150,000 people could die in the U.K. from mad cow disease (just 177 deaths to date).

How could any competent PM once again follow the advice of Ferguson, who failed so ineptly in the past?

We reported on why it was unsafe to rely on government medical experts before (see here). This all echoes the junk model computer predictions seen so often in climate change ‘science.’ As usual, skeptical scientists are ignored in favor of the alarmists. Why do our political leaders never learn?

As Cheryl K. Chumley – The Washington Times (Tuesday, April 28, 2020) pointed out:

“…..some in the medical community, thank goodness, are starting to point out the glaring omissions of logic and fact that have plagued this overhyped, overreaching coronavirus crackdown that has stretched on far, far too long.

Among some of Erickson’s remarks:

“This is immunology — microbiology 101. This is the basis of what we’ve known for years: When you take human beings and you say, ‘Go into your house, clean all your counters, Lysol them down’ … what does it do to our immune system? … Sheltering in place decreases your immune system.””

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who also serves on the research and development advisory board for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, warned weeks ago that lockdowns were not working.  [1]

EU Data between 2016-Present Shows COVID-19 No Worse Than Bad Flu Season

Look at the euromomo.eu data for EU countries and it reveals that when comparing excess morbidity since 2016 European nations show either a FALL or no additional rise in deaths due to COVID19: Comparison with the UK is not encouraging reading for the leader of the British government.

At the left of the graph are the earliest days and months for all excess deaths starting from the year 2016 to the present. Moving towards the right – month by month – the excess death toll in each country is detailed. As you can see, there is no ‘hockey stick’ shape graph produced with a big uptick on the far right – the current date.

Unless of course, you look at the period of 2016-2020 for the UK (shown bottom), where an inconvenient sharp uptick does emerge to the right.

Judging by these official numbers, there is something seriously amiss in the UK when it concerns government handling of national medical emergencies (and statistics). The term ‘government expert’ is again shown to be an oxymoron and should henceforth be permanently printed into tax payers’ brains.

[1] https://principia-scientific.com/shock-israeli-study-reveals-covid19-lockdown-was-pointless/

About the author: John O’Sullivan John is CEO and co-founder (with Dr Tim Ball) of Principia Scientific International (PSI).  John is a seasoned science writer and legal analyst who assisted Dr Ball in defeating world leading climate expert, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann in the ‘science trial of the century‘. O’Sullivan is credited as the visionary who formed the original ‘Slayers’ group of scientists in 2010 who then collaborated in creating the world’s first full-volume debunk of the greenhouse gas theory plus their new follow-up book.

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