I support SAGE's stack on Germany's lockdowns & the catastrophe it was, by sharing my review of near 500 studies, pieces of research, reports (high quality); showed all lockdowns entire world FAILED!

SAGE: Pretty sure this "Modeling Science" ruse is going on with zeeee Klimate Change too. "Shaping the Future" on bad science = Build Back Better; no evidence any global lockdown worked, NONE

Science Would Be Falsified: "Was Germany’s Lockdown in Spring 2020 Necessary? How Bad Data Quality Can Turn a Simulation Into a Delusion that Shapes the Future"

https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the-failure-of-compulsory-covid-interventions/

‘The great body of evidence (comparative research studies and high-quality pieces of evidence and reporting judged to be relevant to this analysis) shows that COVID-19 lockdowns, shelter-in-place policies, masks, school closures, and mask mandates have failed in their purpose of curbing transmission or reducing deaths. These restrictive policies were ineffective and devastating failures, causing immense harm especially to the poorer and vulnerable within societies. 

Nearly all governments have attempted compulsory measures to control the virus, but no government can claim success. The research indicates that mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures have had no discernible impact of virus trajectories. 

Bendavid reported “in the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, or the United States in early 2020.” We’ve known this for a very long time now but governments continue to double down, causing misery upon people with ramifications that will likely take decades or more to repair. 

The benefits of the societal lockdowns and restrictions have been totally exaggerated and the harms to our societies and children have been severe: the harms to children, the undiagnosed illness that will result in excess mortality in years to come, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation in our young people, drug overdoses and suicides due to the lockdown policies, the crushing isolation due to the lockdowns, psychological harms, domestic and child abuse, sexual abuse of children, loss of jobs and businesses and the devastating impact, and the massive numbers of deaths resulting from the lockdowns that will impact heavily on women and minorities. 

Now we have whispers again for the new lockdowns in response to the Omicron variant that, by my estimations, will be likely infectious but not more lethal.

How did we get here? We knew that we could never eradicate this mutable virus (that has an animal reservoir) with lockdowns and that it would likely become endemic like other circulating common cold coronaviruses. When we knew an age-risk stratified approach was optimal (focused protection as outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration) and not carte blanche policies when we had evidence of a 1,000-fold differential in risk of death between a child and an elderly person. We knew of the potency and success of early ambulatory outpatient treatment in reducing the risk of hospitalization and death in the vulnerable.

It was clear very early on that Task Forces and medical advisors and decision-makers were not reading the evidence, were not up to speed with the science or data, did not understand the evidence, did not ‘get’ the evidence, and were blinded to the science, often driven by their own prejudices, biases, arrogance, and ego. They remain ensconced in sheer academic sloppiness and laziness. It was clear that the response was not a public health one. It was a political one from day one and continues today. 

A recent study (pre-print) captures the essence and catastrophe of a lockdown society and the hollowing out of our children by looking at how children learn (3 months to 3 years old) and finding across all measures that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic.” Researchers also reported that “males and children in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”

Perhaps Donald Luskin of the Wall Street Journal best captures what we have stably witnessed since the start of these unscientific lockdowns and school closures: “Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.”

The British Columbia Center for Disease Control (BCCDC) issued a full report in September 2020 on the impact of school closures on children and found para “that i) children comprise a small proportion of diagnosed COVID-19 cases, have less severe illness, and mortality is rare ii) children do not appear to be a major source of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in households or schools, a finding which has been consistent globally iii) there are important differences between how influenza and SARS-CoV-2 are transmitted. School closures may be less effective as a prevention measure for COVID-19 iv) school closures can have severe and unintended consequences for children and youth v) school closures contribute to greater family stress, especially for female caregivers, while families balance child care and home learning with employment demands vi) family violence may be on the rise during the COVID pandemic, while the closure of schools and childcare centres may create a gap in the safety net for children who are at risk of abuse and neglect.”

Now places like Austria (November 2021) have re-entered the world of lockdown lunacy only to be outmatched by Australia. Indeed, an illustration of the spurious need for these ill-informed actions is that they are being done in the face of clear scientific evidence showing that during strict prior societal lockdowns, school lockdowns, mask mandates, and additional societal restrictions, the number of positive cases went up!

The pandemic response today remains a purely political one.

What follows is the current totality of the body of evidence (available comparative studies and high-level pieces of evidence, reporting, and discussion) on COVID-19 lockdowns, masks, school closures, and mask mandates. There is no conclusive evidence supporting claims that any of these restrictive measures worked to reduce viral transmission or deaths. Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective, and masks themselves were and are ineffective and harmful.’

1) Lockdown Effects on Sars-CoV-2 Transmission – The evidence from Northern Jutland, Kepp, 2021“Analysis shows that while infection levels decreased, they did so before lockdown was effective, and infection numbers also decreased in neighbour municipalities without mandates…direct spill-over to neighbour municipalities or the simultaneous mass testing do not explain this…data suggest that efficient infection surveillance and voluntary compliance make full lockdowns unnecessary.”

2) A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes, Chaudhry, 2020“Analysis was conducted to assess the impact of timing and type of national health policy/actions undertaken towards COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes…low levels of national preparedness, scale of testing and population characteristics were associated with increased national case load and overall mortality….in our analysis, full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”

3) Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic, Meunier, 2020“Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.”

4) Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models, Chin, 2020“Inferences on effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification. Claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated.”5) vvvlrNPIs). In this way, it may be possible to isolate the role of mrNPIs, net of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics.Here, we use Sweden and South Korea as the counterfac-tuals to isolate the effects of mrNPIs in

5) Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19, Bendavid, 2020“Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19…we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less-restrictive interventions.”“After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country.”“In the framework of this analysis, there is no evidence that more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (‘lockdowns’) contributed substantially to bending the curve of new cases in England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the United States in early 2020.”

6) Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions, Rice, 2020“We therefore conclude that the somewhat counterintuitive results that school closures lead to more deaths are a consequence of the addition of some interventions that suppress the first wave and failure to prioritise protection of the most vulnerable people.When the interventions are lifted, there is still a large population who are susceptible and a substantial number of people who are infected. This then leads to a second wave of infections that can result in more deaths, but later. Further lockdowns would lead to a repeating series of waves of infection unless herd immunity is achieved by vaccination, which is not considered in the model. A similar result is obtained in some of the scenarios involving general social distancing. For example, adding general social distancing to case isolation and household quarantine was also strongly associated with suppression of the infection during the intervention period, but then a second wave occurs that actually concerns a higher peak demand for ICU beds than for the equivalent scenario without general social distancing.”

7) Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary? Kuhbandner, 2020“Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the corona virus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions become effective. Several reasons for such an autonomous decline have been suggested. One is that differences in host susceptibility and behavior can result in herd immunity at a relatively low prevalence level. Accounting for individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to the coronavirus yields a maximum of 17% to 20% of the population that needs to be infected to reach herd immunity, an estimate that is empirically supported by the cohort of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Another reason is that seasonality may also play an important role in dissipation.”

8) A First Literature Review: Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19, Herby, 2021“Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19…studies which differentiate between the two types of behavioral change find that, on average, mandated behavioral changes accounts for only 9% (median: 0%) of the total effect on the growth of the pandemic stemming from behavioral changes. The remaining 91% (median: 100%) of the effect was due to voluntary behavioral changes.” 

9) Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe, Colombo, 2020“We show that relaxing the assumption of homogeneity to allow for individual variation in susceptibility or connectivity gives a model that has better fit to the data and more accurate 14-day forward prediction of mortality. Allowing for heterogeneity reduces the estimate of “counterfactual” deaths that would have occurred if there had been no interventions from 3.2 million to 262,000, implying that most of the slowing and reversal of COVID-19 mortality is explained by the build-up of herd immunity.”

10) Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis, Shlomai, 2020“A national lockdown has a moderate advantage in saving lives with tremendous costs and possible overwhelming economic effects.”

11) Lockdowns and Closures vs COVID – 19: COVID Wins, Bhalla, 2020“As we have stressed throughout, a direct test of lockdowns on cases is the most appropriate test. This direct test is a before after test i.e. a comparison of what happened post lockdown versus what would have happened. Only for 15 out of 147 economies the lockdown “worked” in making infections lower; for more than a hundred countries, post lockdown estimate of infections was more than three times higher than the counter factual. This is not evidence of success – rather it is evidence of monumental failure of lockdown policy…“we also test, in some detail, the hypothesis that early lockdowns, and more stringent lockdowns, were effective in containing the virus. We find robust results for the opposite conclusion: later lockdowns performed better, and less stringent lockdowns achieved better outcomes.” “For the first time in human history, lockdowns were used as a strategy to counter the virus. While conventional wisdom, to date, has been that lockdowns were successful (ranging from mild to spectacular) we find not one piece of evidence supporting this claim.”

12) SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution, Djaparidze, 2020“Found that 180-day of mandatory isolations to healthy <60 (i.e. schools and workplaces closed) produces more final deaths…e mandatory isolations have caused economic damages and since these enforced isolations were sub-optimal they involuntarily increased the risk of covid-19 disease-related damages.”

13) Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response, Gibson, 2020“Lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths. This pattern is visible on each date that key lockdown decisions were made in New Zealand. The apparent ineffectiveness of lockdowns suggests that New Zealand suffered large economic costs for little benefit in terms of lives saved.”

14) Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison, Bjørnskov, 2020“The lockdowns in most Western countries have thrown the world into the most severe recession since World War II and the most rapidly developing recession ever seen in mature market economies. They have also caused an erosion of fundamental rights and the separation of powers in a large part of the world as both democratic and autocratic regimes have misused their emergency powers and ignored constitutional limits to policy-making (Bjørnskov and Voigt, 2020). It is therefore important to evaluate whether and to which extent the lockdowns have worked as officially intended: to suppress the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and prevent deaths associated with it. Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.”

15) Inferring UK COVID-19 fatal infection trajectories from daily mortality data: were infections already in decline before the UK lockdowns ?, Wood, 2020“A Bayesian inverse problem approach applied to UK data on first wave Covid-19 deaths and the disease duration distribution suggests that fatal infections were in decline before full UK lockdown (24 March 2020), and that fatal infections in Sweden started to decline only a day or two later. An analysis of UK data using the model of Flaxman et al. (2020, Nature 584) gives the same result under relaxation of its prior assumptions on R.”

16) The 1illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe, Homburg, 2020“We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”

17) Child malnutrition and COVID-19: the time to act is now, Fore, 2020“The COVID-19 pandemic is undermining nutrition across the world, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). The worst consequences are borne by young children. Some of the strategies to respond to COVID-19—including physical distancing, school closures, trade restrictions, and country lockdowns—are impacting food systems by disrupting the production, transportation, and sale of nutritious, fresh, and affordable foods, forcing millions of families to rely on nutrient-poor alternatives.”

18) Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation, De Larochelambert, 2020“Countries that already experienced a stagnation or regression of life expectancy, with high income and NCD rates, had the highest price to pay. This burden was not alleviated by more stringent public decisions.”

19) Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: A quasi-experimental study, Hunter, 2020“Closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders and closure of all non-businesses was not associated with any independent additional impact.”

20) Israel: thefatemperor, 2020“Given that the evidence reveals that the Corona disease declines even without a complete lockdown, it is recommendable to reverse the current policy and remove the lockdown.”

21) Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy, Altman, 2020“The response to COVID-19 has been overwhelmingly to lockdown much the world’s economies in order to minimize death rates as well as the immediate negative effects of COVID-19. I argue that such policy is too often de-contextualized as it ignores policy externalities, assumes death rate calculations are appropriately accurate and, and as well, assumes focusing on direct Covid-19 effects to maximize human welfare is appropriate. As a result of this approach current policy can be misdirected and with highly negative effects on human welfare. Moreover, such policies can inadvertently result in not minimizing death rates (incorporating externalities) at all, especially in the long run… such misdirected and sub-optimal policy is a product of policy makers using inappropriate mental models which are lacking in a number of key areas; the failure to take a more comprehensive macro perspective to address the virus, using bad heuristics or decision-making tools, relatedly not recognizing the differential effects of the virus, and adopting herding strategy (follow-the-leader) when developing policy.” 

22) The Mystery of Taiwan, Janaskie, 2020 “Another fascinating outlier – often cited as a case in which a government handled the pandemic the correct way – was Taiwan. Indeed, Taiwan presents an anomaly in the mitigation and overall handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. In terms of stringency, Taiwan ranks among the lowest in the world, with fewer controls than Sweden and far lower than the U.S….The government did test at the border and introduce some minor controls but nowhere near that of most counties. In general, Taiwan rejected lockdown in favor of maintaining social and economic functioning.” “Despite Taiwan’s closer proximity to the source of the pandemic, and its high population density, it experienced a substantially lower-case rate of 20.7 per million compared with New Zealand’s 278.0 per million. Rapid and systematic implementation of control measures, in particular effective border management (exclusion, screening, quarantine/isolation), contact tracing, systematic quarantine/isolation of potential and confirmed cases, cluster control, active promotion of mass masking, and meaningful public health communication, are likely to have been instrumental in limiting pandemic spread. Furthermore, the effectiveness of Taiwan’s public health response has meant that to date no lockdown has been implemented, placing Taiwan in a stronger economic position both during and post-COVID-19 compared with New Zealand, which had seven weeks of national lockdown (at Alert Levels 4 and 3).”

23) What They Said about Lockdowns before 2020, Gartz, 2021“While expert consensus regarding the ineffectiveness of mass quarantine of previous years has recently been challenged, significant present-day evidence continuously demonstrates that mass quarantine is both ineffectual at preventing disease spread as well as harmful to individuals.”

24) Cost of Lockdowns: A Preliminary Report, AIER, 2020“In the debate over coronavirus policy, there has been far too little focus on the costs of lockdowns. It’s very common for the proponents of these interventions to write articles and large studies without even mentioning the downsides…a brief look at the cost of stringencies in the United States, and around the world, including stay-at-home orders, closings of business and schools, restrictions on gatherings, shutting of arts and sports, restrictions on medical services, and interventions in the freedom of movement.”

25) Leaked Study From Inside German Government Warns Lockdown Could Kill More People Than Coronavirus, Watson, 2020
German Minister: Lockdown Will Kill More Than Covid-19 Does“The lockdown and the measures taken by the German federal and central governments to contain the coronavirus apparently cost more lives, for example of cancer patients, than of those actually killed by it.”
“Half a million more will die from tuberculosis.”

26) Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, Berry, 2021“Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behavior, and small but adverse effects on the economy.”

27) Study: Lockdown “Will Destroy at Least Seven Times More Years of Human Life” Than it Saves, Watson, 2020“A study has found that the “stay at home” lockdown order in the United States will “destroy at least seven times more years of human life” than it saves and that this number is “likely” to be more than 90 times greater… Research shows that at least 16.8% of adults in the United States have suffered “major mental harm from responses to Covid-19…Extrapolating these numbers out, the figures show that “anxiety from responses to Covid-19 has impacted 42,873,663 adults and will rob them of an average of 1.3 years of life, thus destroying 55.7 million years of life.”

28) Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19, Atkeson, 2020“Failing to account for these four stylized facts may result in overstating the importance of policy mandated NPIs for shaping the progression of this deadly pandemic… The existing literature has concluded that NPI policy and social distancing have been essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the number of deaths due to this deadly pandemic. The stylized facts established in this paper challenge this conclusion.”

29) THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCK ON LIFE EXPECTANCY AND MORTALITY RATES, Bianchi, 2021“Policy-makers should therefore consider combining lockdowns with policy interventions meant to reduce economic distress, guarantee access to health care, and facilitate effective economic reopening under health care policies to limit SARS-CoV-19 spread…assess the long-run effects of the COVID-19 economic recession on mortality and life expectancy. We estimate the size of the COVID-19-related unemployment shock to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical unemployment shock, depending on race and gender, resulting in a significant increase in mortality rates and drop in life expectancy. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while the effects for white men will unfold over longer horizons. These figures translate in more than 0.8 million additional deaths over the next 15 years.”30) Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence, AIER, 2020“The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.”31) Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control, Cohen, 2020“The link between limiting pathogen exposure and improving public health is not always so straightforward. Reducing the risk that each member of a community will be exposed to a pathogen has the attendant effect of increasing the average age at which infections occur. For pathogens that inflict greater morbidity at older ages, interventions that reduce but do not eliminate exposure can paradoxically increase the number of cases of severe disease by shifting the burden of infection toward older individuals.”32) Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature, Allen, 2020“Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries. Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life-years saved, is between 3.6–282. That is, it is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.”33) Covid-19: How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe? Karáth, 2020“Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19. President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade. Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.”34) PANDA, Nell, 2020“For each country put forward as an example, usually in some pairwise comparison and with an attendant single cause explanation, there are a host of countries that fail the expectation. We set out to model the disease with every expectation of failure. In choosing variables it was obvious from the outset that there would be contradictory outcomes in the real world. But there were certain variables that appeared to be reliable markers as they had surfaced in much of the media and pre-print papers. These included age, co-morbidity prevalence and the seemingly light population mortality rates in poorer countries than that in richer countries. Even the worst among developing nations—a clutch of countries in equatorial Latin America—have seen lighter overall population mortality than the developed world. Our aim therefore was not to develop the final answer, rather to seek common cause variables that would go some way to providing an explanation and stimulating discussion. There are some very obvious outliers in this theory, not the least of these being Japan. We test and find wanting the popular notions that lockdowns with their attendant social distancing and various other NPIs confer protection.”35) States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions, McCann, 2021Graphics reveal no relationship in stringency level as it relates to the death rates, but finds a clear relationship between stringency and unemployment. 36) COVID-19 Lockdown Policies: An Interdisciplinary Review, Robinson, 2021“Studies at the economic level of analysis points to the possibility that deaths associated with economic harms or underfunding of other health issues may outweigh the deaths that lockdowns save, and that the extremely high financial cost of lockdowns may have negative implications for overall population health in terms of diminished resources for treating other conditions. Research on ethics in relation to lockdowns points to the inevitability of value judgements in balancing different kinds of harms and benefits than lockdowns cause.”37) Comedy and Tragedy in Two Americas, Tucker, 2021“Covid unleashed a version of tyranny in the United States. Through a surreptitious and circuitous route, many public officials somehow managed to gain enormous power for themselves and demonstrate that all our vaunted limits on government are easily transgressed under the right conditions. Now they want to use that power to enact permanent change in this country. Right now, people, capital, and institutions are fleeing from them to safe and freer places, which only drives the people in power to madness. They are right now plotting to shut down the free states through any means possible.”38) Lockdowns Worsen the Health Crisis, Younes, 2021“We suspect that one day, the quarantining of entire societies that was carried out in response to the coronavirus pandemic, leading to vast swaths of the population becoming unhealthier overall and ironically more susceptible to severe outcomes from the virus, will be seen as the 21^st century version of bloodletting.  As the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff has observed, public health is not just about one disease, but all health outcomes.  Apparently, in 2020, the authorities forgot this obvious truth.”39) The Damage of Lockdowns to Young People, Yang, 2021“Biological and cultural reasons why young people, mostly referring to those under the age of 30, are particularly vulnerable to the isolation as well as lifestyle disruptions brought about by lockdowns… “Adults under 30 experienced the highest increase in suicidal thinking in the same period, with rates of suicidal ideation rising from 12.5% to 14% in people aged 18-29. For many of the young adults surveyed, these mental health challenges persisted into the summer, despite a loosening of restrictions.”40) Lifestyle and mental health disruptions during COVID-19, Giuntella, 2021“COVID-19 has affected daily life in unprecedented ways. Drawing on a longitudinal dataset of college students before and during the pandemic, we document dramatic changes in physical activity, sleep, time use, and mental health. We show that biometric and time-use data are critical for understanding the mental health impacts of COVID-19, as the pandemic has tightened the link between lifestyle behaviors and depression.”41) CDC: A Quarter of Young Adults Say They Contemplated Suicide This Summer During Pandemic, Miltimore, 2020“One in four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 say they’ve considered suicide in the past month because of the pandemic, according to new CDC data that paints a bleak picture of the nation’s mental health during the crisis. The data also flags a surge of anxiety and substance abuse, with more than 40 percent of those surveyed saying they experienced a mental or behavioral health condition connected to the Covid-19 emergency. The CDC study analyzed 5,412 survey respondents between June 24 and 30.”42) Global rise in childhood mental health issues amid pandemic, LEICESTER, 2021“For doctors who treat them, the pandemic’s impact on the mental health of children is increasingly alarming. The Paris pediatric hospital caring for Pablo has seen a doubling in the number of children and young teenagers requiring treatment after attempted suicides since September.Doctors elsewhere report similar surges, with children — some as young as 8 — deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills and otherwise self-harming. In Japan, child and adolescent suicides hit record levels in 2020, according to the Education Ministry.”43) Lockdowns: The Great Debate, AIER, 2020“The global lockdowns, on this scale with this level of stringency, have been without precedent. And yet we have examples of a handful of countries and US states that did not do this, and their record in minimizing the cost of the pandemic is better than the lockdown countries and states. The evidence that the lockdowns have done net good in terms of public health is still lacking.”44) COVID-19 containment policies through time may cost more lives at metapopulation level, Wells, 2020“Show that temporally restricted containment efforts, that have the potential to flatten epidemic curves, can result in wider disease spread and larger epidemic sizes in metapopulations.” 45) The Covid-19 Emergency Did Not Justify Lockdowns, Boudreaux, 2021“Yet there was no such careful calculation for the lockdowns imposed in haste to combat Covid-19. Lockdowns were simply assumed not only to be effective at significantly slowing the spread of SARS-CoV-2, but also to impose only costs that are acceptable. Regrettably, given the novelty of the lockdowns, and the enormous magnitude of their likely downsides, this bizarrely sanguine attitude toward lockdowns was – and remains – wholly unjustified.”46) Death and Lockdowns, Tierney, 2021“Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.”47) The COVID Pandemic Could Lead to 75,000 Additional Deaths from Alcohol and Drug Misuse and Suicide, Well Being Trust, 2021“The brief notes that if the country fails to invest in solutions that can help heal the nation’s isolation, pain, and suffering, the collective impact of COVID-19 will be even more devastating. Three factors, already at work, are exacerbating deaths of despair: unprecedented economic failure paired with massive unemployment, mandated social isolation for months and possible residual isolation for years, and uncertainty caused by the sudden emergence of a novel, previously unknown microbe…the deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year… lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford Medical School. “We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.”48) Professor Explains Flaw in Many Models Used for COVID-19 Lockdown Policies, Chen, 2021“Economics professor Doug Allen wanted to know why so many early models used to create COVID-19 lockdown policies turned out to be highly incorrect. What he found was that a great majority were based on false assumptions and “tended to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs.” He found it troubling that policies such as total lockdowns were based on those models. “They were built on a set of assumptions. Those assumptions turned out to be really important, and the models are very sensitive to them, and they turn out to be false,” said Allen, the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, in an interview.”“Furthermore, “The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries,” writes Allen. In other words, in his assessment, heavy lockdowns do not meaningfully reduce the number of deaths in the areas where they are implemented, when compared to areas where lockdowns were not implemented or as stringent.”49) The Anti-Lockdown Movement Is Large and Growing, Tucker, 2021“The lesson: lockdown policies failed to protect the vulnerable and otherwise did little to nothing actually to suppress or otherwise control the virus. AIER has assembled fully 35 studies revealing no connection between lockdowns and disease outcomes. In addition, the Heritage Foundation has published an outstanding roundup of the Covid experience, revealing that lockdowns were largely political theater distracting from what should have been good public health practice.” 50) The Ugly Truth About The Covid-19 Lockdowns, Hudson, 2021“By following the data and official communications from global organisations, PANDA unravels what transpired that led us into deleterious lockdowns, which continue to have enormous negative impacts across the world.”51) The Catastrophic Impact of Covid Forced Societal Lockdowns, Alexander, 2020“It is also noteworthy that these irrational and unreasonable restrictive actions are not limited to any one jurisdiction such as the US, but shockingly have occurred across the globe. It is stupefying as to why governments, whose primary roles are to protect their citizens, are taking these punitive actions despite the compelling evidence that these policies are misdirected and very harmful; causing palpable harm to human welfare on so many levels. It’s tantamount to insanity what governments have done to their populations and largely based on no scientific basis. None! In this, we have lost our civil liberties and essential rights, all based on spurious ‘science’ or worse, opinion, and this erosion of fundamental freedoms and democracy is being championed by government leaders who are disregarding the Constitutional (USA) and Charter (Canada) limits to their right to make and enact policy. These unconstitutional and unprecedented restrictions have taken a staggering toll on our health and well-being and also target the very precepts of democracy; particularly given the fact that this viral pandemic is no different in overall impact on society than any previous pandemics. There is simply no defensible rationale to treat this pandemic any differently.”52) Cardiovascular and immunological implications of social distancing in the context of COVID-19, D’Acquisto, 2020“It is clear that social distancing measures such as lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic will have subsequent effects on the body including the immune and cardiovascular systems, the extent of which will be dependent on the duration of such measures. The take-home message of these investigations is that social interaction is an integral part of a wide range of conditions that influence cardiovascular and immunological homeostasis.”53) A Statistical Analysis of COVID-19 and Government Protection Measures in the U.S., Dayaratna, 2021“Our analysis demonstrates that the time from a state’s first case to voluntary changes in residence mobility, which occurred before the imposition of shelter-in-place orders in 43 states, indeed quelled the time to reach the maximum growth in per capita cases. On the other hand, our analysis also indicates that these behavioral changes were not significantly effective in quelling mortality… our simulations find a negative effect of the time from a state’s first case to the imposition of shelter-in-place orders on the time to reach the specified per capita mortality thresholds. Our analysis also finds a slightly smaller negative effect on the time from a state’s first case to the imposition of prohibitions on gatherings above 500 people…. shelter-in-place orders can also have negative unforeseen health-related consequences, including the capacity to cause patients to avoid visits to doctors’ offices and emergency rooms. In addition, these policies can result in people, including those with chronic illnesses, skipping routine medical appointments, not seeking routine procedures to diagnose advanced cancer, not pursuing cancer screening colonoscopies, postponing non-emergency cardiac catheterizations, being unable to seek routine care if they experience chronic pain, and suffering mental health effects, among others…drug overdose deaths, alcohol consumption, and suicidal ideation have also been noted to have increased in 2020 compared to prior years.”54) Lockdowns in Taiwan: Myths Versus Reality, Gartz, 2021“Articles citing a “tightening” of rules only briefly acknowledge that Taiwan never locked down. Instead, they blame the increase in cases on a loosening of travel restrictions and on people’s becoming “more relaxed or careless as time goes by.” A closer look reveals that this harsh turn in restrictions consists of capping gatherings at 500 for outdoors and 100 for indoors to 10 and 5 respectively — more in line with gathering limits imposed by Western nations.The reality is that the hyperbolic 124 action items misrepresent the Taiwanese approach. Relative to other countries, Taiwan serves as a beacon of freedom: children still attended school, professionals continued to go to work, and businesspeople were able to keep their businesses open.”55) Lockdowns Need to Be Intellectually Discredited Once and For All, Yang, 2021“Lockdowns do not provide any meaningful benefit and they cause unnecessary collateral damage. Voluntary actions and light-handed accommodations to protect the vulnerable according to comprehensive analysis, not cherry-picked studies with overly short timelines, provide similar, if not better, virus mitigation compared to lockdown policies. Furthermore, contrary to what many keep trying to say, it is lockdowns that are the causal factor behind the unprecedented economic and social damage that has been dealt to society.”56) Canada’s COVID-19 Strategy is an Assault on the Working Class, Kulldorff, 2020“The Canadian COVID-19 lockdown strategy is the worst assault on the working class in many decades. Low-risk college students and young professionals are protected; such as lawyers, government employees, journalists, and scientists who can work from home; while older high-risk working-class people must work, risking their lives generating the population immunity that will eventually help protect everyone. This is backwards, leading to many unnecessary deaths from both COVID-19 and other diseases.”57) Our COVID-19 Plan would Minimize Mortality and Lockdown-induced Collateral Damage, Kulldorff, 2020“While mortality is inevitable during a pandemic, the COVID-19 lockdown strategy has led to more than 220,000 deaths, with the urban working class carrying the heaviest burden. Many older workers have been forced to accept high mortality risk or increased poverty, or both. While the current lockdowns are less strict than in March, the lockdown and contact tracing strategy is the worst assault on the working class since segregation and the Vietnam War.Lockdown policies have closed schools, businesses and churches, while not enforcing strict protocols to protect high-risk nursing home residents. University closures and the economic displacement caused by lockdowns have led millions of young adults to live with older parents, increasing regular close interactions across generations.”58) The costs are too high; the scientist who wants lockdown lifted faster; Gupta, 2021“It’s becoming clear that a lot of people have been exposed to the virus and that the death rate in people under 65 is not something you would lock down the economy for,” she says. “We can’t just think about those who are vulnerable to the disease. We have to think about those who are vulnerable to lockdown too. The costs of lockdown are too high at this point.”59) Review of the Impact of COVID-19 First Wave Restrictions on Cancer Care, Collateral Global, Heneghan; 2021“Restrictive measures in the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic in 2019-20 led to wide-scale, global disruption of cancer care. Future restrictions should consider disruptions to the cancer care pathways and plan to prevent unnecessary harms.”60) German Study Finds Lockdown ‘Had No Effect’ on Stopping Spread of Coronavirus, Watson, 2021“Stanford researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”61) Lockdown will claim the equivalent of 560,000 lives because of the health impact of the ‘deep and prolonged recession it will cause’, expert warns, Adams/Thomas/Daily Mail, 2020“Lockdowns will end up claiming the equivalent of more than 500,000 lives because of the health impact of the ‘deep and prolonged recession it will cause.”62) Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns, Glen, 2021“Likewise, a 2020 paper about quarantines published in The Lancet states: “Separation from loved ones, the loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can, on occasion, create dramatic effects. Suicide has been reported, substantial anger generated, and lawsuits brought following the imposition of quarantine in previous outbreaks. The potential benefits of mandatory mass quarantine need to be weighed carefully against the possible psychological costs.”Yet, when dealing with Covid-19 and other issues, politicians sometimes ignore this essential principle of sound decision-making. For a prime example, NJ Governor Phil Murphy recently insisted that he must maintain a lockdown or “there will be blood on our hands.” What that statement fails to recognize is that lockdowns also kill people via the mechanisms detailed above… In other words, the anxiety from reactions to Covid-19—such as business shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, media exaggerations, and legitimate concerns about the virus—will extinguish at least seven times more years of life than can possibly be saved by the lockdowns.Again, all of these figures minimize deaths from anxiety and maximize lives saved by lockdowns. Under the more moderate scenarios documented above, anxiety will destroy more than 90 times the life saved by lockdowns.”63) The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence, Brooks, 2020“Reported negative psychological effects including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. Stressors included longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. Some researchers have suggested long-lasting effects. In situations where quarantine is deemed necessary, officials should quarantine individuals for no longer than required, provide clear rationale for quarantine and information about protocols, and ensure sufficient supplies are provided. Appeals to altruism by reminding the public about the benefits of quarantine to wider society can be favourable.”64) Lockdown ‘had no effect’ on coronavirus pandemic in Germany, Huggler, 2021“A new study by German scientists claims to have found evidence