Death By Lockdown

I almost don’t blame people who are unaware of this information, because you have to go to the UK, usually, or the international press in general, to find it. But here is some of the collateral damage caused by lockdowns.

(1) In the UK, cancer authorities have been warning that the lockdowns will wind up leading to as many or more avoidable cancer deaths than COVID deaths there — as many as 60,000, according to one estimate.

The UK’s Sunday Express – not exactly some obscure dispatch – reports that increased cancer fatalities will result from the redeployment of health resources caused by COVID hysteria. The BBCsays the same. In fact, says Richard Sullivan, a professor of cancer and global health at King’s College London and director of its Institute of Cancer Policy:

The number of deaths due to the disruption of cancer services is likely to outweigh the number of deaths from the coronavirus itself. The cessation and delay of cancer care will cause considerable avoidable suffering. Cancer screening services have stopped, which means we will miss our chance to catch many cancers when they are treatable and curable, such as cervical, bowel and breast. When we do restart normal service delivery after the lockdown is lifted, the backlog of cases will be a huge challenge to the healthcare system.

According to the Daily Mail on October 6:

Vital operations were cancelled and patients missed out on potentially life-saving therapy in the spring because tackling Covid-19 became the sole focus of the health service, instead of cancer and other cruel diseases. 

Almost 2.5 million people missed out on cancer screening, referrals or treatment at the height of lockdown, even though the NHS was never overwhelmed — despite fears it would be crippled by the pandemic.

Experts now fear the number of people dying as a result of delays triggered by the treatment of coronavirus patients could even end up being responsible for as many deaths as the pandemic itself.

(2) United Nations report in April warned that economic hardship generated by the radical interruptions of commerce could result in hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020. The report further warned that 42 million to 66 million children could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis.

Even The Atlantic had to admit, “When you ask them to stay home, in many cases you’re asking them to starve.”

And in the UK, The Telegraph says, “The absurd demand that developing countries adopt economically disastrous lockdowns is driving untold misery.”

(3) The Well Being Trust in Oakland, California, released a study that seeks to determine how many “deaths of despair” (from drug or alcohol abuse or suicide) will occur as a result of the pandemic, including the lockdowns. Their estimate, according to CBS News: about 75,000.

(4) UNICEF warned of 1.2 million child deaths — “visits to health care centers are declining due to lockdowns, curfews and transport disruptions, and as communities remain fearful of infection.”

(5)Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta has pointed to warnings by global authorities that as many as 130 million people are at risk of starvation thanks to the possibility of famine in several dozen places around the world, brought on by lockdown-induced disruptions of supply chains.

(6) Suicidal ideation is massively on the rise in the United States.

The federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports on percentages of people who have considered suicide within the previous 12 months, organized by age.

People between the ages of 18 and 25 fluctuate between 6.8 percent and 11 percent.

Now, from the Centers for Disease Control, we find that percentage (for the 18-24 group) has leaped to 25.5 percent — and this survey asks not about the previous 12 months, like the earlier one, but whether they’ve considered suicide just in the past 30 days.

(7) The CDC estimates 93,814 non-COVID “excess deaths” this year, including 42,427 from cardiovascular conditions, 10,686 from diabetes, and 3646 from cancer, and many of these were caused by the cancellation of “nonessential” care in the midst of the COVID panic.

Meanwhile, almost no American hospitals were actually “overwhelmed” during 2020, despite what your Facebook friends told you. In April alone, 1.4 million health care workers were furloughed because the hospitals were empty. In May NPR reported on those field hospitals that were assembled to take care of the surge of people who were supposed to appear: “U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients.”

(8) According to The Lancet, “During lockdown people with dementia or severe mental illness had a higher risk of excess death.” Dementia patients had a 53% greater chance of death because of lockdowns and elderly patients with severe mental illness had a 123% greater chance of death.

(9) As a direct result of the lockdowns, the New York Times reports that there will be 1.4 million excess tuberculosis deaths, half a million excess HIV deaths, and 385,000 malaria deaths.

See why “public health” shouldn’t be confused with “the monomaniacal fixation on one virus”?

Meanwhile, if you look at the charts for country after country and state after state, you will not be able to tell which ones locked down, how hard they locked down, when they lifted their lockdown, whether they had a mask mandate, when they imposed such a mandate, and when and if they lifted that mandate. The charts show zero correlation. Zero.

For example: for masks, click here. “If we only wore masks at the beginning this wouldn’t have happened” is hereby refuted.

Non-pharmaceutical interventions — voodoo, we might well call it now — appear to have accomplished nothing, apart from creating all this avoidable misery around the world.

This is why, instead, you should listen to these professors from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford.

Read the original article here, and many others (and watch his many videos) at TomWoods.com. 

Tom Woods “rings the bell” on the disconnect between the data and the policy in this must-watch video:

Related articles:

Stats Hold a Surprise: Lockdowns May Have Had Little Effect on COVID-19 Spread, by the National Review, October 4, 2020.

Evidence of collateral damage from lockdowns consolidates, by Alliance for Natural Health International

Read Tom Woods’ free eBook Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About the Lockdown.

 

Featured image at top by Priyam Patel from Pixabay