Lockdowns as Public Health Policy
World Economic Forum Campaign for Lockdowns
WEF- Why lockdowns can halt the spread of COVID-19 21 Mar 2020 by Samantha Sault - Writer, Washington DC and Geneva
(selected highlights.. see link for Neil Ferguson charts) The UK, US, EU and many other countries are currently in some degree of “lockdown,” with restaurants and bars, shops, schools and gyms closed, and citizens required, or at least strongly encouraged, to stay home to avoid catching or spreading COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
Researchers are well on their way to discovering vaccines and treatments for the virus, but even in a best-case scenario, these are likely to be 12-18 months away.
Until then, extreme social distancing is pretty much the only intervention available to help individuals stay healthy, and to break the chain of transmission - giving more vulnerable populations a fighting chance of surviving this pandemic.
But how exactly does a lockdown work? And why is it important for even younger and healthier people, who face a lower risk of severe illness, to remain in their homes as much as possible?
The goal; R<1
The purpose of a lockdown, explains a new study from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team, is to reduce reproduction – in other words, to reduce the number of people each confirmed case infects. 1)
The goal is to keep reproduction, or “R,” below one (R<1) – with each case infecting fewer than one other person, on average.
The authors of the study say there are two routes to try to get there;
Mitigation, “slowing but not necessarily stopping epidemic spread – reducing peak healthcare demand while protecting those most at risk of severe disease from infection.” This is done by isolating suspected cases and their households, and social distancing the elderly and people at highest risk of serious illness.
Suppression, or basically, lockdown, which “aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels” by social distancing the entire population “indefinitely” and closing schools and universities.
The study’s models show that, painful as lockdown may be for many of us, it works.
Without any lockdown or social distancing measures, we can expect peak mortality in approximately three months. In this scenario, 81% of the UK and US populations would be infected, with 510,000 dying in the UK and 2.2 million dying in the US….
So, have the lockdowns worked?
Starting 23 January 2020, the Chinese government locked down Hubei Province, including Wuhan, the city of 11 million where the outbreak started. They halted transportation in and out and barred tens of millions of people from working or going to school and closed all shops except those selling food or medicine. In some areas, residents were even forced to limit trips to the store, or order supplies for delivery.
This unprecedented lockdown of tens of millions of people was considered a “vast experiment” – but it may have worked. Following the lockdown, cases began to slow. On 19 March, China’s National Health Commission reported no new confirmed infections in Hubei.2)
Historical Evidence
Influenza
Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team
- 16 March 2020 Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team
- DOI; https://doi.org/10.25561/77482 Page 1 of 20
- Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-
- 19 mortality and healthcare demand
- Neil Ferguson, Daniel Laydon, Gemma Nedjati-Gilani, Natsuko Imai, Kylie Ainslie, Marc Baguelin,
- Sangeeta Bhatia, Adhiratha Boonyasiri, Zulma Cucunubá, Gina Cuomo-Dannenburg, Amy Dighe, Ilaria
- Dorigatti, Han Fu, Katy Gaythorpe, Will Green, Arran Hamlet, Wes Hinsley, Lucy C Okell, Sabine van
- Elsland, Hayley Thompson, Robert Verity, Erik Volz, Haowei Wang, Yuanrong Wang, Patrick GT Walker,
- Caroline Walters, Peter Winskill, Charles Whittaker, Christl A Donnelly, Steven Riley, Azra C Ghani.
- On behalf of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team
- Correspondence; neil.ferguson@imperial.ac.uk
“Disease Progression and Healthcare Demands p. 5 Analyses of data from China as well as data from those returning on repatriation flights suggest that 40-50% of infections were not identified as cases12. This may include asymptomatic infections, mild disease and a level of under-ascertainment. We therefore assume that two-thirds of cases are sufficiently symptomatic to self-isolate (if required by policy) within 1 day of symptom onset, and a mean delay from onset of symptoms to hospitalisation of 5 days.”
Results p. 6
In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months (Figure 1A). In such scenarios, given an estimated R0 of 2.4, we predict 81% of the GB and US populations would be infected over the course of the epidemic. Epidemic timings are approximate given the limitations of surveillance data in both countries: The epidemic is predicted to be broader in the US than in GB and to peak slightly later. This is due to the larger geographic scale of the US, resulting in more distinct localised epidemics across states (Figure 1B) than seen across GB…. we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US, not accounting for the potential negative effects of health systems being overwhelmed on mortality.3)
Bad Lockdown Data Models and Public Panic
UK Telegraph
Coding that led to lockdown was 'totally unreliable' and a 'buggy mess', say experts
The code, written by Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London, was impossible to read, scientists claim By Hannah Boland and Ellie Zolfagharifard 16 May 2020
The Covid-19 modelling that sent Britain into lockdown, shutting the economy and leaving millions unemployed, has been slammed by a series of experts.
Professor Neil Ferguson's computer coding was derided as “totally unreliable” by leading figures, who warned it was “something you wouldn’t stake your life on“.
The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.
“In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”
The comments are likely to reignite a row over whether the UK was right to send the public into lockdown, with conflicting scientific models having suggested people may have already acquired substantial herd immunity and that Covid-19 may have hit Britain earlier than first thought. Scientists have also been split on what the fatality rate of Covid-19 is, which has resulted in vastly different models. 4)
The Guardian
UK Covid cases could hit 200,000 a day, says scientist behind lockdown strategy This article is more than 1 month old
Prof Neil Ferguson says 100,000 cases after England unlocks are ‘almost inevitable’ and may double
The Guardian by Natalie Grover Science correspondent - Sun 18 Jul 2021
Covid cases could hit 200,000 a day in the UK this year and cause “major disruption” to the NHS, according to the scientist whose initial modelling helped shape Britain’s coronavirus lockdown strategy.
Prof Neil Ferguson said it was “almost inevitable” that Monday’s final phase of unlocking would bring on 100,000 daily cases, with about 1,000 hospitalisations – despite roughly half the UK being fully vaccinated. He added that he could foresee a situation in which the case rate expands to twice the size.
“The real question is do we get to double that – or even higher,” he told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday,. “And that’s where the crystal ball starts to fail. I mean, we could get to 2,000 hospitalisations a day, 200,000 cases a day – but it’s much less certain.” 5)
Covid19Up
Neil Ferguson’s Latest Faux Pas in a Long Line of Fear-Driven Predictions The real story here is that Neil Ferguson is somehow still regarded to have any credibility whatsoever.
August 2021 By Don Via, Jr. In July, Professor Ferguson once again postulated the dire consequences of lifting the UK’s lockdown restrictions. He stated it was “almost inevitable” that doing so would bring more than 100,000 new COVID-19 cases a day—potentially up to 200,000.
Ferguson had to rescind that prognosis just a few weeks later, as the severity of the surge has been lackluster at best. After a slight spike above 50,000 cases, the majority of which were mild or asymptomatic, the number quickly settled down to 27,335 cases by August 9. Also mostly asymptomatic or mild.6)
BBC
Covid: More measures needed to limit hospitalisations - Sage scientists Dec 18m 2021 By Jim Reed - BBC News
More stringent restrictions need to be brought in “very soon” in England if ministers want to stop hospital admissions reaching 3,000 a day, the government's scientific advisers say.
The BBC has seen leaked minutes of a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies held on Thursday.
The document says there are “many uncertainties” about the future path of hospitalisations linked to Omicron.
It comes as the UK's four nations are to hold a Cobra meeting this weekend. Timing of measures 'crucial'
According to the leaked minutes, the SAGE advisers say that without intervention measures beyond the Plan B rules currently in place, modelling indicates that hospital admissions could peak at “at least” 3,000 a day in England.
The number of people requiring treatment in hospital has been rising, with admissions being between 800 and 900 every day in the past week.
The current Plan B rules for England include Covid passes for certain events, face masks in more places and people being urged to work from home if they can.
The other nations of the UK had already brought in similar rules - and Scotland has gone further by asking people to limit social contact to three households at a time in the run-up to Christmas. Wales has also ordered nightclubs to close from 27 December.
The Sage minutes say: “If the aim is to reduce the levels of infection in the population and prevent hospitalisations reaching these levels, more stringent measures would need to be implemented very soon.”
The record of the meeting goes on to say that measures equivalent to those in place after Step Two or Step One of the roadmap in England, if enacted early enough, “could substantially reduce the peak in hospital admissions and infections compared with Plan B alone”.
Step One and Two of the roadmap for easing lockdown - which was in place in England in the Spring - banned indoor social contact and indoor hospitality. Step Three allowed six people, or two households, to meet indoors and indoor hospitality could reopen.
“The timing of such measures is crucial,” say the Sage minutes. “Delaying until 2022 would greatly reduce the effectiveness of such interventions and make it less likely that these would prevent considerable pressure on health and care settings.” 7)
Lockdowns: The Great Gaslighting
The lockdowns of 2020 were very real. And few opposed them.
Substack - The New Normal - Michael P Senger - October 28, 2022
More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.
But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.
The narrative now goes something like this; Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.
Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.
As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in meticulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported when they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty and hunger. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdowns—let alone the economic damage—would be six times greater than the benefit.
Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, key officials, media entities, billionaires and international organizations advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date. The resulting scenes were horrific and dystopian.8)