Statists around the United States are rushing to reimpose lockdowns around the country. Case in point is Gavin Newsom in California. On July 13, the California governor issued a new dictate ordering shopping malls, gyms, indoor church services, and nail salons to shut down. Of the new shut downs, the Sacramento Bee reported: “The closures will take place in counties that have been on the state’s monitoring list for three or more days. That’s a total of 30 counties, which now includes Placer, Sonoma, Sutter and Yuba counties. In total, the closure will impact 80 percent of Californians, the Democratic governor said.”
The reason cited for the reimposition of the lockdowns is the burgeoning number of COVID cases. However, there is also more testing taking place now than previously. Naturally, with a widespread virus, an increase in testing will uncover higher numbers of cases. While sometimes acknowledging this fact, mainstream media distributors of fear propaganda point out that it is also true that the rate of positives is also increasing, meaning, they say, that the virus is still spreading aggressively among the population.
Well, so what? Let’s look at some numbers.
As of July 13, the CDC is reporting that there have been a total of 3,296,599 cases of COVID-19 in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States is 329,950,969 as of the morning of July 14. As a percentage, then, just shy of one percent of the U.S. population has been infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to testing data reported by the CDC.
Also according to the CDC, there have been 134,884 deaths from COVID-19. As a percentage, this means about four percent of those infected have died. But this percentage is heavily skewed to those who are already elderly and who have other conditions that make them particularly susceptible to any viral illness, whether it be a cold, the flu, or COVID-19.
The American Council of Science and Health has taken CDC data collected from February 1 to June 17 and broken it down to show death rate by age group. They discovered that “deaths in young people (from babies to college students) are almost non-existent. The first age group to provide a substantial contribution to the death toll is 45-54 years, who contribute nearly 5% of all coronavirus deaths. More than 80% of deaths occur in people aged 65 and over. That increases to over 92% if the 55-64 age group is included.”
This data does not support the idea that lockdowns are a good approach to halting the disease. On the contrary, the numbers indicate that the most important thing to do to stop the disease from killing people is to protect the old and infirm. Of course, this is exactly what the states, mostly led by those with Democrat governors, didn’t do. They did the opposite.
On June 27, the New York Post ran a headline noting: “Almost half of US COVID-19 deaths are linked to nursing homes.”
Breaking this down, the Post reported: “In at least 24 states, the majority of deaths were nursing-home-related. New Hampshire recorded the largest percentage of nursing-home COVID-19 deaths, with 80 percent, or 293, of the state’s fatalities coming from the facilities. Rhode Island and Minnesota followed, each with 77 percent, according to the database, which includes stats from the facilities, along with local, state and federal governments.”
Worse, governors forced nursing homes to be exposed to the virus. Referring to the state of New York, the Post noted: “The state Department of Health issued a directive in March mandating that nursing homes could not refuse to take in recovering coronavirus patients coming from hospitals.”
Similar nursing home orders were issued by other state governments. In the Northeast, according to the Bucks County Courier Times, similar orders to that in New York were issued in Pennsylvania and several other states. These orders weren’t confined to the Northeast. States such as California and Michigan issued similar orders. Even the New York Times called this policy “Playing Russian Roulette.”
Such orders were criminally incompetent, at best. Regardless of disease, be it the cold, the flu, pneumonia, or any other, the elderly and those with signifiant health conditions that compromise their immune systems are always most at risk from serious consequences, up to and including death, from exposure to pathogens. Ordering nursing homes densely populated with these at-risk individuals to be exposed to COVID-19 was and is the best way to ensure a high death rate for the virus. And that is just what happened. To reiterate what the New York Post has noted: Nearly half of the US death toll could have been averted if these policies had not been put in place.
Note also, that the governors who have most fervently locked down the healthy, were by and large the same governors who purposely exposed the old and infirm.
Finally, let’s consider the infection fatality rate. Many studies, at this point, indicate that many more Americans have been exposed to the virus than previously thought or that testing indicates. “Our best estimate right now is that for every case that we’ve recorded, there actually were 10 other infections,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in June according to US News and World Report. Summing up CDC data on antibody test results, Jacob Sullum writing for Reason magazine noted: “Antibody test results from half a dozen parts of the country confirm that COVID-19 infections in the United States far outnumber confirmed cases. The ratio of estimated infections to known cases in these studies, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Friday, range from 6 to 1 in Connecticut as of early May to 24 to 1 in Missouri as of late April.”
As a result, officials now have a good grasp of the likely overall infection fatality rate for COVID-19. The CDC’s best current estimate for that number is 0.0065 — or .65 percent. Writing, again for Reason, Eugene Volokh puts it this way: “The 0.65% is the probability of dying once infected.”
Last, but not least, most people who are exposed to the virus will never get sick. As WebMD noted in June, “As many as 45% of people infected with COVID-19 have no symptoms.”
Clearly, the lockdowns were and are bad policy.
In total, here’s what we know about the disease impact of SARS-CoV-2: Nearly half of those who are infected will not get sick from the virus. In total, the vast majority of those who get infected will not die from the virus. Some, however, will die, and these are overwhelmingly those people who are elderly or already sick from some other cause.
From this information, we can conclude that lockdowns are worthless as a public health policy and that effective measures to decrease deaths would be those that protect the already sick and the elderly from exposure.
Worthless as they are as a public health policy, when viewed as general government policy, the lockdowns are much worse than worthless. They have thrown millions of people out of work, they have disrupted supply chains that put the global food supply at risk with the real possibility of significant famine as a result, they have put millions of people in a position where they cannot afford to pay their housing costs, and they have led to a massive increase in government spending and in inflation of the money supply — measures that threaten a deep economic crisis in the future.
The lockdowns, both past and contemplated for the future, will do nothing to end the spread of COVID-19. Instead, they will only deepen the crisis.
Photo: Maridav / iStock / Getty Images Plus
