[T]he Government overlooked two vital pieces of evidence that raise frightening questions about the impact of its draconian lockdown strategy – and whether lockdown was ever even necessary.
Collateral Damage
Data from official sources show that the lockdown measures are doing more harm than COVID-19 itself.
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A decade of painstaking fiscal repair-work was undone within the first few hours; and that was just the start. The direct cost of Britain’s stimulus package is £70 billion which, as Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, confirmed on Friday, is considerably higher than in other countries.
The indirect costs are harder to assess, but will surely be gargantuan. The first nine days of the crisis pushed half a million more people onto the dole, wiping out five years of rising employment. With every day that our shops remain shut, the benefits bill will rise – just as tax revenues dry up.
I don’t think we yet understand how vast a hit we are taking. It has become commonplace to compare the coronavirus to the Second World War, but our domestic economy continued to function even at the height of the Blitz. Shops, pubs and schools stayed open, and cinemas were closed for only two weeks.
Lockdown might actually be slowing the tendency of this new disease to get milder with time. Which raises an important question: might the lockdown be causing more harm than good.
Two and a half thousand years ago Hippocrates told us that medicine should ‘First, do no harm’, and this is still a key tenet. Making absolutely sure that the treatment is better than the cure takes a long time and requires that we carefully examine as many angles as possible. Unfortunately, in the rush to apply the lockdown treatment for Covid, this principle was the first casualty.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/could-the-lockdown-have-side-effects-no-one-has-considered
You can see there isn’t any hope at all for coronavirus. It won’t even make the top 10. It’ll be lucky to make it even a noticeable blip once 2020 is over.
Why? See, what happens is that these bugs come, kill off a bunch of people. But many of these, since they’re old, would have died this year anyway. Sad, but true. That means if you’re looking for 2020 to be a banner year, don’t bother.
This will affect the road haulage industry substantially, which already suffers from a HGV driver shortage of 59 thousand drivers according to an October 2019 FTA report. Government statistics show that there are approximately 300 thousand HGV drivers in the UK3, meaning if 20% of drivers are off sick at once, this will effectively temporarily double the driver shortage to 120 thousand. What this could mean on a short-term basis is that there is a marked increase in subcontracting out jobs to other hauliers, as some hauliers will be much harder hit than others in terms of driver numbers – due to various factors such as regional considerations and timing.
This video has been removed by YouTube so a Bitchute mirror is provided below. Please wait after pressing the play button. It may take longer than usual to load the video.
- Professor Neil Ferguson was not doing science.
- Lockdowns are worse than useless.
- It was known to everyone that the lockdown would cause a catastrophe.
- Isolating nursing homes would have prevented the load of hospitals.
- The lockdown approach taken by most governments was a human catastrophe that should never have happened.
- All we have done is slowed the spread of herd immunity and increased the risk to the elderly.
- We have wasted a lot of time, money and lives.
- The spread of respiratory diseases are predictable and relatively short.
- Bill Gate’s comments about the need to lockdown until a vaccine is ready is absurd and has nothing to do with reality.
- We don’t need a vaccine for COVID-19.
- “I don’t know where the government finds these so-called experts who very obviously don’t understand the very basics of epidemiology.”
- Tragic stories from some doctors are not representative of the general experience. We don’t stop living our lives because something goes wrong in a particular place.
- The Swedish approach shows that the draconian measures taken in other countries were unnecessary.
- We may see a ‘Second Wave’ rebound but it may be low.
- There is no reason to believe that COVID-19 will be fundamentally different from other coronaviruses.
- Having a novel virus is not novel.
- We have no science about the effect of social distancing.
- The COVID-19 disaster is a failure of the people to take control of the government.
- There is no reason to wait before opening up schools and businesses.
…this isn’t proof, but it’s pretty good evidence the lockdowns caused a lot of harm. Physical harm, at the least.
A frontline nurse working in New York on coronavirus patients claims the city is killing sufferers by putting them on ventilators, advocating against them
The nurse persuaded a friend, a nurse practitioner who is not working on coronavirus patients, to make the video to get the word out
‘It’s a horror movie. Not because of the disease, but the way it is being handled,’ the frontline nurse said through the friend, who only was identified as Sara NP
Sara said COVID-19 patients are placed on ventilators rather than less invasive CPAP or BiPAP machines due to fears about the virus spreading
She explained: ‘The ventilators have high pressure, which then causes barotrauma, it causes trauma to the lungs’
More than 12,000 people have died from the virus in NYC, with another 4,300 dying in other parts of the Empire State
New York emergency room doctor Cameron Kyle-Sidell stepped down this month because he didn’t want to follow the hospital’s ventilator protocol
Republican Minnesota Senator Scott Jensen told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that Medicare pays hospitals three times as much if patients are placed on ventilators
When foreign commentators discuss Sweden’s light-touch response to Covid-19, they tend to adopt an affronted tone. Which is, on the surface, surprising. You’d think everyone would be willing the Nordic country to succeed. After all, if Sweden can come through the epidemic without leaving a smoking crater where its economy used to be, there is hope for the rest of the world. So far, many signs appear encouraging. The disease seems to be following the same basic trajectory in Sweden as elsewhere.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/25/sweden-succeeds-lockdownswill-have-nothing/
A new analysis by Edge Health, a leading provider of data to NHS trusts, warns that a second and then a third wave of “non-corona” deaths are about to hit Britain. Unless radical solutions can be found to resume normal service and slash waiting lists, the NHS may be forced to institute a formal regime of rationing.
Over long periods of time, social isolation can increase the risk of a variety of health problems, including heart disease, depression, dementia, and even death. A 2015 meta-analysis of the scientific literature by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a research psychologist at Brigham Young University, and colleagues determined that chronic social isolation increases the risk of mortality by 29%.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/we-are-social-species-how-will-social-distancing-affect-us
Unlike covid-19, this is a killer we have created and that we can do something about. Boris called the first lockdown because the science pointed that way at that time, and the First Secretary, Dominic Raab, presumably renewed it because Boris was ill. But whoever renews the lockdown again would simply have blood on their hands.
The political reality is that the government has boxed itself in by allowing policy to be dictated by opinion-poll; it bowed to pressure to copy everyone else (apart from the free Swedes), then had to scare the public into compliance with the lockdown they’d demanded, and now the public is indeed scared. But look purely at the likely toll: even if declaring lockdown was originally the right move, leaving it in place can certainly be the wrong move. Protect the vulnerable, sure, but lift the lockdown: back to Plan A.
https://thecritic.co.uk/its-hurting-but-its-just-not-working/
Natalie Wolfson, 85, a resident at Westacres Care Home in East Renfrewshire, passed away the day after her GP allegedly asked for her to be admitted to hospital for hydration and pain relief after she fell and fractured her upper arm.
Westacres Care Home manager Linda Carruthers told Channel 4 News Scotland Correspondent Ciaran Jenkins she believed Natalie, who also had suspected Covid-19 symptoms, died as a consequence of being refused admission to the hospital.
Businesses are being discreetly advised by ministers on how to get people back to work in the coming days and weeks amid growing concerns over the economic impact of the lockdown.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/04/24/government-tells-uk-businesses-time-get-back-work/
The quality and quantity of individuals’ social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality.
Update 05 May 2020: Original video was removed from YouTube. Below is the mirror on Bitchute.
The world has never faced a hunger emergency like this, experts say. It could double the number of people facing acute hunger to 265 million by the end of this year.
The coronavirus has sometimes been called an equalizer because it has sickened both rich and poor, but when it comes to food, the commonality ends. It is poor people, including large segments of poorer nations, who are now going hungry and facing the prospect of starving.
Tony Heller compares COVID-19 with other pandemics and explains why the lockdown may create an even more devastating second wave.
Medical professionals say there never was a surge, hospital activity is at a low and we’re in danger of losing our capacity to deal with the second wave because we panicked.