It’s amazing how often Sweden still crops up in conversations. It didn’t impose tough lockdown, kept primary schools and core economic activities functioning, issued clear guidelines and relied on voluntary social distancing and personal hygiene practices to manage the crisis. For harsh lockdowns to be justified elsewhere, Sweden had to be discredited. Hence the harsh criticisms of Sweden’s approach last year by the New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today, CBS News and others.
But with Sweden’s demonstrable success, goalposts have shifted. Every time it’s mentioned as a counter to Europe’s high Covid-toll lockdown countries, the response now is: ‘But their Nordic neighbours did much better. Look at Denmark’. Let’s ‘interrogate’ this argument.
Mortality Rate
Public Health England, on their 21 March 2020 update for High consequence infectious diseases (HCID), stated, “As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease in the UK.”
Medical experts advise that COVID-19 is harmless to most people and we should tackle the disease just as we currently do with seasonal influenza.
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To this day, many commentators think that coercion is justified in defence of public health. Arguments over ‘vaccine passports’ and obligations to get vaccinated in contracts of employment are already raging. The voluntary principle, however, is a good one. It is what allowed Britain’s vaccination programme to move beyond the controversies of the 1880s, squaring the circle of vaccination and opposition by letting people opt out. Pointedly, the conscientious objection clause over time killed off Britain’s anti-vaccine campaigns by removing the causes célèbres of vaccine martyrdom.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/31/history-shows-us-why-vaccines-must-be-voluntary/
Just 851.2 people per 100,000 died last month – the lowest figure since the ONS started recording mortality rates in 2001. At the height of the first wave of the Covid pandemic last April, death rates were 1,859 per 100,000.
The latest figures show that 38,899 people died in April – 6.1 per cent fewer than the five-year average.
Just 2.4 per cent of all deaths mentioned Covid on the death certificate, a 77.6 per cent decrease from March and the largest month-on-month decline since the pandemic began.
The new data provide more evidence that the NHS is in little danger of being overwhelmed in the near future, with deaths from most causes lower than normal. Covid is now the ninth most common cause of death in England and Wales, behind conditions including heart disease, dementia, several cancers and influenza.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/20/death-rate-england-lowest-since-records-began/
There have been at least seven peer-reviewed studies which look at the question of lockdowns from a data point of view, and all of them come to the same basic conclusion: lockdowns do not have a statistically significant relationship with Covid cases or deaths. Here is a list of them with a key quote for ease of reference.
- “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.” “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. CESifo Economic Studies March 29th, 2021.
- “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.” “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, November 19th, 2020.
- “Lockdowns do not reduce COVID-19 deaths.” “Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response” by John Gibson. New Zealand Economic Papers, August 25th, 2020.
- “While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs.” “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, January 5th, 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 behaviour, and small but adverse effects on the economy.” “Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Christopher R. Berry, Anthony Fowler, Tamara Glazer, Samantha Handel-Meyer, and Alec MacMillen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, April 13th, 2021.
- “We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analysed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline. In the restrictive and global comparisons, only 3% and 1.6% of the comparisons were significantly different, respectively.” “Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study,” by R. F. Savaris, G. Pumi, J. Dalzochio & R. Kunst. Scientific Reports (Nature), March 5th, 2021.
- “Full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.” “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine (The Lancet) 25 (2020) 100464, July 21st, 2020.
Deaths in the UK from 1990 to 2020 – ONS
A table of the yearly death rates per year in the U.K since 1990 up until the end of December 2020.
Year | Number of deaths |
Population (Thousands) |
Crude mortality rate (per 100,000 population) |
Age-standardised mortality rate (per 100,000 population) |
---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | 608,002 | 59,829 | 1,016.20 | 1,043.50 |
2019 | 530,841 | 59,440 | 893.1 | 925 |
2018 | 541,589 | 59,116 | 916.1 | 965.4 |
2017 | 533,253 | 58,745 | 907.7 | 965.3 |
2016 | 525,048 | 58,381 | 899.3 | 966.9 |
2015 | 529,655 | 57,885 | 915 | 993.2 |
2014 | 501,424 | 57,409 | 873.4 | 953 |
2013 | 506,790 | 56,948 | 889.9 | 985.9 |
2012 | 499,331 | 56,568 | 882.7 | 987.4 |
2011 | 484,367 | 56,171 | 862.3 | 978.6 |
2010 | 493,242 | 55,692 | 885.7 | 1,017.10 |
2009 | 491,348 | 55,235 | 889.6 | 1,033.80 |
2008 | 509,090 | 54,842 | 928.3 | 1,091.90 |
2007 | 504,052 | 54,387 | 926.8 | 1,091.80 |
2006 | 502,599 | 53,951 | 931.6 | 1,104.30 |
2005 | 512,993 | 53,575 | 957.5 | 1,143.80 |
2004 | 514,250 | 53,152 | 967.5 | 1,163.00 |
2003 | 539,151 | 52,863 | 1,019.90 | 1,232.10 |
2002 | 535,356 | 52,602 | 1,017.70 | 1,231.30 |
2001 | 532,498 | 52,360 | 1,017.00 | 1,236.20 |
2000 | 537,877 | 52,140 | 1,031.60 | 1,266.40 |
1999 | 553,532 | 51,933 | 1,065.80 | 1,320.20 |
1998 | 553,435 | 51,720 | 1,070.10 | 1,327.20 |
1997 | 558,052 | 51,560 | 1,082.30 | 1,350.80 |
1996 | 563,007 | 51,410 | 1,095.10 | 1,372.50 |
1995 | 565,902 | 51,272 | 1,103.70 | 1,392.00 |
1994 | 551,780 | 51,116 | 1,079.50 | 1,374.90 |
1993 | 578,512 | 50,986 | 1,134.70 | 1,453.40 |
1992 | 558,313 | 50,876 | 1,097.40 | 1,415.00 |
1991 | 570,044 | 50,748 | 1,123.30 | 1,464.30 |
1990 | 564,846 | 50,561 | 1,117.20 | 1,462.60 |
According to the most recently peer-reviewed paper on Covid-19, how many people who get the virus do you think survive? Go on, take a wild guess. Eighty percent? Ninety percent? Ninety-five percent? Nope. Precisely 99.8 percent live to see another day. Under-70s have an even higher survival rate – 99.96. Put another way, they have a 0.04 chance of dying; less than half of half a per cent.
And many of those are already seriously or even terminally ill from other conditions.
The Office for National Statistics said this week that far from a “second wave”, figures show all UK deaths are currently just 1.5 percent above average, and on a normal trajectory for early autumn.
[Hospital admissions] stubbornly bump along near the bottom of the chart.The co-relationship between diagnosis and death has radically changed in the last six months as treatments dramatically improve.
Telegraph Cartoonist Bob Moran makes an interesting comment about this BBC News article.
This is a great example of how mad people (the BBC) have become. In attempting to demonstrate how serious the current situation is, they accidentally show that everything is completely normal and remind us that when things were actually bad, we didn’t even notice.
@bobscartoons on Twitter, 29 January 2021
Number of deaths, crude and age-standardised mortality rates from 1938 to 2020. Age-standardised mortality rates start in 1942.
Ivor Cummins aka the Fat Emperor – gives James the lowdown on why you can’t trust anything our governments tell us about Covid-19. If you want the facts on Coronavirus – how deadly is it? do lockdowns and masks work? how does it compare with previous pandemics? – you’ve come to the right place
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- The mortality rate is below 0.2%.
- For most people the risk of dying if you get infected is less than one in 500 (and less than one in 3,000 if you’re below 70 years of age).
- The disease preferentially strikes people who are anyway very close to the end of life/
- The amount of lifetime lost when someone dies of the disease is usually small.
- 2020 will likely turn out to have been a very average year in terms of overall mortality.
- 98% of people who get covid are fully recovered within three months.
- There is no good evidence that covid results in long term health consequences.
- Chinese realized early on that covid-19 wasn’t very serious, no worse than a bad flu.
- China is still reporting less than 20 cases per day.
- China is claiming that less than 5,000 people have so far died of covid in China. That’s less than Sweden, a country with less than 1% of China’s population.
First COVID-19 outpatient study based on risk stratification and early antiviral treatment at the beginning of the disease.
Low-dose hydroxychloroquine combined with zinc and azithromycin was an effective therapeutic approach against COVID-19.
Significantly reduced hospitalisation rates in the treatment group.
Reduced mortality rates in the treatment group.
The unprecedented measures of universal lockdowns, tight institutional lockdowns of care homes, universal masking of the general population, obsession with surfaces and hands, and the accelerated vaccine deployment are contrary to known science, and contrary to recent leading studies. There has been government recklessness by action and negligence by omission. Institutional measures have been needed for a long time to stem corruption in both medicine and public health policy.
By plunging London into a Tier Three lockdown, the Government is going to do terrible harm to the city, the entire national economy, and to millions of lives.
No one can predict the number of people who will lose jobs, suffer poor mental health or who will have life-saving operations postponed until too late.
All we can say with any certainty is that all these things will happen, and not to a few isolated people. The harms caused by these new restrictions, like those caused by the previous over-reactions, will be immense.
- The Government is withholding much of the information we need to draw our own conclusions about better ways to handle the crisis.
- The weekly average number of Covid deaths in the capital is just over a tenth of what it was at its peak in April.
- Weekly average Covid admissions to London’s hospitals are a quarter of what were in the spring.
- The [UK Government’s] obsession with secrecy is not intended to hide the facts from enemy agents but from us, the general public.
- This disease is not like Spanish flu, or the plague. It does not sweep away young and old indiscriminately. In fact, many younger people – now more likely to catch Covid – will have it without even being aware. They will be infected but not affected.
- The average age of people dying with a Covid infection is 82 years and four months – 14 months more than the average life expectancy in Britain.
- In November the total number of deaths in London was very little different to the average over the past five years.
- Covid is a respiratory virus that spreads on the wind. Just look at the leaves blowing around – that’s what viral particles do when we walk past each other.
- Cloth or woven paper masks are no barrier to this tiny virus either, as shown by the world’s only controlled study, from Denmark, which found that they only made a small, ‘non-statistically-significant’ difference.
Children represented 1.1% (1,408/129,704) of SARS-CoV-2 positive cases between 16 January 2020 and 3 May 2020. In total, 540 305 people were tested for SARS-COV-2 and 129,704 (24.0%) were positive. In children aged <16 years, 35,200 tests were performed and 1408 (4.0%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 19.1%–34.9% adults. Childhood cases increased from mid-March and peaked on 11 April before declining. Among 2,961 individuals presenting with ARI in primary care, 351 were children and 10 (2.8%) were positive compared with 9.3%–45.5% in adults. Eight children died and four (case-fatality rate, 0.3%; 95% CI 0.07% to 0.7%) were due to COVID-19. We found no evidence of excess mortality in children.
Children accounted for a very small proportion of confirmed cases despite the large numbers of children tested. SARS-CoV-2 positivity was low even in children with ARI. Our findings provide further evidence against the role of children in infection and transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201124224223if_/https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/12/1180
- Despite the fearmongering, the number of Covid-19 deaths is significantly lower than the peak back in April
- Latest ONS estimate shows that in the week ending November 14, new infections were already levelling off
- GCHQ has embedded a team in Downing Street to provide Boris Johnson with real-time updates of Covid-19
- Analysts will sift through vast amounts of data to ensure Boris Johnson has the most up-to-date information
Results: Higher Covid death rates are observed in the [25/65°] latitude and in the [−35/−125°] longitude ranges. The national criteria most associated with death rate are life expectancy and its slowdown, public health context (metabolic and non-communicable diseases (NCD) burden vs. infectious diseases prevalence), economy (growth national product, financial support), and environment (temperature, ultra-violet index). Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.
Conclusion: 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. Inherent factors have predetermined the Covid-19 mortality: understanding them may improve prevention strategies by increasing population resilience through better physical fitness and immunity.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604339/full
- The vaccine reduces symptoms; may prevent infection but this has not been proven.
- Mass testing is not the way out and could be very problematic.
- Around 1% of the population are infected and probably have no symptoms.
- If you are under 65, there is less risk than the regular flu.
- The number of people dying is the same as any other year.
- People of dying of respiratory diseases is about the same.
- Covid deaths will continue to go up.
- Hospitals are less full because they’ve increased their capacity; they’re not struggling to cope.
- Prevalence for the virus has plateaued.
- We should continue to be careful but COVID-19 is ‘not a major player’