Two legs good - Four legs bad
The title of the UK Government policy brought in to attempt to deal with the spread of COVID-19 was “Staying at home and away from others (social distancing)” :
This policy is captured in a number of documents which if printed would cover 10 or more A4 pages and the now ubiquitous term “lockdown” is a form of shorthand used to grossly simplify and obscure the complexities and uncertainties inherent in the policy imposed. The UK Government poster captures the principle of "lockdown" in two words i.e “Stay Home” with the justification being captured in five “Protect the NHS - Save Lives”
Obviously STAY HOME was never intended literally - the vast majority of people had to leave their homes sometimes for numerous reasons - to get shopping, to visit the doctor, hospital, chemist, huge numbers of people had to pretty much go to work as normal to provide food, water, power, rubbish collection and sewage services, medical & emergency services, financial services critical infrastructure, transport services etc. and these are covered in the 10+ page policy definition .
What is totally absent from the Government presentation is any mention or recognition of the terrible damage that would necessarily result from the policy - the most immediate and severe being increased deaths due, not to COVID-19 but to reduced access to proper medical and emergency care compounded by the government deliberately increasing the fear of COVID to the extent it inhibited people from seeking what urgent medical attention and emergency care was still available with tragic consequences.
The decision to manipulate people including children and teenagers by increasing their sense of threat vastly beyond what the true threat to them was is captured in these extracts:
The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging
those complacent being defined as those who
still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group (8),
So for example a teenager whose risk of dying from COVID-19 (even assuming you trust PCR based diagnosis) was less than 1 in 200,000, and even lower for those in good health, had to be made, and have been kept, fearful not for their own good but for the the greater good ..
The Governments own document from July 2020 recognising that many deaths would indeed result directly from the lockdown ..
So while functioning as a Public Health Message the poster is also a piece of propaganda i.e :
" information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/propaganda
It is also analogous to a logical fallacy - the false dilemma - i.e.
"this insidious tactic has the appearance of forming a logical argument, but under closer scrutiny it becomes evident that there are more possibilities than the either/or choice that is presented. Binary, black-or-white thinking doesn't allow for the many different variables, conditions, and contexts in which there would exist more than just the two possibilities put forth. It frames the argument misleadingly and obscures rational, honest debate.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white
The government's lockdown policy which only presented positive benefits i.e. saved lives, protecting the NHS, was and always was going to be balanced by deaths caused by the policy and a vast range of very damaging impacts on the economy, education, jobs, personal freedoms, mental health etc that resulted from its introduction. This post is only going to focus on one negative consequence - the increase in non covid-19 deaths following the 1'st UK lockdown. The 1'st Lockdown - NonCOVID-19 Deaths
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) graph below shows the UK weekly deaths up to and covering the period of 1’st lockdown introduced on 23 March. It has been overlaid with the official number of weekly cases of COVID. Of particular note are the increase in non-COVID deaths above the 5 year average as identified by the ONS i.e those shown in the red hatched area covering March 27th till May 8th
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Figure 1 Weekly Deaths Overlaid with Cases
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The increase in non COVID-19 deaths over this period is 12,996. I am not aware of any credible explanation for the sudden and substantial rise other than that the excess 12,996 non COVID-19 deaths resulted primarily from the lockdown policies themselves. Over the same period the "confirmed" [see other posts] COVID deaths are 33,490. A large percentage 40%, or more, of these were in care homes and were also due in part to the known shortcomings in the government policies.
It is impossible even with hindsight to know how many of the care home deaths resulted directly from the lockdown policy and how many could have been avoided by a better policy. However if we assume even a quarter of the care home deaths could have been avoided i.e some three and a half thousand, we are left with a situation where government polices resulted in the deaths of in the region of 16,500 deaths people over a six week period.
I find it appalling in a society where the media, led by the BBC, gave blanket coverage to the peaceful natural death of one highly privileged 99 year old, that over 16 thousand deaths of its own citizens as a result of government policies can go unmentioned and without public debate. However it is sadly not surprising as the power of propaganda to justify pretty much anything from war to genocide is well established.
No option - What about Sweden ?
One of the few countries in Europe not to follow lockdown dogma was Sweden for which they were widely condemned and criticised by the mainstream media and lockdown policy advocates in UK and elsewhere e.g France. However comparing the figures on COVID deaths from France and UK to those of Sweden provides no direct support for claiming Sweden's policy was worse than Britain's - far from it - the figures on deaths per million were and remain consistently better than the UK's and overall than France's .
A typical example of criticism of Sweden is this france24 report on 10 May 2020 where a comparison is made only with other Nordic countries whose death rate was a lot less than Sweden
and thus arguing Sweden's "non lockdown" policy was fundamentally flawed. It's actually much more complicated as Sweden did implement a range of social distancing measures. However no comparison is given against UK and France where at that time Sweden had a lower death rate per million than either - from which you could argue it was UK and France's lockdowns that were flawed.
BBC reports around that time use the same france24 propaganda technique of only making comparisons that show Sweden in a bad light. The excess mortality statistics since the crisis started also provide no support for any claim that Sweden's weaker set of restrictions had a worse outturn than UK's more severe lockdown.
No Option - What about Brazil
Brazil came in for even more condemnation for refusal to follow lockdown dogma. A good example is this biased COVID alarmist propaganda by the ever reliable BBC from April 2020:
So how did the BBC's claimed "explosion" of Coronavirus in Brazil compare to the results of UK lockdown policy and Sweden's more pragmatic approach. ??
note: after dec 2020 COVID-19 vaccines became available with UK a front runner in the number of people vaccinated . No useful information about social distancing effectiveness can be gained from comparing UK and Brazil COVID deaths from that point onwards as Brazil has a much lower vaccination rate.
In practise any quantitative comparisons between countries are fraught with complexities e.g the average age of the population in Brazil is 33.2 years versus 40.6 in UK from which it would expected that the Brazilian population would be more resilient to COVID. On the other hand the percentage of people living in urban environments in Brazil is actually higher 87% versus 84% for UK which would tend to make them more vulnerable. Even so the actual figures on confirmed deaths from Sweden, Brazil and UK tend to contradict rather than support claim that lockdowns / partial social distancing were effective.
So what on earth was the basis for introducing a policy that it was known would directly cause thousands of deaths in the UK ??
Lies Damned Lies and Modelling
One of the key pillars of the justification for lockdown in UK was the modelling by Imperial College which predicted an unmitigated epidemic would cause 510,000 deaths in UK and 2.2 million in the USA .
As we saw above the actual numbers of deaths in UK due to Covid-19 over the 1st wave was less than 40 thousand some 470,000 less than those predicted. The UK government claim is that this was due to the lockdown but of course there is no proof that 470,000 lives were saved as it was only ever a prediction of how many may die. We will never actually know how many people would have died in UK from COVID-19 if the lockdown had not been implemented.
However it can be seen that even "without" a lockdown Brazil COVID-19 deaths per million were still lower than UK even after the 2nd wave had started in Q4 2020 so there is every reason to have serious doubt about the number of lives predicted to have been "saved" by lockdown.
When you look at the track record of Neil Ferguson's who led Imperial College's modelling it is so bad it's hard to even comprehend how decisions that would necessarily result in the deaths of thousands of people could be based on such inherently unreliable and inaccurate computer models.
note: The misuse of computer modelling in support a narrative ie to support propaganda will be the subject of a future post
Summary
The UK lockdown and deliberately induced fear to enhance compliance resulted in the deaths of thousands of UK citizens in the 1'st wave of COVID with many hundreds of thousands likely to be a longer term consequence. A key factor used to justify lockdown was unproven computer modelling that predicted that if we didn't lockdown over half a million people would die. The evidence to date strongly suggests that prediction was far, far too high and the justification for introducing polices that resulted in the deaths of 16 thousand people much weaker. The use of blatant propaganda and manipulation to promote compliance and avoid debate remains shocking and highly concerning.
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