The Years of Covid – Death by Lockdown

"If it even saves one life" is another slogan that's impossible to contend with. If locking down whole countries -and since most governments copied each other, entire continents- saves just one life, you'd be a heartless bastard to oppose it, right?

Yet lockdowns have huge costs, even if you only measure the direct ones, in human life.

All kinds of preventive medical inspections for lethal diseases were suspended or significantly reduced due to Covid measures. If an early cancerous tumor goes undetected in a patient during a routine screening, they can die several quality years (even quality decades) earlier. An excerpt from the Great Barrington Declaration says:

Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.

The exact casualty numbers will be challenging to obtain, as it'll be hard to pinpoint that a particular death happened because of missing a screening - and governments will have no incentive to measure or publish those numbers. One study estimates 3291–3621 additional deaths in the UK across four common cancer types within five years and 59 204–63 229 YLLs (Years of Lives Lost). Another one, in the US, paints an even more dire picture:

A recent study confirms that up to 78% of cancers were never detected due to missed screening over three months. If one extrapolates to the entire country, up to a million new cases or more over nine months will have gone undetected. That health disaster adds to missed critical surgeries, chemotherapy, organ transplants, presentations of pediatric illnesses, heart attack and stroke patients too afraid to call emergency services, and others, all well documented.

A typical phenomenon of Covid fear is people being reluctant to risk hospitalization for other, serious medical problems, for fear of catching the virus. A Denver doctor found that people stopped having heart attacks as soon as the stay-at-home orders began. He, and a few others, dug deeper:

Stauffer and his colleagues found that the number of people in Denver who died of cardiac arrests at home in the two weeks following the statewide stay-at-home order was greater than the total number of people who died of COVID-19 in the city during that time.

In the developing parts of the world, Unicef expects an additional 1.2 million child deaths, a 45 percent increase in child mortality. This is due to lockdowns imposed in many African countries (even though there wasn't even a pandemic in them) so that families couldn't take their children to vaccination spots.

The above are just the primary, direct effect of forced stay-at-home, don't-dare-to-open-your-nonessential-business orders. There are myriad other ways that lead to people dying or living a miserable life. An incredible amount of businesses needed to shut down, with dreams behind these ventures smashed: this also sent unemployment through the roof. Then there are the mental health issues: suicidal thoughts among young adults, substance abuse, and symptoms of depression all significantly increased.

The list could go and on. The cost of lockdowns is absolutely staggering: I very much recommend you to check out "Cost of Lockdowns - A Preliminary Report" which goes into further details (and lists other examples) on the points above.

Further reading