Roman Baber (Ontario MPP for York Centre) | March 31, 2021:

“Lockdowns are far more harmful to public health than Covid (at least 5–10 times)”, Dr. Ari Joffe, Peds ICU & ID of AB.

My 1st citation in “Lockdown is Deadlier than Covid” is now peer reviewed. It’s fair & supported. Pls read & RT. #No3rdLockdown #onpoli

He is referring to:

COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink
by Ari R. Joffe
(Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Stollery Children’s Hospital, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada,
John Dossetor Health Ethics Center, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada)

Conclusion

The lockdowns implemented in the name of public health entailed trade-offs that were not adequately considered. Lockdowns may prevent some COVID-19 deaths by flattening the curve of cases and preventing stress on hospitals. At the same time, lockdowns cause severe adverse effects for many millions of people, disproportionately for those already disadvantaged among us. The collateral damage included severe losses to current and future wellbeing from unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, interrupted preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic healthcare, interrupted education, loneliness and deterioration of mental health, and intimate partner violence. The economic recession has been framed as the economy vs. saving lives from COVID-19, but this is a false dichotomy. The economic recession, through austerity in government spending on the social determinants of health, can be expected to cause far more loss of life and wellbeing over the long-run than COVID-19 can. We must open up society to save many more lives than we can by attempting to avoid every case (or even most cases) of COVID-19. It is past time to take an effortful pause, calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.

Just singling out a few points from the beginning of the report:

Early modeling made concerning predictions that induced fear . . . On March 16, 2020, the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team published modeling of the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand in the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) . . . The Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team extended this to the global impact of the pandemic on March 26, 2020, and estimated that without lockdowns there would be “7.0 billion infections and 40 million deaths globally this year (page 1)” . . .

There ensued a contagion of fear and policies across the world . . .

. . . There was talk of “acting together against a common threat,” “about seeming to reduce risks of infection and deaths from this one particular disease, to the exclusion of all other health risks or other life concerns,” with virtue signaling to the crowd, of “something they love to hate and be seen to fight against”. . .

. . . Even now, how a country “performed” is measured by COVID-19 cases and deaths without denominators, without other causes of deaths considered, without considering overall population health trade-offs “that cannot be wished away” (e.g., the future of our children from lack of education and social interaction, and “changes to our wealth-generating capacity that has to pay for future policies”) . . .

. . . All of this, even though in October 2019 the WHO published that for any future Influenza pandemic: travel-related measures are “unlikely to be successful… are likely to have prohibitive economic consequences (page 2)”; “[measures] not recommended in any circumstances: contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, border closure (page 3)”; social distancing measures (closures of workplace, avoiding crowding and closing public areas) “can be highly disruptive, and the cost of these measures must be weighed against their potential impact (page 4)”; and “border closures may be considered only by small island nations in severe pandemics… but must be weighed against potentially serious economic consequences (page 4)” . . .

That paragraph is referring to this document from the WHO:
Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic andpandemic influenza (original: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf?ua=1)

Page 2:

The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions. There have been a number of high quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission, although higher compliance in a severe pandemic might improve effectiveness. However, there are few RCTs [randomized controlled trials] for other NPIs, and much of the evidence base is from observational studies and computer simulations. School closures can reduce influenza transmission but would need to be carefully timed in order to achieve mitigation objectives. Travel-related measures are unlikely to be successful in most locations because current screening tools such as thermal scanners cannot identify pre-symptomatic infections and afebrile infections, and travel restrictions and travel bans are likely to have prohibitive economic consequences.

That’s a World Health Organization document.

Other factors leading to death are considered in the report. There is much more in the article that can be followed up on.