RIGHT SPEAK: Four Years On, COVID Damage Remains While Fauci & Co. Pay No Price; Covid Lessons Learned, Four Years Later, and other C-Virus related stories

NY POST: Four years on, COVID damage remains while Fauci & Co. pay no price:

We just passed the fourth anniversary of “15 Days To Slow the Spread,” the start of the COVID lockdowns that did damage from which we still haven’t recovered.

I’m embarrassed to admit I fell for it.

I was a COVID hawk in the early days. It seemed right at the time.

The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and they almost always downplayed bad things in China.

There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi and Bill de Blasio were telling us not to worry, to take cruises and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them. (Hey, I was right about that.)

They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, COVID’s mortality rate was significantly less than one-tenth of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly and those with heart failure and diabetes.

(And the deaths often resulted from too-aggressive use of ventilators, which are themselves quite dangerous.)

Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience and colossal economic destruction.

(Even “long COVID,” which we heard a lot about, turns out to be no different from the flu’s long-term consequences, scientists just confirmed.)

Then there were the deaths caused by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s program of moving still-contagious COVID patients into old-folks’ homes, exposing the most vulnerable people to infection.

In short, the government response to COVID was probably more destructive than the virus itself. --->READ MORE HERE

WSJ: Covid Lessons Learned, Four Years Later:

Mandatory lockdowns had almost no benefit—but did significant economic and health-related damage.

Four years ago this week Vice President Mike Pence announced the White House’s “15 days to slow the spread” campaign. What followed was the unprecedented use of lockdowns, school closings and other sweeping measures to mitigate Covid-19. Four years later, we know what many of us suspected then: None of those policies were successful, and many were gravely damaging.

The Covid health benefits of mandatory lockdowns were tiny. Lockdowns in the U.S. prevented between 4,000 and 16,000 Covid deaths. In an average year 37,000 Americans die from the flu, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lockdowns also failed to reduce infections more than a trivial amount, in part because people voluntarily alter their behavior when a bad bug is in the air. Coercive government policies generated few benefits—and massive costs.

Public-health agencies exacerbated the damage by failing to keep their heads and follow standard pandemic-management protocols. Before 2020, it was recognized that communities respond best to pandemics when government measures are only minimally disruptive. During Covid, however, officials junked that practice by green-lighting restrictive practices and intentionally stoking fear. That response overlaid enormous economic, social, educational and health harms on top of those caused by the virus.

Those harms are captured, in part, in excess deaths—the number beyond what would have been expected without a pandemic. Non-Covid excess deaths from lockdowns, the shutdown of non-Covid medical care, and societal panic are estimated at nearly 100,000 between April 2020 and at least the end of 2021. The number of lockdown and societal-disruption deaths since 2020 is likely around 400,000, as much as 100 times the number of Covid deaths the lockdowns prevented.

The best measure of health performance during the pandemic is all-cause excess mortality, which captures the overall number of deaths relative to the expected level, encompassing Covid and lockdown-related deaths. On this measure Sweden—which kept most schools open and avoided strict lockdown orders—outperformed nearly every country in the world.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the U.S. “would have had 1.60 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Sweden, 1.07 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of Finland, and 0.91 million fewer deaths if it had the performance of France.” In America, states that imposed prolonged lockdowns had no better health outcomes when measured by all-cause excess mortality than those that stayed open. While no quantifiable relationship between lockdown severity and a reduction in Covid health harms has been found, states with severe lockdowns suffered significantly worse economic outcomes. --->READ MORE HERE