Many global collectives of medical and scientific professionals, and journalists and analysts, have been pointing out that the impact of lockdowns has been far worse than the impact of COVID. Doctors, scientists and independent media sites, including UK Column and in the US, The Highwire, have been analysing the mortality figures and showing that in cases where this exists, excess mortality has largely been caused by lockdown and not the virus. One issue for example is that the number of heart attack and stroke patients who usually go to the emergency room (ER) for treatment has plummeted i.e. people who need immediate life-saving treatment are not coming forward so they are at risk of, and have been, dying unnecessarily.
As early as 20 March 2020, in an op-ed in the New York Times, Dr David Katz, a specialist in preventive medicine and public health, president of True Health Initiative, and the founding director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, argued that the impact of lockdown will be far more crippling for people than the impact of the virus.
The True Health Initiative put out a fact sheet on 7 April 2020: “A National Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic for #TotalHarmMinimization”, where they cautioned on the need to weigh up the benefit of the lockdown versus no lockdown, in terms of the overall harm. They have continued to argue that lockdowns have been more harmful than beneficial. Katz also has a YouTube channel where he has posted many video discussing his concerns over the various measures imposed in the US in the past year.
A few weeks after the start of the alleged pandemic, in the US, CNBC reported that the weekly number of US jobless had risen by 4.4 million to a total of over 26 million, and in the early months of lockdown, The Highwire was estimating that up to 65 million US citizens could be unemployed, worse than the percentage in the Great Depression. The health impacts of this vast increase in unemployed could be far in excess of the mortality rate attributed to the virus.
In a webinar: COVID-19 and Indian economy, hosted on 7 April 2020, Indian economist Professor Jayati Gosh explained that 90% of the Indian population derive their income from the informal market. How devastating the lockdown has been in this country is beyond imaginable, as with a comparable situation in South Africa and many other African countries, where a significant portion of the population rely on informal markets to survive.
Countless other reports could be cited from various countries regarding the huge economic toll in the world.