COVID pandemic lockdowns, what were the impacts on public health?

Jordan Schachtel on X - "Thoughtful people on day one: lockdowns are stupid and will destroy the economy while imposing devastating disruption upon our society. Corporate media, five years later:"

COVID pandemic lockdowns, what were the impacts on public health? (aka "‘The lockdowns were never really effective’: New research shows COVID stay-at-home orders did more harm than good")

"Five years ago, lockdown critics faced death threats and censorship. Now they are gaining influence amid new evidence on the harmful health effects of prolonged isolation...

A growing number of scientific studies have concluded the measures in the United States did little to slow the rampaging pathogen. What’s more, the stifling of public debate about them eroded trust in public health policy and prevented more effective strategies, according to a number of prominent infectious-disease experts...

“We are long overdue for a reckoning on the lockdowns,” said Stephen Macedo, a political scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, who co-authored a book due out later this month that calls for a national inquiry into the lockdown measures. “What’s become increasingly clear is that a lot of what we did was irrational and based on fear, and we didn’t think through the profound costs.”...

while the impact of lockdown policies is still being studied, new research paints a troubling picture of the immense collateral damage inflicted by them.

The measures increased poverty and wealth disparities, spurred a dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety and depression, contributed to a surge in fatal drug overdoses, and led to devastating learning losses in schoolchildren, who have yet to recover, according to scientific studies. As of last spring, the average American student remained half a grade behind pre-pandemic levels in both math and reading, according to a recent report card on pandemic learning loss.

What’s more, months of unrelenting seclusion caused many people to sever social connections, with lasting consequences to mental and physical health. Both volunteering at nonprofits and church attendance, two measures of social engagement, declined and have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In 2023, the nation’s surgeon general warned of an "epidemic of loneliness and isolation" — brought on, in part, by lockdown measures that isolated people.

And that’s not counting the other costs in lost livelihoods, shuttered businesses, and the anguish of seeing relatives die alone without being able to say goodbye.

“The lockdowns were never really effective, and the confusion around them sowed a great deal of public distrust in government,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.

On average, states with Democratic governors had stay-at-home orders that were nearly three times longer than those in red states. Yet many so-called blue states — including California, New York, and New Mexico — had among the highest COVID-19 death rates, measured as a share of their population. And some red states, including Idaho and Utah, had among the lowest, national health data shows, according to an analysis by Macedo and a Princeton colleague, Frances Lee..

Those critical of lockdowns point to sobering data showing that, despite widespread school and business closures, the United States had among the worst mortality rates in the developed world during the pandemic...

Infectious disease experts who are critical of lockdowns point to alternative approaches that would protect public health with less pain should another pandemic arise. These include more stringent testing of workers in nursing homes, more generous sick leave policies for workers, and efforts to expand home care and food deliveries for older people most vulnerable to the virus.

“You couldn’t witness the mass deaths in New York City and Italy and not think that something had to be done,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. “But tools like shutdowns and school closures are sledgehammers and shouldn’t be part of our toolbox.”

The other problem with lockdowns, say many scientists, is they cannot be sustained indefinitely. And once they are lifted, people start interacting again and infections can spread rapidly. For instance, China’s abrupt decision in December 2022 to end its zero-COVID policy, which included stringent quarantines and lockdowns, led to a massive surge in hospitalizations and deaths in the following two months, according to a 2023 study in the medical journal JAMA.

Osterholm at the University of Minnesota has long recommended what he calls the “snow day approach.” When infections surge, or hospital bed capacity falls to unsafe levels, officials could announce temporary school closures and encourage people to stay home. Then, when the virus subsides, after a few days or weeks, the restrictions would be lifted, he said. People would be more willing to comply, knowing the closures are temporary, he argued...Public officials should also communicate more clearly about the uncertain benefits of any measure during a pandemic, particularly when so much is unknown, public health experts said.

Indeed, in October 2019, the World Health Organization analyzed a range of responses to past pandemics, including the 1918 “Spanish flu,” and recommended against forced quarantines of individuals or populations, saying there was “no obvious rationale” for such measures and they were impractical to implement.

“From the beginning, the evidence to support lockdown policies was very, very poor, and there was a large sentiment within the scientific community that the collateral damage far outweighed the benefits,” Macedo, of Princeton, said.

In the bitterly polarizing climate of 2020, some scientists who spoke out against lockdowns in favor of less-restrictive measures faced a harsh backlash. Some even received death threats.

In one such instance, in October 2020, three medical experts from three renowned universities decided the public discussion about lockdowns had become too one-sided.

The trio — which included Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of University of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School — crafted a short statement opposing the lockdowns, arguing that there was no scientific consensus for school closures and other stringent measures.

“Keeping [lockdown] measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed,” the trio warned in the statement, which was named the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town where it was written in the Berkshires.

Kulldorff said he was not prepared for the visceral response. Within days, he began receiving anonymous death threats via email and accusations that he supported mass murder. Facebook deleted a page set up by the scientists, and Kulldorff’s Twitter account was suspended.

Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, wrote an email at the time to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in which he called for a “quick and devastating published take down” of its premises, according to emails obtained by the American Institute for Economic Research, a free market think tank.

Three years later, Collins said in a public forum that lockdowns caused widespread harm to public health and the Great Barrington Declaration could have been a “great opportunity” for a broad scientific debate about lockdowns. Collins, who recently retired from the NIH, declined to be interviewed.

Fauci did not respond to multiple interview requests.

To the dismay of some public health advocates, there has never been a public reckoning over the lockdown measures.

Robert Moffit, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Congress should appoint a bipartisan commission with subpoena power that would investigate the extent of the harm caused and why alternative points of view were silenced.

“We need to know why all these federal health agencies failed to respond to the latest science on lockdowns,” Moffit asked.

Even some who supported the lockdown measures five years ago are now doubtful they were worth the long-term costs."