Recent COVID-19 news: Lockdowns ineffective, White House revising hospitalizations
Also: CDC changes vaccine schedules in the face of rising "heart inflammation" cases. Some new information on T-cell immunity.
A recent study on the ineffectiveness of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic is making the rounds in the news. The report was produced and led by Steve Henke, a co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise.
From the 24 papers which were analyzed, Henke’s report concluded that lockdown policies had very little to no effect on mortality.
“Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report says.
The report cites lockdowns used in both Europe and the United States only dropped COVID-19 mortality rates by 0.2 percent on average.
Similar “shelter-in-place” orders issued by various municipalities and states in the U.S. only reduced mortality by 2.9 percent on average.
Of interest, the report found that these types of policies had the effect of increasing COVID-19 mortality, with lockdowns slightly ticking up by 0.6 percent and limits on the number of people at social gatherings went up 1.6 percent.
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the Johns Hopkins report states. “In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Only closure of nonessential businesses seemed to have some type of impact, reducing COVID-19 mortality by 10.6 percent on average and the report theorized the result might have been a drop in close-contact socialization with the closure of restaurants and bars.
“Only business closure consistently shows evidence of a negative relationship with COVID-19 mortality, but the variation in the estimated effect is large,” the report said of the bar closure hypothesis. “Three studies find little to no effect, and three find large effects. Two of the larger effects are related to closing bars and restaurants.”
Hospitalized for COVID vs With COVID
In the ongoing shifts of policy and science on COVID-19, the Biden White House is in the process of “recalculating the number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the U.S.,” according to Politico.
The reported goal is to get a “more accurate sense” of patients hospitalized for COVID versus those hospitalized with COVID.
Apparently, the Biden administration has directed a task force to be set up for this purpose that will be made up of scientists and data specialists from the CDC and Department of Health and Human Services.
Politico says what the data is really aimed at is determining the strain on hospitals and resources. If that’s true, the staffing losses due to forced vaccination policies may be a big factor.
In North Carolina, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services tweeted about the National Guard supplementing a facility run by Cone Healthcare System.
Turns out Cone instituted a vaccination requirement in July 2021, about which the CEO of Cone Healthcare said they were “willing to lose employees.”
While healthcare struggles with lack of staff possibly exacerbated by vaccination mandates, the CDC is now shifting on vaccination schedules due to rising cases of “heart inflammation.”
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