Today, Australia posted its largest daily total for the number of new infections since the pandemic began. Yet parts of Sydney have been under lockdown for almost two full months. Is it time for focused protection?
The mainstream narrative says that each of England's lockdowns arrested a steep upward trend in daily infections that would have otherwise continued unabated. However, there are several reasons to doubt this narrative.
There is ample evidence that school closures have hurt student achievement. And the World Bank estimates that “a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion”.
A New York Times article calls for universal masking in schools, based on a recent study. However, that study had no control group. And the authors don't consider the costs of forcing children to wear masks.
The World Bank estimates there will 21 million fewer people in extreme poverty this year, compared to 2020. Why? One reason, the World Bank suggests, is that "the appetite for lockdowns has been smaller”.
In a recent blog post, the economist Tyler Cowen observes that "it is better to get a given amount of Covid over with more quickly ... subject to the constraint that you do not overwhelm your hospital system".
According to many news outlets, Europe experienced a deadly third wave of COVID-19 during the spring of 2021. However, in terms of excess mortality, this third wave was just a blip.
Ralph Baric is one of the world's leading coronavirus experts. In a recent interview with the MIT Technology Review he said, “If you study hundreds of different bat viruses at BSL-2, your luck may eventually run out.”
“Nobody really knows what’s going on”, says the epidemiologist John Edmunds, commenting on the recent decline in cases. But there are at least nine previous examples where cases fell in the absence of restrictions.
Philippe Lemoine’s articles on the pandemic are required reading. We asked him about the case against lockdowns, why epidemiological models have fared so poorly, and what Emmanuel Macron should have done last year.
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