“In the seven months since, Florida schools have avoided major outbreaks of Covid-19 and maintained case rates lower than those in the wider community.“...3/17/21, “Florida Schools Reopened Without Becoming Covid-19 Superspreaders,” Wall St. Journal, Arian Campo-Flores…”Florida’s lesson for the country, said Mr. Gimbert [father of a 9th grader], 51, is “not only that we should have opened, but that we should have opened a long time ago.”
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3/14/21, “EDITORIAL: Virus lockdowns don’t appear to have worked as advertised,” Las Vegas Review-Journal Editorial
“Lockdowns can destroy the economy,” wrote Phillipe Lemoine
of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology
in a Wall Street Journal oped last week, “but it’s starting
to look as if they have minimal effect on
Mr. Lemoine, who says he favored the tactic early in the pandemic,
notes that “not a single government has published a cost-benefit
analysis to justify lockdown policies.”
The Associated Press picked up on the theme over the
weekend, finding that states which enacted tight restrictions
on commerce and other activities performed no better
in preventing coronavirus deaths or confirmed infections.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for instance, imposed
some of the most draconian curbs in the nation.
Florida was at the opposite extreme. Yet “California and Florida
have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19
case rates,” the AP reports,and both rank in the middle in terms
of deaths per capita.
The latter is even more significant given that California’s
younger demographic means that a higher percentage of
Florida residents were at high risk for serious virus complications.
The AP also highlights the contrast between South Dakota
and Connecticut, which are both among the 10 worst states in
terms of death rates. But the latter was much more
aggressive in restricting the actions of its residents,
while the former took a laissez-faire approach.
While there are obviously many factors in play when
making comparisons between the states, such anecdotal
evidence is in line with a peer-reviewed Stanford study
of eight countries-–including the United States —
published in January [2021] that found “no clear
significant beneficial effect” from stay-at-home orders
and business closures.
[1/5/21, “Assessing mandatory stay‐at‐home and business
closure effects on the spread of COVID‐19,” European
Journal of Clinical Investigation, “The study was funded
with support from the Stanford COVID‐19
Seroprevalence Studies Fund.”]
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security, told the AP, “This is going to be an
important question that we have to ask ourselves: What public
health measures actually were the most impactful and which
ones had negligible effect or backfired by driving
Indeed. Even comparing raw numbers on deaths and
case counts fails to take into account the staggering economic,
academic and mental health costs associated with lockdowns
and school closures.
In coming years, we’ll learn more about the various public
health strategies governments and public health officials
employed to fight COVID and their long-term ramifications.
But at this point, the long-term lockdown experiment appears
to have been an expensive failure.” (Top image, AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
image from Wall St. Journal
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Comment: Nothing less than Nuremberg type trials must take place
to ensure that those responsible are punished and that “lockdowns”
never happen again.
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