There’s a strong case against lockdowns. At several times in human history people have used quarantines to help slow the spread of an infectious disease. But at no time in human history have we asked entire countries to stop their activities or kept healthy people separated from each other and living in a perpetual state of fear.
The original idea behind lockdown was to “flatten the curve.” We wanted to keep hospitals and medical personnel from overwhelm. And we wanted to reduce coronavirus deaths. While this seemed like sound logic at the time, it has not worked.
We are continuing to see better outcomes in Sweden, where there was no mandatory lockdown and where schools were not closed, than in many countries in Europe with police-enforced lockdowns.
The first argument in the case against lockdowns is that lockdowns have not led to better outcomes than places where there were no lockdowns.
In fact, in many cases, including Italy and America, the coronavirus outcomes have been much worse.
Sweden’s success
If lockdowns worked, Sweden, which has faced global criticism for their “lax” policy with no lockdowns, would not have seen only 5,800 deaths out of a population of 10,343,403.
The global health community is starting to realize that Sweden has been successful in its fight against coronavirus. In fact, the World Health Organization has recently appointed Johan Giesecke, former Swedish state epidemiologist and one of the voices against police-enforced widespread lockdowns, a senior advisory position as vice-chair of the World Health Organization Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards.
This article in Newsweek explains Giesecke’s position:
Writing in The Lancet in May, Giesecke said he believes that “everyone will be exposed” to the virus at some point and that “most people will become infected”—but many will have weak or mild symptoms. “There is very little we can do to prevent this spread: a lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear. I expect that when we count the number of deaths from COVID-19 in each country in one year from now, the figures will be similar, regardless of measures taken.”
Isolation polices prolong the problem
As Scott Atlas, M.D., points out in this excellent article, isolation policies actually prolong the problem. Atlas explains:
We know from decades of medical science that infection itself allows people to generate an immune response — antibodies — so that the infection is controlled throughout the population by “herd immunity.” Indeed, that is the main purpose of widespread immunization in other viral diseases — to assist with population immunity. In this virus, we know that medical care is not even necessary for the vast majority of people who are infected. It is so mild that half of infected people are asymptomatic, shown in early data from the Diamond Princess ship, and then in Iceland and Italy. That has been falsely portrayed as a problem requiring mass isolation.
In fact, infected people without severe illness are the immediately available vehicle for establishing widespread immunity. By transmitting the virus to others in the low-risk group who then generate antibodies, they block the network of pathways toward the most vulnerable people, ultimately ending the threat. Extending whole-population isolation would directly prevent that widespread immunity from developing.
So widespread lockdowns of the entire population do not work.
Yet despite this clear evidence, different states in the United States and countries around the world are continuing to ignore the case against lockdowns and insist on them.
California remains in a state of coronavirus fear
What’s going on in California is a case in point. Many Californians remain in a state of overwhelming fear. Healthy people are afraid of other healthy people. Californians are canceling birthday parties, weddings, and Thanksgiving gatherings. Based on what data?
Keep in mind that coronavirus testing seems to have very high false positive rates. As the American Council on Science and Health explains: “Diagnostic tests are imperfect, and they produce false positives and false negatives. Even if kept to a minimum, minor inaccuracies create substantial problems.” Unusable tests have plagued health authorities in Iowa and many other states.
Yet California defines one new case in 10,000 as “widespread” in their Blueprint for a Safer Economy Guidelines. A “new case” is a positive test result. This may or may not be an actual COVID-19 case. With criteria as broad and unscientific as this, California lockdowns could last for years.
New Zealand reinstates isolation policies despite the case against lockdowns
On August 13, after more than a hundred days without any new local cases of COVID-19, the prime minister of New Zealand locked down the country’s largest city.
The reason for the new lockdown was that four members in the same family tested positive for coronavirus.
I have a colleague who lives in New Zealand, an American married to a New Zealander. She told me that people out of the country had to wait for months to return. New Zealand locked down its borders. But the new cases cropping up there suggest that Dr. Atlas’s assessment is correct: Mass isolation (even in an island country as remote as New Zealand) is not the way to beat a novel virus.
Lockdown policies have also failed in Israel. Early on Israel adopted stringent isolation policies. They didn’t work the first time. But the Israeli government has now imposed a second lockdown despite the case against lockdowns. Why they’ve done so is not entirely clear.
If lockdowns worked, Israel would not be in another lockdown. They were one of the earliest adopters of the most draconian methods.
The strongest case against lockdowns may be that they cause harm
You don’t have to be an epidemiologist or social scientist to understand that we human beings are social creatures. We thrive off skin-to-skin contact. (Read more about that here and here.) We need to be in social solidarity with other people, not social isolation. When humans are separated from their loved ones the psychological harm is often, perhaps always, devastating.
Consider what happened to Gerald and Kiley Fadayomi. Gerald was kept from being with his wife in the hospital because of the fear he might have the virus. As USA Today reported:
On March 18, Fadayomi jumped in his car and raced to Northside Hospital Atlanta. As soon as he pulled into the lot, he said, a nurse called him.
“I don’t want to be the person to tell you this,” the nurse said, “but you can’t come into the hospital until you receive your test results.”
Fadayomi started to cry.
For years, he had vowed to be there for his children from the very beginning – the way his father, who left his life when he was in third grade, never was. How could he not be there for the babies’ first look at this world, a world filled with so much anxiety and fear and confusion?
“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. She started to cry, too.
Gerald and Kiley did not have coronavirus. The forced separation, it seems, was completely unnecessary.
We humans have evolved to live in groups. Being together is how we humans stay safe. Lockdowns not only devastate the economy, they also lead to excess deaths from suicide, domestic violence, and loneliness.
Suffering from loneliness increases the likelihood of death
Indeed, scientists have repeatedly found that suffering from loneliness increases the likelihood of death.
As this team of Finnish researchers explains:
Isolated and lonely people are at increased risk of death. Health policies addressing risk factors such as adverse socioeconomic conditions, unhealthy lifestyle, and lower mental wellbeing might reduce excess mortality among the isolated and the lonely.
In 2015 Dale Archer, M.D., explored how loneliness is connected to death in an article for Psychology Today. Archer writes that loneliness can kill:
…researchers say loneliness is now a major public health issue and represents a greater health risk than obesity and is as destructive to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The study, published in the journal “Perspectives on Psychological Science”, was a meta-analysis that looked at 70 studies covering over 3 million people. The results: social isolation, loneliness and living alone can increase mortality risk by 29%, 26%, and 32% respectively, after adjusting for age, gender, socio-economic status and pre-existing health conditions.
Instilling fear instead of sharing information
It’s disappointing that public health authorities have instilled so much fear without giving people information about the science-based ways they can support healthy immunity, prevent coronavirus, and treat it effectively.
We support the human immune system by eating healthy, real, whole foods; getting adequate sun exposure; making love; and enjoying social togetherness.
We destroy the human immune system by promoting fear, raising anxiety and stress, overexposing our bodies to toxins and unsafe medication, social isolation, and lockdowns.
It looks like we are exposed to some 60,000 pathogens every single day.
These include:
- Cold and flu viruses
- Drug-resistant bacteria
- E. Coli
- Norovirus
- Parasites like tapeworms and roundworms
- Pathogenic Fungi
- Protozoans (single-celled organisms that can cause diseases like malaria)
- Salmonella
- Staphylococcus
A healthy immune system neutralizes disease-causing agents. Health comes from social interactions and togetherness, not isolation and lockdowns.
Related articles:
Jane Orient, M.D., on the COVID-19 Vaccine
Ordering Coffee During a Pregdemic
23 Wince-Worthy COVID-19 Memes
Published: September 24, 2020
Last update: May 21, 2021
Tim Lundeen says
Lockdowns are used to control prison riots or slave revolts. They stop the violence, and punish the inmates. They work.
What we are doing is not a lockdown. We are using mandatory social isolation to try to stop the spread of a virus. The analogy with lockdowns is not appropriate. We are not prisoners, we are not slaves. We are free people, and we’ve done nothing wrong. We don’t deserve punishment, and most of all: social isolation doesn’t work.
Calling it a “lockdown” subtly makes it seems as if what we are doing will work, because lockdowns work. It makes it sound as if the sacrifices we are being forced to make are worth it. They are not!
Social isolation increases stress. Stress is a killer: people are more likely to get sick, more likely to end up in the hospital or to die. People who aren’t allowed to work, who can’t earn a living, are particularly hard hit.
Social isolation causes depression. Depression itself makes you more likely to get sick, and more likely to commit suicide. Suicide rates are up.
Everyone is going to be exposed to the SARS-Cov-2 virus, and the more susceptible will get sick. When enough people have been exposed and developed immunity, the pandemic will end.
Many people have some pre-existing immunity from prior coronavirus infections (aka the common cold), and it looks as if 10-20% infections will establish herd immunity from SARS-Cov-2. Many places already have this, and everywhere will soon. The evidence is that immunity is long-lasting, based on T-Cell immunity.
We don’t need a vaccine, and we don’t need mandated social isolation.
Shannon says
You call Sweden’s response to COVID a success while criticizing New Zealand, but Sweden currently has 578.41 deaths per million compared to New Zealand at 5.12 per million, so your theory doesn’t track. In fact, in order to obtain herd immunity, approximately 60-80% of the population would need to have natural antibodies to this virus. The US has had about 2% of its population infected and over 200,000 deaths, so if we pursued a strategy of herd immunity, as Dr. Fauci said, the “death toll would be enormous and totally unacceptable.”
On the other hand, most countries which have seen low infection and low death rates are exactly those countries that required a period of national shelter in place and then coupled that with strong testing and contact tracing practices. The fact that some of them have required additional periods of shelter in place is not evidence of failure, but simply a reality of a global economy where it is nearly impossible to completely close your borders, even on an island.
The failure of shelter in place in the US is not because it doesn’t work but because we didn’t really do it. Even in places like California where there was a state-wide shelter in place order, the rules were relatively lax and unenforced (compared to other countries), the borders were still open, and they opened up before their infection rate was low enough to warrant wide spread re-opening of public life.
Shelter in place is indeed lonely and difficult. But it need not be an endless policy as it has been for some of us here in the US. Done correctly, you can reduce the infection rate in a matter of a 6-8 weeks and with adequate testing and contact tracing, you can maintain that low infection rate until a vaccine is widely available. For those of you who may doubt that timeline, please follow Andy Slavitt, the former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama. Or just read this article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/andy-slavitt-obama-healthcare-coronavirus_n_5f1eea6cc5b69fd4730fa50f