By: Bretigne Shaffer

If CA Governor Newsom putting in place a “task force” to discuss how to end the lockdown in that state – when none was needed to implement it – isn’t enough to convince you that this is all a load of horse manure, maybe these will help:

Wilfred Reilly looked at the “data from the Worldometers Coronavirus Project, along with information about the population, population density, median income, median age and diversity of each US state, to determine whether states that have adopted lockdowns or ‘shelter in place’ orders experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than those which pursue a social-distancing strategy without a formal lockdown.”

He controlled for a number of variables, also looked at the experiences of other countries, and then says: “I do not find that lockdowns are a more effective way of handling coronavirus than well-done social-distancing measures.”

You can read all about how he did that (with links to the raw data if you want to see that), here.

Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University has looked at the rates of Covid-19 infections across several different countries, and found that regardless of the country’s policy regarding lockdowns, the numbers rose and fell in precisely the same pattern. Says Townhall.com:

“His graphs show that all countries experienced seemingly identical coronavirus infection patterns, with the number of infected peaking in the sixth week and rapidly subsiding by the eighth week.”

According to Professor Ben Israel, “It turns out that the peak of the spread is already behind us for about a week, and it will probably be almost completely wasted within two weeks,” (from a translation.)

3. Sweden

There is a lot to say about Sweden. I won’t say it all here. Instead, I will just point to this one indicator. This is from EuroMOMO, which is “a European mortality monitoring activity, aiming to detect and measure excess deaths related to seasonal influenza, pandemics and other public health threats.”

What the graphs on this page show us are patterns of excess mortality from ALL causes, over the past four years, in European countries. Here is the graph for Sweden, alongside those for Spain, Switzerland and England (only because these four were all together in the presentation.) I think this is useful to look at because it dispenses with any critique about non-Covid-19 deaths being counted as Covid-19 deaths. This (you can see graphs for all the countries here) simply shows us excess mortality from ALL causes, by country:

In conclusion, for everyone who believes that total state control of our lives is justified by a desire to save lives (a principle that is notably not applied to our freedom to drive automobiles, to pick one obvious example), please just stop. Your unprincipled authoritarianism has already done enough damage, and is only going to do more.

Just stop.

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