Tweet

Milhouse Van Houten 🙂

11 Jan, 10 tweets, 2 min read

It's ok to change your mind about lockdowns.

Countries like Japan show that it's possible to combat a virus without compromising civil rights.

"Japan attracted world notice for neither imposing a lockdown nor obsessively testing asymptomatic people."

japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2021/0…

"COVID-19 accounted for only 0.3% of all deaths. There were seven times as many suicides and 40 times as many flu and pneumonia deaths."

"Japanese shouldn’t take Western criticism too seriously. The mainstream media has been on a mission to cheerlead the lockdown narrative."

"Countries like Sweden and Japan that diverge from the approved narrative are the object of their special ire for irresponsibility bordering on criminal dereliction of duty."

"Examples of better outcomes without the extensive range of health, mental health, livelihoods, economic and civil liberties costs of harsh lockdowns should be welcome. Instead, many commentators seem to be willing the lockdown-light countries to fail so they can feel vindicated"

"Unfortunately for them, there is little empirical data to support the abstract mathematical models on which governments relied to clamp lockdowns. The virus is not unprecedented, but the draconian societal shutdowns are."

"Who would have expected Western democracies to mimic authoritarian China?"

"Yet after a year of this extreme experiment, data from around the world show that the spread of the pandemic correlates more with geography, demography and seasonality than lockdown stringency and sequencing."

"...even in Japan, face masks did not prevent infection and transmission. This too strongly suggests that an exceptionally low death rate despite a high proportion of elderly must be due to genetic factors, health factors (e.g. little obesity) or pre-existing immunity."

https://twitter.com/Milhouse_Van_Ho/status/1348146673923600384?s=20

More to consider regarding the unintended consequences of actions guided by good intentions:

https://twitter.com/Milhouse_Van_Ho/status/1348146673923600384?s=20

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @Milhouse_Van_Ho

Milhouse Van Houten 🙂

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

13 Jan

Greater Toronto and Ottawa.

#COVID19toronto #covid19ottawa #COVID19Ontario #COVID19

Greater Toronto.

Greater Toronto - The proportion of cases (positive test results) resulting in death (yellow line).

Read 12 tweets

Milhouse Van Houten 🙂

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

12 Jan

Ontario covid-19 cases, deaths, and testing.

#COVID19Ontario

Weekly all-cause deaths and deaths with/from Covid-19 in Ontario, including % of deaths attributed to Covid-19.

Note: Covid-19 is often not a wholly distinct and separate cause of death as there are other medical conditions involved in many cases.

There are also cases in which it is not even a cause of death, but the individual had tested positive sometime prior to their death.

Read 18 tweets

Milhouse Van Houten 🙂

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

11 Jan

Here we have the total number of deaths in Canada over the past five years. The most recent 12 months of data do not suggest a spike in deaths out of line with historical trends.

Thread:

Zooming out nationally over the past decade, we see that it's perfectly natural for deaths in one year to exceed deaths in the previous year.

***This does not necessarily = excess deaths.***

Look how often the blue growth line is above 0%.

So deaths are rising.

Is that due to population growth?

Population aging?

It's a bit of both, but not covid.

Read 16 tweets

Milhouse Van Houten 🙂

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

10 Jan

What do peanuts have to do with lockdowns?

Unintended consequences.

A thread:

Peanut allergies were rare among American children up until the mid-1990s, when only four out of a thousand children under the age of eight had such an allergy. But by 2008, the rate had more than tripled, to fourteen out of a thousand.

No one knew why kids were becoming more allergic to peanuts. But the response was natural and seemingly rational: kids are vulnerable so keep them away from peanuts, peanut products, and anything that has been in contact with nuts of any kind.

Read 19 tweets