Five years on, the countries that never locked down, don't appear to be much different in terms of pandemic excess deaths compared to neighbouring countries according to the BBC. 🤔
By 2021 subsequent reports by Imperial College London walked back these claims, conceding that in the case of London, Rt was already below 1.0 before the 23 March 2020 lockdown.
Note the difference between the 2020 ICL report (Flaxman) and the 2021 ICL report (Knock).
How many lives did Covid vaccines save during the pandemic?
Most studies calculate a number based on an "assumed" level of protection against death, with numbers varying from 313 per mil (Ioannidis, 2024) to 2,500 per mil (Mellis, 2022).
I propose a different method.
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There are a handful of countries that vaccinated >90% of their populations before infection.
Their C-19 deaths per million ranged between 1,000 and 2,000 per million.
In Europe and the Americas, C-19 deaths averaged between 2,790 and 3,150 per million (700-2,200 higher).
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If countries were able to delay infections until vaccination and Omicron, as Finland and Australia did, Covid deaths could have been 28% to 68% lower.
However, this benefit (700-2,200 deaths per mil) is the combined benefit of waiting for vaccination and a milder variant.
Suppression as a concept did not exist before 2020.
Pre-pandemic plans did not ignore it because it planned for the wrong pandemic.
It was ignored, as without timeous vaccines, it would be futile.
#covidinquiryreport
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Using costly measures to delay infections, only became worthwhile considering in a scenario where a significant portion of people had the hope of getting vaccinated prior to first infection.
It is this change that lead to the abandonment of pre-pandemic plans.
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The concepts of mitigation and suppression were defined in haste, early in 2020, and as a result were defined poorly, and remain poorly defined to this day.
What was the relative mortality burden of Covid-19 for different ages during the acute phase of the pandemic (w12/2020-w11/2021) in England?
The relative burden was calculated as Covid-19 mortality as a percentage of pre-pandemic mortality.
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Both Covid-19 mortality and all cause mortality increase exponentially with age (straight line on log graph). However, the slope is steeper for Covid-19.
The implication is that the burden of Covid was significantly higher at the older ages.
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On a linear scale, mortality levels in the younger ages are hardly visible.
However, one needs to consider that only 6% of the population is over 80 years of age, and the young have more life years to lose.
It is exactly 2 years ago that the UK government ignored scientists’ advice to tighten restrictions to combat Omicron.
Cabinet met on 20 December 2021 and decided to persist with Plan B despite SAGE’s apocalyptic scenario for Plan B.
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Experts accused the government of ignoring the latest modelling by SAGE which pointed to between 3,000 and 10,000 hospitalisations a day, and between 600 and 6,000 deaths a day without additional restrictions.
Commentators described these numbers as utterly implausible.
No sense checking was done, with implied hospital fatality rates ranging from 20% to 60%, when it was already down to 16% for the Delta variant in England, and down to 9% for Omicron in South Africa.
On 7 July 2021 SAGE published daily hospital admission scenarios reaching 10,000 per day at the upper bound.
The range was so wide, it was displayed on a log scale!
Daily hospitalisations remained below 800 (grey line).
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Most remaining restrictions were to be lifted on 19 July 2021, so the worst case cannot be regarded as a counterfactual scenario.
Here is the range of daily hospital admissions plotted on a normal scale to illustrate how wide the range of outcomes were.
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It is hard to see how such a wide range could be of any use for hospital planning purposes. By 20 August 2021, the range spanned 2 orders of magnitude!
Imagine having to plan for a party for 1 to 100 people!