How lockdowns and other restrictive pandemic policies did more harm than good
The tragic story of 19-year-old Kai Matthews
On May 30th 2021, 19-year-old Kai Matthews rapidly developed a fever and chills and was brought to a Canadian emergency room by his family. However, he was repeatedly turned away due to the hospital needing to process his COVID-19 test. His illness, which turned out to be bacterial meningitis, was treatable. However, because no treatment was provided, his illness rapidly progressed. He died.
The infection-fatality rate at the time in Canada was 0.26%, meaning that Kai Matthews would have had to infect 400 people with COVID-19 to cause one death. And at the time, the average person with COVID-19 would spread the virus to just 5 people.
What’s more, it was determined later that Kai did not have COVID-19 at all. It is possible to calculate the odds that Kai would have had the virus at the time when he was presenting for admission to the emergency room, prior to having been tested. The number of new COVID-19 cases reported in Canada the week before Kai Matthews’s death–information available anyone with an Internet connection at the time–was just 22,154 cases out of a total Canadian population of 38.25 million. This means that the odds of anyone in Canada presenting as a new case that week was just 0.058%, or 1-in-1700. Therefore, prior to being tested, Kai’s odds of causing the deaths of anyone else by infecting them with COVID-19 was just 400x1700, or 1-in-680,000. Thus, while Kai was almost certain to die without care, he was incredibly unlikely to cause any deaths by infecting others if he had been admitted.
That same madness would repeat over and over in other hospitals around the world. As emergency room visits for diabetes, strokes, and heart attacks plummeted, deaths from these conditions skyrocketed. Meanwhile, cancer care, cardiovascular services, infectious disease programs (HIV, tuberculosis, malaria), neurological services, immunizations, and maternal health were disrupted.
As scientists recognized during the very earliest months of the pandemic, this led to countless deaths from lack of proper medical care. Because the threat of the virus was exaggerated beyond what it actually was, life was unnecessarily lost. As was the case for Kai, to the degree that the threat of the virus was exaggerated beyond what it actually was, these deaths from lack of proper medical care in many cases may have exceeded the lives saved.
Many people lost their lives due to pandemic policies. Drug overdoses, homicides, unintentional injuries, motor vehicle deaths, and suicides increased exponentially during the pandemic. Altogether, these non-COVID deaths accounted for more than 200,000 lives lost in 2020-2021 in the United States alone. As a result, America saw a larger decline in life expectancy than any other advanced country in the world.
Such costs were not isolated to the United States. In 2020 in South Asia alone, the United Nations estimates that social disruptions due the pandemic response killed 228,000 children. Data from the UK indicated early on—in August 2020—that the lockdowns likely cost five-times more life-years than they saved. Economists in Australia have put the costs much higher. Moreover, because curtailing economic growth also means curtailing increases in life expectancy, the loss in life is far greater than can be captured in official statistics.
American researchers publishing in The Lancet found no association between restrictive pandemic policies and deaths averted from COVID-19 saved at all. It is very likely that the long-term global cost of restrictive pandemic policies like lockdowns and school closures is millions more lives lost than saved.
And yet they would do it all again if they could.
One of the arguments the branch covidians and mad maskers make that infuriates me is that deaths like his do not matter. They argue against excess deaths after vaxxination are not from the clot shot but from cases such as this where people were denied care cuz covid. Both deaths from the shots and deaths from medical neglect are from the idiotic anticovid policies.