Reckless projections from Imperial College London researchers convinced the U.K. government to enact draconian lockdown policies in response to COVID-19.
Those policies actually “increased mortality rather than reduced it,” according to a preprint research paper by professors from other U.K. universities.
The paper sought to determine “how many deaths in England and Wales are due to COVID-19,” according to a press release by Loughborough University, home to one of the authors, Professor of Financial Economics Karligash Glass. The other authors are University of Sheffield Professor of Managerial Economics Anthony Glass and researchers from economics consultancy Economic Insight.
The phrasing of the paper’s title is deliberate, highlighting the lazy habit of celebrity scientists and the media to identify COVID-19 deaths largely by positive cases:
Currently COVID-associated deaths or excess deaths are used to track the impact of the virus. However these figures may be distorted[,] as to record a COVID-associated death you require only weak evidence that COVID ‘may’ have contributed to the death, and counting excess deaths assumes that any variation in weekly mortality relative to a five year average represents ‘excess’ deaths due to COVID without taking into account other drivers of mortality.
By using “the excess death framework more robustly and controlling for other factors that affect mortality,” the researchers found that actual deaths due to COVID are 54-63 percent lower “than implied by the standard excess deaths measure.” It’s likely that a “significant number of non-COVID deaths” are included in reported excess deaths, they said.
Mortality risk is “particularly acute” in the “very elderly” – 75 and up – compared to elderly people more broadly, where deaths are already concentrated.
They concluded: “Over the lockdown period as a whole Government policy has increased mortality rather than reduced it,” citing “significant unintended consequences” such as “reduced A and E [accident and emergency] attendances and reduced cancer and cardiac treatments.”
Loughborough’s Glass said in the release that the study “raises questions not simply about the efficacy of the blanket lockdown response, but also whether Government communications to encourage public compliance have inadvertently driven other, more harmful, behaviours.”
Read the release and full paper.
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