Writes Dionysus, Content writer, Headline Diplomat eMagazine
Shops closed, schools shut down, events canceled, factories shut, travel bans announced, and the stock markets in panic, the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still much around, hit the world economy hard as countries struggled to save lives from the grip of the deadly virus. However, studies have now shown that states lost more than they tried to save during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns around the world.
Lockdowns had “little to no effect” on saving lives
The lockdowns during the pandemic were intended to prevent corona deaths. However, according to findings in studies made by US researchers published January 2022, this has not been successful.
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have found in the meta-study (analysis of numerous studies worldwide) that the tough lockdowns imposed in the USA and Europe during the pandemic have prevented almost no corona deaths.
In view of the great importance that governments and key health officials attached to this measure at the beginning of the pandemic, the result of the study is sobering.
Compared with voluntary behavior changes based on recommendations, the state-enforced measures such as social distancing, closing schools, restaurants, bars, and clubs reduced the death rate by only 0.2 percent, according to the study.
The verdict of the authors of the study, Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke, is: “The effect of lockdowns is small to non-existent. Lockdown measures are unfounded and should be abolished as a pandemic policy tool.”
“While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,” the professors wrote in the journal.
“I think that the real virus was the panic virus,” Michael Levitt, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013, also tells the Telegraph while commenting about the motive behind the policy of lockdowns. “The people panicked and I think there was a huge lack of discussion.”
“The lockdown is a very blunt and very medieval weapon and the epidemic could have been stopped just as effectively with other sensible measures (such as masks and other forms of social distancing),” he added.
“The problem with epidemiologists is that they feel their job is to frighten people into lockdown, social distancing. So you say ‘there’s going to be a million deaths’ and when there are only 25,000 you say ‘it’s good you listened to my advice’. This happened with Ebola and bird flu. It’s just part of the madness,” he added, but went on, “I think the lockdown will cause much more damage than the deaths saved.”
Corona lockdowns have major economic and social impacts
According to the researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the lockdowns have contributed to untold hardship on the global economy and the social impacts are damning.
“They (the lockdowns) have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy,” the report reads, as published by the NYPost.
“Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument,” the authors said of the “ill-founded” measures.
During the peak of the lockdowns, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also lamented the damages caused by the pandemic and the measures taken, saying the spread of the virus has disrupted supply chains and caused investment and consumption to plummet, leading to a “real and growing risk of a global recession”
“We are facing a global health crisis unlike any in the 75-year history of the United Nations — one that is spreading human suffering, infecting the global economy and upending people’s lives,” Guterres said at the time in 2020.
“A global recession – perhaps of record dimensions – is a near certainty,” he warned. “The International Labour Organization (ILO) has just reported that workers around the world could lose as much as 3.4 trillion U.S. dollars in income by the end of this year.”
However, the IMF has estimated that the final bill for managing the pandemic would amount to $28 trillion, according to reports from The Guardian, and it was described by the fund’s economic counselor, Gita Gopinath, as the “worst crisis since the Great Depression.”
“The cumulative loss in output relative to the pre-pandemic projected path is projected to grow from $11tn over 2020-21 to $28tn over 2020-25,” Gopinath said, as published by Guardian. “This represents a severe setback to the improvement in average living standards across all country groups.”
Consequences of school closures
UNESCO also identified 195 countries forced to close all their schools – an exceptional measure which already deprives more than 1.3 billion primary, secondary, tertiary, and technical school learners of educational rights.
Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed concern about the consequences of these closures for parents who risk being forced to stay at home, which led to a loss of salary and, worse, job loss.
“Disruption to schools and training programs heightens the risk of the poorest children falling behind and increases children’s exposure to the threat of domestic violence, child labor, child marriage, and female genital mutilation,” she said at the 44th session of the Human Rights Council in 2020. “We are also seeing signs of a surge in online sexual exploitation of children.”
Michelle Bachelet also asked that the measures taken by countries to combat the spread of the coronavirus respect human rights and be “proportionate to the assessed risk”.
The United Nations Children’s Fund further warned of the serious and growing consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic for children in another report. One in nine people infected with the coronavirus is a child or adolescent, i.e. 11% of the 25.7 million infections recorded in the 87 countries where this data is available, underlines the report, which endeavors to draw up a complete assessment on the consequences of the health crisis on the youngest.
“Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the idea that children are hardly affected by the disease has spread. Nothing could be further from the truth,” said Henrietta Fore, director-general of UNICEF, in a press release. “Children can get sick and transmit the virus, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”
The disruption of essential services and the jump in the poverty rate “are the biggest threats to children”, said Fore. “The longer the crisis drags on, the more severe the impact on children’s education, health, nutrition, and well-being will be. It is the future of an entire generation that is threatened.”
Based on surveys in 140 countries, UNICEF reported that about a third of the countries analyzed have observed a drop of at least 10% in health services such as routine vaccinations, outpatient care for diseases childhood infectious diseases and maternal health services. In addition, in 65 countries, the number of home visits made by social workers in September had decreased compared to the same period in 2019.
No access to school meals for 265 million children
According to the UNICEF report, coverage of nutrition services for women and children has dropped by 40% in 135 countries globally. In October, “265 million children worldwide still did not have access to school meals and more than 250 million children under the age of 5 could be deprived of the protective benefits provided by vitamin A supplementation programs,” UNICEF reports worryingly.
Premature deaths, acute malnutrition
The figures in the report are worrying. In November, 572 million students were affected by national school closures in 30 countries or 33% of children in school worldwide.
Interruptions to essential services and increasing malnutrition seriously threaten the health of the youngest. Over a period of twelve months, UNICEF recorded two million additional deaths of children under 5 and 200,000 additional deaths at birth.
The report estimates that an additional six to seven million children under five will be wasted or acutely malnourished in 2020, an increase of 14%. This is likely to result in more than 10,000 additional child deaths per month, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
51,000 children at risk in North Africa and the Middle East
According to the UNICEF estimates, the number of children worldwide affected by multidimensional poverty – those without access to education, health, housing, nutrition, sanitation or water – jumped 15% by mid-2020, representing an additional 150 million children.
Faced with this crisis, UNICEF called on governments to ensure that every child can get an education. According to the UN organization, when health security measures are put in place, “the net benefits of opening schools outweigh the costs of closing them”. “As we reinvent the future and prepare for a post-pandemic world, children must come first”, urged the director of UNICEF.
Consequences on children’s mental health
In an analysis by Save the Children, more than 13,000 children in 46 countries were asked about their mental health before and after the global corona lockdowns. A majority stated that they were increasingly suffering from negative feelings and anxiety disorders.
After schools had been closed for more than 17 weeks, the majority of children – around 96 percent – felt these feelings. These include a worrying rise in cases of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and even self-harm.
“We are in a global mental health crisis! Disadvantaged children, such as those living in poverty, are particularly hard hit by the lockdown,” said Marie Dahl, Head of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support at Save the Children.
Conclusions
Many researches and experts have proven the socioeconomic damages caused by the pandemic and the flawed corrective measures which was put in place – lockdowns. Despite all the damages caused and suffered, it’s more damning to find out several months after that the lockdowns shouldn’t have been an option as they didn’t save even up to a percent of lives they were meant to protect.
Although children infected with Covid-19 in most cases only suffer from mild symptoms of the virus, they seem to be the hardest hit of the general population and UNICEF’s worries are valid. The long-term impact of the pandemic on education, nutrition, and well-being may alter the course of the life of a whole generation of children.
The lockdowns impacted global economy but, today, countries have returned from their recession and companies are back open, recruiting, and expanding. But what about children who stopped schools at the time and were recruited by crime syndicates or went through sexual exploitations, as confirmed by UNICEF?
Featured photo by SHVETS production, Pexels
