Confirming what we had forecast when politicians launched the COVID War that the lockdowns have and ultimately will do more harm than good, a Canadian researcher has quantified the damage done.
Doug Allen, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, studied the effects of lockdowns imposed in Canada as well as the models on which the lockdown policies were based.
The Canadian lockdown policies mirrored those in the U.S. and around the world, involving the shutting down of schools and non-essential businesses, mandated mask-wearing and social distancing, and restrictions on public and private gatherings.
Flawed Assumptions Make for Flawed Models
Andrew Chen, writing in The Epoch Times, tells how Prof. Allen conducted his study and reached his conclusions. One major conceptual flaw in the models, according to Allen, was the assumption that behavior had to be mandated and people could not be trusted to voluntarily alter their behavior to protect themselves from the virus and to limit its spread.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
The professor framed part of his findings as a cost-benefit analysis, in which he calculated the number of “life-years” saved vs. lost or “how many years of lost life will have been caused by the various harms of lockdowns versus how many years of lost life were saved by lockdowns.”
Far More Harm than Good
Based on such calculations, the lockdowns are responsible for a whopping 282 times more harm than good (or 282 more life-years lost than saved). Allen notes that politicians often take credit for a reduction in case numbers, but that doesn’t correlate to lives saved vs. lives lost.
Additionally, the flawed assumptions and ill-advised stringent lockdowns can be shown to have had little effect when compared to virus rates in areas where no such stringent policies were imposed.
No Surprise Here
But don’t expect politicians to acknowledge that, Allen notes. Admitting to making mistakes is something politicians don’t like to do.
He also notes that mainstream media have largely reported only one side of any debate over COVID-19 restrictions, and views that challenge official government policies, including his own study, are often pulled from social media platforms. As the professor said,
“These are private platforms. They can do what they want… But on the other hand, I feel kind of sad that we live in the kind of a world where posing opposing opinions is either dismissed, ignored, or… cancelled.”
