‘Global Policy Failure’: Lockdowns Had ‘Negligible’ Impact on Deaths Compared to ‘Staggering Collateral Costs’, Study Finds; Fraud and Graft Thrived in the Pandemic and Beyond, and other C-Virus related stories

‘Global Policy Failure’: Lockdowns Had ‘Negligible’ Impact on Deaths Compared to ‘Staggering Collateral Costs’, Study Finds:

The imposition of lockdowns by governments around the world during the Chinese coronavirus crisis was “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions” that had a “negligible” impact on loss of life compared to the steep costs on society, a landmark study has found.

A peer-reviewed study published by the Institute for Economic Affairs from researchers, including economics Professor Steve H. Hanke of Johns Hopkins University, has found that countries that locked down their citizens faired little better than countries such as Sweden, which imposed relatively few restrictions in favour of allowing its citizens to exercise their own caution.

The Herby-Jonung-Hanke review, which conducted a meta-analysis of 19,646 studies on lockdowns from countries around the world, found that lockdowns, defined as any non-pharmaceutical intervention, managed to reduce mortality by 3.2 per cent in comparison to countries that adopted a more laissez-faire approach during the first lockdowns in the Spring of 2020.

According to the study, this means that the initial lockdowns prevented 1,700 deaths in England and Wales, 6,000 deaths throughout Europe, and 4,000 deaths in the United States. The authors noted that the number of deaths prevented by restrictions paled in comparison to the number of deaths experienced during a typical flu season.

The study found that stay-at-home orders in Europe and the U.S. only reduced mortality rates by 1.4 and 4.1 per cent, school closures only between 2.5 and 6.2 per cent, and shutting down businesses reduced deaths by 7.5 per cent. Even under a broader definition of lockdown, the study claimed that at best measures only reduced Covid deaths by 10.7 per cent.

While they did find evidence that mask mandates — which most countries avoided during the initial lockdown — may have had more of an impact, at an estimated 18.7 per cent mortality reduction, the researchers said that it still remains to be seen if the negative societal impacts of masking add up to a fair trade-off. —>READ MORE HERE

Chicago Tribune: Fraud and graft thrived in the pandemic and beyond:

In these days of rampant virtue signaling, politicians, corporations and socially wired individuals all try to convince you that they care the most about doing the right thing. Alas, while we’ve all been recovering from the COVID-19 crisis, plenty of old-fashioned grifters have seized the day.

The Associated Press recently released a stunning investigation into pandemic fraud, finding that large numbers of Americans — of all stripes, it appears — fraudulently helped themselves to colossal chunks of federal COVID-19 relief money.

Any huge program created in an emergency is bound to encounter some corrupt actors, but the scale of the fraud in this instance indicates that the federal government did a thoroughly lousy job of erecting the necessary protections as it cut check after check to the unworthy. The news agency called it “the greatest grift in U.S. history,” and that’s saying something.

The AP estimated that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding, with an additional $123 billion either wasted or misspent. Those are stunning amounts of money. And we wonder why we had inflation raging out of control.

How did this happen? Among other missteps, the AP points to a common situation where too many applicants for federal cash were essentially “self-certifying” a need that for some of them was pure fiction. In other words, the government was repeating the same mistake that many banks offering mortgages did when they offered so-called liar loans that sparked the financial crisis in the first decade of this century.

The COVID-19 fraud, it seems, was everywhere and the grift of fake businesses, stolen identities and other shenanigans ranged from epic steals to petty robbery. Take just one sample agency — Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services. According to the AP, that overwhelmed agency reported in February some $1 billion in “fraudulent pandemic unemployment claims” and an additional $4.8 billion in “overpayments.” They hardly were alone: Government systems were simply incapable of rooting out many fake or excessive claims. —>READ MORE HERE

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