Tag Archives: Covid-19 consequences

Cost of Lockdowns: A Preliminary Report, by AIER staff

Posted on November 21, 2020 | 1 comment

A long and frightening list of the costs of the lockdowns, from the AIER staff at aier.org:

In the debate over coronavirus policy, there has been far too little focus on the costs of lockdowns. It’s very common for the proponents of these interventions to write articles and large studies without even mentioning the downsides.

Here is a brief look at the cost of stringencies in the United States, and around the world, including stay-at-home orders, closings of business and schools, restrictions on gatherings, shutting of arts and sports, restrictions on medical services, and interventions in the freedom of movement.

Mental Health

Mental Health Data Source Region
During late June 2020, 40% of US adults reported to be struggling with mental health or substance abuse. CDC (June 2020) US
Of adults surveyed, 10.7% had thoughts of suicide compared to 4.3% in 2018. CDC (August 2020) US
Reported symptoms of anxiety were three times higher than they were in Q2 2019 and reported symptoms of depression were four times higher than they were in Q2 2019. CDC (August 2020) US
Of individuals aged 18-24, 25.5% considered suicide. CDC (August 2020) US
In New York alone, Google searches increased for phrases and words: anxiety, panic attack, and insomnia. JAMA (October 2020) New York
Between April and October, the portion of emergency visits related to mental health for children (5-11) increased by 24% and 31% for 12-17 year olds compared to 2019. CDC (November 2020) US
In late June, 13% of survey respondents said they had started or increased substance use to cope with the pandemic. CDC (August 2020) US
More than 40 states have reported increases in opioid-related mortality. AMA (October 2020) US
From January 2020 to March 2020, 19,416 people died from drug overdoses, which is 3,000 more than in 2019 of the same quarter. CDC (2020) US

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UK Health Study Found 26,000 “Extra” Non-COVID Deaths At Home Amid Lockdowns, by Tyler Durden

Posted on November 16, 2020 | 1 comment

26,000 extra deaths and throw in unemployment and economic deterioration and in the UK, as in the US, the cure is far worse than the disease. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

BBC recently reported some shocking statistics regarding UK health, but which will perhaps come as no surprise to those critics who warned that far-reaching national lockdowns would cause other unseen adverse effects:

Compared with normal years, there have been more deaths at home from a number of major causes, including cancers and respiratory diseases, during the last six months.

The latest analysis published by Britain’s Office for National Statistics found that more than 26,000 “extra” deaths occurred in private homes this year, while simultaneously hospital deaths have been lower than usual.

“More men than normal are dying at home from heart disease in England and Wales, and more women are dying from dementia and Alzheimer’s, figures show,” the report says.

File image via DW/Picture-Alliance

The figures had been issued just ahead of European officials in Germany, France, and Italy contemplating ‘severe’ extended measures that could last as long as four to five months, as Germany is now said to be mulling.

The BBC report further cited Alzheimer’s charity groups as lamenting the “heartbreaking” and devastating hidden adverse impact of both stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures, particularly on elderly men.

Deaths attributable to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease at home are on a major upward trajectory while being down in hospitals, strongly suggesting that more people with life-threatening but treatable diseases are simply avoiding professional medical services for fear of COVID-19 or possibly on fear of violating social distancing measures or travel bans.

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Lockdowns Haven’t Brought down Covid Mortality. But They Have Killed Millions of Jobs. By Mitch Nemeth

Posted on November 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

As predicted from the beginning of this fiasco by SLL and other commentators, the cure has been far worse than the disease. Especially the lockdown part of the cure. From Mitch Nemeth at mises.org:

killed job

During the early onset of covid-19 in the spring, government officials across the political spectrum widely agreed that government intervention and forced closure of many businesses was necessary to protect public health. This approach has clearly failed in the United States as it led to widespread economic devastation, including millions of jobs lost, bankruptcies, and extremely severe losses in profitability. Nor have states with strict lockdowns succeeded in bringing about fewer covid deaths per million than states that were less strict.

Consequently, a few months into the pandemic, some governors weighed the competing economic costs with covid-19 containment and slowly reopened their economies. Of course, these governors did not mandate businesses reopen; however, they provided businesses the option to reopen.

Hysteria ensued as many viewed easing restrictions as akin to mass murder. The Atlantic famously dubbed Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s easing of restrictions as “human sacrifice” and referred to Georgians as being in a “case study in pandemic exceptionalism.” Instead, we should view the lockdowns as a case study in the failure of heavy-handed approaches in containing a highly infectious virus.

Now that we are nine months into this pandemic, there is a clearer picture of how state government approaches varied widely. It is clear that “reopened” economies are faring much better overall than less “reopened” economies. “Fueled by broader, faster economic reopenings following the initial coronavirus rash, conservative-leaning red states are by and large far outpacing liberal-leaning blue states in terms of putting people back to work,” writes Carrie Sheffield. This follows logically especially when considering that human beings learn to adapt very quickly. Now, we have learned much more about treating this virus and about who is most at risk from infection.

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Lockdowns Make Time Stand Still, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on November 12, 2020 | Leave a comment

By now, coronavirus is endemic across most of the world and current tactics aren’t stopping it. In light of the disastrous consequences, how long before power-hungry government officials and scientists throw in the towel? From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

We would by now have expected the narrative surrounding COVID19 to be simpler to understand, but it’s not. We may understand much more about the disease and everything that has to do with it, but we’re finding there is so much that has been left unsaid, not discussed, neglected.

The discussion has been stuck in an All Else Being Equal (Ceteris Paribus) mode, but all things do not remain equal. It’s not even as if you get rid of the disease, all your problems go away. Not only do various COVID measures inflict huge damage on economies, on people’s jobs and incomes, they also cause entire new sets of health problems.

Epidemiologists and virologists are not equipped for such massive problems. They may be able to say the odd wise word in their field -and even that will be 90% rear-view mirror stuff, because they must compare what they see to what happened in the past-, but the disease doesn’t only affect their field. It affects many fields they have no knowledge of.

Their ideas are then taken on board by economists, not exactly the most scientific of sciences, and off go the government policies. But that was 6-7 months ago, and we learned so much since, right? By now we have involved for instance mental health experts on a large scale, right? Yeah, sure.

The point is, you can’t force lockdowns, masks etc. onto people, without looking at what the consequences of that will be. Because all things do not remain equal for 6-7 months.

A nice example comes from a July 2020 study published in the Lancet, which indicates that “..the number of smokers in a population was correlated with a 3% decrease in covid deaths.. Wow, that’s great. Let’s get everybody smoking, said … nobody. But if your sole focus is COVID19, and for many governments it is, why not? That’s of course because smoking is one thing people recognize as “bad”. But how about other things, that are not?

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Coronavirus Counterfactual: A True Enemy Would Have Alerted Us In 2019, by John Tamny

Posted on October 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

What if there had been no official response to coronavirus other than advice to wash your hands, blow your nose, cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough, and stay at home if you felt sick? Odds are the disease would have come and gone with very little notice and very little damage to the economy and society. From John Tamny at realclearmarkets.com:

With the coronavirus, the most frustrating counterfactual of all is to think about how much better off we all would have been if politicians had done nothing. Stop and think about it for a minute. The more desperate the situation, the more freedom makes sense.

The reality is that well before the needless lockdowns began, Americans had started to adjust their behavior. This included staying at home for some. Notable about this is that it was in the U.S. states that locked down the latest that citizens adjusted the most. In a global sense, it was reported by the great Holman Jenkins that the supply of masks had run out before major action by Merkel et al in Germany. People get it. They don’t need a law. Fear of sickness or death concentrates the mind.

Remember how restaurants started to clear somewhat before the lockdowns? People were adjusting. Imagine if businesses, including restaurants, had been left free to meet the needs of customers (or not at all) free of business tips from those who brought us the DMV.

No doubt some businesses would have gone under amid fear of the virus, but they were already going under before that. Particularly retail. Remember all the hand wringing about Amazon and the internet “hollowing out” shopping malls? While the nailbiters will eventually regret the association of their names with such alarmism, the reality in a dynamic economy is that the roster of names in shopping malls and town centers is constantly changing.

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We Destroyed the World’s Greatest Economy for No Reason, by James Rickards

Posted on October 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

The economy will be weaker than it was before Covid-19 for many years. From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:

We Destroyed the World’s Greatest Economy for No Reason
 

Everyone knew the second quarter of 2020 was going to be a disaster, and it was. The U.S. economy fell by 31.4% (annualized) in the second quarter.

But, the expectation was that we’d have a V-shaped recovery with a sharp bounce-back in the third quarter, a reopening of closed businesses, rehiring of the unemployed and a rising stock market.

But so far, the economy is not following the script laid out for it by the politicians and experts.

The stock market did rally, but that was mainly because the stock index components are heavily weighted to companies least affected by the pandemic including Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet (Google), Facebook and Microsoft.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that the Federal Reserve printed $4 trillion of new money and backstopped money markets, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, foreign central banks and other facets of capital markets with direct purchases, guarantees or currency swaps.

Even at that, stocks have been struggling since hitting new highs on September 2.

And yes, there was growth in the third-quarter (the best estimate is that the economy will grow at about a 35% annualized rate, but we won’t have official figures until October 29).

The 35% third-quarter recovery was to be expected as Americans got back to work after the lockdown. That 35% rate might sound like the third quarter will basically make up for the second quarter, but it won’t.

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Economic Doom Due to the Covid Response Is on the Horizon and Beyond, by Gary D. Barnett

Posted on September 14, 2020 | Leave a comment

The coronavirus cure, particularly its economic aspects, will be far worse than the disease. From Gary D. Barnett at lewrockwell.com:

“Only a psychopath would ever think of doing these things, only a psychopath would dream of abusing other people in such a way, only a psychopath would treat people as less than human just for money. The shocking truth is, even though they now have most if not all of the money, they want still more, they want all of the money that you have left in your pockets, they want it all because they have no empathy with other people, with other creatures, they have no feeling for the world which they exploit, they have no love or sense of being or belonging for their souls are dead, dead to all things but greed and a desire to rule over others.” 

~ Arun D. Ellis, Corpalism

Covid-19 as it is called, was invented for many reasons, none of which are more evident than as cover for the coming economic collapse. Long before the fake pandemic, that collapse was already imminent, but now it can take place in plain sight, as the eyes of the masses will remain blind to the truth. The planned global reset is in the works, and in order to accomplish such a task as this, the current economic system will have to be eliminated in favor of a digitized system designed for total control over the current monetary order and the people themselves. This dystopian nightmare is well underway, but the American people are not prepared for the destruction of the economy at every level from money to food. What is coming is an economic nightmare.

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COVID Financial Pain ‘Much, Much Worse’ Than Expected, Warns Harvard Study, by Tyler Durden

Posted on September 11, 2020 | Leave a comment

Some of us expected Covid’s financial pain to be very bad indeed, but that certainly wasn’t the mainstream media line. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

New findings from a survey by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, published by NPR News on Wednesday, reveal low-income minority households have experienced the most financial hardships in the virus-induced recession.

The pandemic heavily impacted Black and Latino households across America’s four largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston) with massive job loss or reduction in hourly wages or a decline in working hours.

The survey, conducted from July 1 through Aug. 3, found Latino households (77%) and Black households (81%) in the Greater Houston area incurred “serious” financial problems.

Houston

As for the three other major cities, the survey showed 73% of Latinos in New York City experienced severe financial hardships, 71% of Latinos in Los Angeles, and 63% in Chicago. Black households in New York City (62%), Los Angeles (52%), and Chicago (69%) also reported severe financial distress because of the downturn.

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The Economy Continues To Unravel Despite All Stimulus Measures, by Brandon Smith

Posted on September 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

You don’t get a lot of production out of an economy when producers have to lock themselves up, fire their employees, and close their businesses. Who knew? From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

Since the pandemic lockdowns were first implemented in the US I have been more concerned with the government and central bank response than the virus itself. As I have noted in past articles, the pandemic restrictions and subsequent economic and social crisis events they help to create will cause far more deaths than Covid-19 ever will. Not only that, but the actions of the Federal Reserve continue to con the American public into believing that there is some kind of “plan” to stop the crash that THEY engineered.

The only agenda of the Fed is to increase the pain in the long term; they have no intention of actually preventing any disaster.

This is evidenced in comments by voting members of the Fed, including Neel Kashkari who recently argued for the enforcement of hard lockdowns for at least six weeks in the US, all because the US savings rate was going up. Meaning, because Americans are saving more in order to protect themselves from economic fallout, Kashkari thinks we should be punished with an economic shutdown that would force us to spend whatever we have been able to save.

Do you see how that works?

Fed members and government officials demand hard lockdowns, depleting public savings and destroying small businesses. Then, the public has to beg the Fed and the government for more and more stimulus measures so that they can survive. The people and the system become dependent on a single point of support – fiat money creation and welfare. Yet, the evidence suggests that this strategy is failing to do much of anything except stall the inevitable for a very short time.

If the goal was really to reduce the pain of the pandemic as much as possible, then the strategy should be to keep the economy as open as possible and let the virus run its course.  By initiating lockdowns, all we are doing is extending the economic damage over the span of years instead of months.  We can deal with the comparatively minimal deaths associated with the virus; we cannot handle the disaster that is about to befall the financial system.

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Airlines, Trying to Dodge Bankruptcy with Air Travel Still Down 70%, Threaten Oct. Jobs Massacre Unless they Get 2nd Bailout, by Wolf Richter

Posted on August 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

The airlines are in a world of trouble. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

“Unfortunately, we see few catalysts over the next six months to meaningfully change this trajectory”: Delta.

October 1 and the days that follow are going to be rough in terms of tens of thousands of well-paid service jobs – that’s what airlines are threatening unless they get another $25-billion bailout. Airlines have been trying to shed employees by offering packages that induce employees to depart voluntarily because the $25-billion bailout package under the CARES Act banned “involuntary” furloughs or layoffs through the end of September.

The air passenger business is still down roughly 70% in the US, six months after the initial collapse of traffic began, according to TSA airport screenings of air travelers entering into security zones. And demand has hardly improved any since early July, and airlines continue to slash costs and cash-burn to survive:

“It was assumed that by Sept. 30, the virus would be under control and demand for air travel would have returned. That is obviously not the case,” American Airlines CEO Parker and President Robert Isom told employees in a grim message on Tuesday.

Under its buyout, early retirement, and long-term leave-of-absence programs, 23,500 employees had already voluntarily departed. But that wasn’t enough. So the executives told employees what the next step would be: 19,000 “involuntary” furloughs on October 1.

American, which started the year out with about 140,000 employees, expects to have fewer than 100,000 employees in October.

“The one possibility of avoiding these involuntary reductions on Oct. 1 is a clean extension” of the bailout package, they said. So if given another bailout, American, which received $5.8 billion under the first bailout package, will then not lay off those employees on October 1 – but instead on the date when the second bailout package would expire?

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