Did our lives ground to a halt for a virus about as lethal as a bad flu?
COVID-19 had a loud bark but little bite, especially compared to the draconian mandates it inspired.
I know: that statement is controversial, but it can be backed up by a new study on infection mortality rates during the pandemic. We now know the virus was never the threat it was made out to be, making the lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates overreactions and unnecessary.
The fear of COVID-19 and its corresponding response can be traced to Mar. 26, 2020. Back then, the Imperial College of London predicted COVID-19 would kill 40 million people. On the other hand, “rapid adoption of proven public health measures – including testing and isolation of cases and wider social distancing” would supposedly save 38.7 million lives.
But according to a recent study by Stanford University professor of medicine and epidemiology John P.A. Ioannidis and four fellow researchers, that estimation did not match reality. Their new paper, “Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population” in Environmental Research, analyzes the infection fatality rate (IFR) in 38 countries prior to the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines.
“At a global level, pre-vaccination IFR may have been as low as 0.03 per cent and 0.07 per cent for 0 to 59 and 0 to 69-year-old people, respectively,” the paper reports.
“These IFR estimates in non-elderly populations are lower than previous calculations had suggested.”
Put another way, 99.97 per cent of people under 60 who contracted COVID-19 survived. Add people in their 60s to the cohort, and survival rates remain a robust 99.93 per cent.
IFRs for age brackets could also be found for 31 of the 38 countries, the stats reading as follows:
- 0 to 19 years: 0.0003 per cent
- 20 to 29 years: 0.002 per cent
- 30 to 39 years: 0.11 per cent
- 40 to 49 years: 0.035 per cent
- 50 to 59 years: 0.123 per cent
- 60 to 69 years: 0.506 per cent
The inverse of such percentages, let’s call them infection survival rates, are indeed quite high. Even people in their 60s who were infected overcame the virus 99.5 per cent of the time. On average, only five deaths would result in among a thousand infected sexagenarians.
The paper tells us that 44 per cent of the population had already been infected with COVID-19 before Omicron arrived in the fall of 2021. However, even if half the population was infected, and the vaccine had never been invented, such hypothetical “fatalities are overall probably modestly higher than seasonal flu fatalities” for those under 70 years of age, yet still “lower than pre-pandemic years when only the younger age strata are considered.”
Wow. Did our lives ground to a halt for a virus about as lethal as bad flu?
Call it the 20-20 hindsight, but the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration has been wholly vindicated. “Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19,” authors Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff wrote on Oct. 4 of that year. “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.”
Too bad Canada didn’t listen. As it turns out, the COVID-19 survival rate for those under 20 was 99.9997 per cent. Is this really the virus that shut down schools? Is this why elementary and secondary students wore masks in classrooms, hallways, and even gymnasiums? Is this the cause for which they went without athletic events, drama performances, and normal graduation ceremonies? What a shame!
It’s too bad so many post-secondary institutions brought in COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The survival rate for anyone infected in their 20s was 99.998 per cent before a needle even pierced their skin. And Canadian Football League players and their fans are left with no consolation that the 2020 season was cancelled.
Lockdowns and limitations on home gatherings now seem regrettably unnecessary. The resultant increases in business failures, domestic violence, overdose deaths, and other damages to the quality and length of lives now weigh heavier than the disease itself.
We already had some hint of this in the April 2021 analysis by Simon Fraser University economist D. W. Allen. Even data then available suggested that lockdowns cost 3.6 to 282 times the life years that they preserved. “It is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history,” Allen wrote. He, too, has been proven correct.
There was no way lockdowns could have saved 38.7 million people of the estimated 40 million deaths feared by the Imperial College of London. Why? As the Ioannidis study points out, even if everyone worldwide was infected with COVID-19 and no vaccines or “potentially beneficial interventions” were available, 4.7 to 5.3 million people under age 70 would have died.
Sadly, although COVID-19 has run its course, it’s unclear whether politicians and the public have learned its lessons.
Lee Harding is a research associate at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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