Do you think that at times what we have referred to as ‘the science’ has got it wrong?

[MarshaBradyo]

I’m thinking about the many times people said well it’s going to go badly wrong and the science backs this up

But a few times this hasn’t happened

July opening
Omicron and not doing ‘circuit breaker’ and not ending in lockdown
Not getting close to best case for omicron

And so on - maybe other examples

What do you think - was it unnecessarily pessimistic?

The Sweden report actually criticises the government and says that they should have implemented more restrictions (and there were restrictions) and closed indoor public spaces early on. It seems that while it said the strategy of not fully locking down was broadly correct as it allowed people to retain some personal freedoms, it says there was a lack of leadership and more should have been done.

It's not a validation of anyone who thinks we should have just carried on as normal.

Yes Sweden didn’t get everything right. They completely failed to protect care homes.

What worked about their policy was people trusted the government and therefore many of them self regulated their behaviour. They didn’t have massive parties in defiance as there was nothing to rebel against. Many chose to work from home, they chose to meet outside in small groups.

What worked about their strategy is that they didn’t enter the cycle of lockdowns that ultimately doesn’t work. Lockdown, suppress the virus, open up, cases shoot up. And repeat. They avoided that. They avoided as large an impact on their economy (there was an impact just not as huge).

@Flyonawalk

Interesting analysis on More Or Less today (radio 4) exploring whether lockdowns made any difference and saved any lives.

Plenty of analysis says lockdowns were useless at preventing covid deaths and have caused many other deaths.

This aspect of ‘the science’ is losing credibility.

I though the conclusion on ‘More or Less’ was that the Johns Hopkins study excluded too much relevant data.

@merrymouse

Aye - a working paper, not peer reviewed.

Claims to be systematic review but the exclusion criteria is strange and will certainly bias towards the null - for example they've disregarded any study which includes a modelled counterfactual (which most epidemiological studies do)

This means the review is not representative of research on lockdowns, and basically has removed any research which is likely to demonstrate benefits of lockdown on infection rates/death.

One really notable error (which draws into question the agenda here) is that the quote the Oxford Stringency Index a fair bit, but when it comes to it, they exclude the paper this quote came from in their meta analysis. This paper found a huge benefit of lockdown on COVID deaths.

Finally no robust risk of bias/quality assessment done, which is the gold standard of systematic reviews methodology. Presumably this was omitted because many of the papers backing their conclusions are too low quality as to be used to infer causality.

Other things revealing their bias - they include a paper by Chisdza et al, stating it found no benefit for lockdowns, when this isn't what their analysis showed. The authors have got in touch stating this. This is true for several other quoted papers.

It's strange that @Flyonawalk who quoted more or less talking about the paper didn't pick up on any on this, even though the prenseters referenced it.

Conclusion? This is a perfect teaching example of how to not conduct a systematic review, and how if you cherry pick evidence and misinterpret it, you make "the science" say anything you want it to.

I think this is what concerns me.

Much of the science ALSO appears to take the economic harms of lockdown into account.

The more ‘economic’ analysis seems to ignore/discredit or not address the science. Cherry pick, weed out etc.

And to be honest I see the same here on threads. A ‘catastophisation’ of mental health issues - with no real acknowledgement of the impact on mental health/physical health - if globally, a no lockdown strategy had been implemented when we had no method to control Covid.

If lockdown had such a catastrophic effect on mental health, why do Sweden have a higher suicide rate per 100 000 than the UK? Surely we’d see - at least the beginnings now - of a drastic difference forming here.

I wouldn’t use suicide alone as a measure of mental health and Sweden has historically had a higher rate.

Why the reluctance to acknowledge harms from lockdown?

Is it really so important to be blinkered to the harms..

Nordic countries traditionally have higher rates of suicide due to lack of light. SAD is a huge issue. Nothing to do with their lack of lockdown.

I have no idea why people minimise the impact of lockdown. I can only think it’s because it’s too much to believe we sacrificed so much and basically threw our children under a bus for very little benefit. Businesses down the drain. Families not seeing each other for months and months, even years in some cases. Grandparents missing out on crucial years....

I wonder what the impact on the lack of sport and PE has had in childhood obesity?

We’ll be seeing the impact of this for decades.

@MarshaBradyo

I wouldn’t use suicide alone as a measure of mental health and Sweden has historically had a higher rate.

Why the reluctance to acknowledge harms from lockdown?

Is it really so important to be blinkered to the harms..

I haven't seen any posts in this discussion reluctant to acknowledge harms of suppression measures @MarshaBradyo?

I've just pointed out that the quoted systematic review is not a representative estimate of to what extent lockdowns reduced COVID deaths.

Much of the arguments seem to be "WELL lockdowns made no difference and they caused all these harms" when in reality, clearly they did reduce deaths and hospitlisations, whilst also causing other adverse effects which of course must be acknowledged and estimates.

The other issue here is that many people seem to be blind to counterfactuals. It isn't life with lockdowns versus the same life with no lockdown, it is life with locdowns versus life with an umitigated pandemic and all the other harms it causes.

I haven't seen an unbiased attempt at a systematic review attempting to answer these questions (it will be a huge amount of work), but hopefully a group somewhere is working on it.

Yes I do think that’s right @MarshaBradyo, and yes to lack of light. I also think there is a link between individualism and suicide rates. BUT I do believe the extent to which lockdown harm has been catastrophised by some, you’d surely also see some evidence here if it were true. And then what indicators would be better to use?

Yes lockdown has caused harm but it’s measuring it carefully. Not being swayed by personal bias, not catastrophising, looking at all the potential impacts for and against. Not cherry picking, not weeding.

I haven't seen any posts in this discussion reluctant to acknowledge harms of suppression measures @MarshaBradyo?

I’d say a few do yes. The one a couple below and others but no point in scrolling through.

I've just pointed out that the quoted systematic review is not a representative estimate of to what extent lockdowns reduced COVID deaths

And that’s fine. As I’m aware of the programme the conclusion can be there’s a basis or not for whatever the study or headline is being looked at. It’s excellent but I haven’t listened to that episode.

And presumably @MarshaBradyo - in order to have a dicussion that's actually helpful, the harms of a pandemic need to be acknowledged too?

And by this I'm not referring to the direct effects of COVID itself, but the indirect harms of unmitigated pandemic on things like businesses, physical health, mental health, and healthcare services.

There seems to be a real blind spot regarding this.

It doesn’t have to be lockdown or unmitigated pandemic.

As we have seen in Sweden they took some measures they just didn’t resort to a lockdown. And no we couldn’t have emulated everything they did but there is starting to be some acknowledgment that many of the strategies they followed were effective. It wasn’t the huge disaster many predicted. Softer measures could work. Versus the Spanish way of locking children indoors for 6 weeks. Which was pretty horrific.

I don’t think with the NHS we could have coped with no lockdown but I do think we could have had shorter and less hard lockdowns and had minimal school closures. Especially if we’d have focused on care homes and hospitals.

@Delatron

It doesn’t have to be lockdown or unmitigated pandemic.

As we have seen in Sweden they took some measures they just didn’t resort to a lockdown. And no we couldn’t have emulated everything they did but there is starting to be some acknowledgment that many of the strategies they followed were effective. It wasn’t the huge disaster many predicted. Softer measures could work. Versus the Spanish way of locking children indoors for 6 weeks. Which was pretty horrific.

I don’t think with the NHS we could have coped with no lockdown but I do think we could have had shorter and less hard lockdowns and had minimal school closures. Especially if we’d have focused on care homes and hospitals.

Yes I agree with this

Yes lockdown has caused harm but it’s measuring it carefully. Not being swayed by personal bias, not catastrophising, looking at all the potential impacts for and against. Not cherry picking, not weeding.

And also understanding that this isn't over yet, so we aren't even in a position to make those assessments even with the best tools in the world.

And also understanding that this isn't over yet, so we aren't even in a position to make those assessments even with the best tools in the world.

Yes. It’s possible and worthwhile to collect data and create studies, but we are in no position to understand long term effects.

@Delatron

Yes Sweden didn’t get everything right. They completely failed to protect care homes.

What worked about their policy was people trusted the government and therefore many of them self regulated their behaviour. They didn’t have massive parties in defiance as there was nothing to rebel against. Many chose to work from home, they chose to meet outside in small groups.

What worked about their strategy is that they didn’t enter the cycle of lockdowns that ultimately doesn’t work. Lockdown, suppress the virus, open up, cases shoot up. And repeat. They avoided that. They avoided as large an impact on their economy (there was an impact just not as huge).

I think one element that made a difference is that they decided to try and make a long term sustainable strategy that wouldn't mean changing their rules and such all the time. They allowed right of the bat that there would be 18 months or more of living according to whatever restrictions they decided on, and that in order for that to work it had to take into account people's long term well-being.

It's also just good policy in any organization that you should try not to change the rules too often. Every time there is change it causes people stress to adapt and some people become confused or fall behind.

Those are really good places to start in formulating policy. The specific decisions might look different in different countries or regions, sure, but those kinds of principles are applicable pretty much across the board.

@Delatron

I have no idea why people minimise the impact of lockdown. I can only think it’s because it’s too much to believe we sacrificed so much and basically threw our children under a bus for very little benefit. Businesses down the drain. Families not seeing each other for months and months, even years in some cases. Grandparents missing out on crucial years....

I wonder what the impact on the lack of sport and PE has had in childhood obesity?

We’ll be seeing the impact of this for decades.

There are stats out on this now. It's quite disturbing.

@Delatron

It doesn’t have to be lockdown or unmitigated pandemic.

As we have seen in Sweden they took some measures they just didn’t resort to a lockdown. And no we couldn’t have emulated everything they did but there is starting to be some acknowledgment that many of the strategies they followed were effective. It wasn’t the huge disaster many predicted. Softer measures could work. Versus the Spanish way of locking children indoors for 6 weeks. Which was pretty horrific.

I don’t think with the NHS we could have coped with no lockdown but I do think we could have had shorter and less hard lockdowns and had minimal school closures. Especially if we’d have focused on care homes and hospitals.

Yes, something to consider is that while MN skews to UK users, many places made different choices than the UK or Sweden.

From my perspective in Canada the UK overall made pretty moderate choices all along. Not that there were no bumps, but they at least tried to keep children at risk in school, there were no vaccine passports at least in England. People were not let go from their jobs or put on leave in large numbers because they didn't want to vaccinate.

Quite different to where I am where we closed schools for all children more than once, we had vaccine passports, long periods where regional travel was not allowed, many people (all civil servants, people who worked in places with government contracts, others including gas station employees and lumberjacks) had the choice of getting vaccinated or losing their income. We are still mandated to wear masks in all public places in many parts of Canada.

Near the beginning of the pandemic I heard a radio interview with an elderly women in a care home who had been restricted to her room for three weeks - food was left for her at the door. And many residents of care homes were not allowed out of the facility, or to have visitors, for over a year.

Frankly I'd take Swedish rules over that any day.

I’m just reading about this :

One in three young people said their mental health and wellbeing improved during lockdown measures.

Getting more sleep and exercise, and avoiding bullying were among the reasons.

More than 17,000 UK school students took part in a study during the last two months of the first national lockdown, answering questions about their experiences of the pandemic, school, home life, and relationships, among others.

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00787-021-01934-z

It’s interesting to hear the perspective from
Canada @MangyInseam and that sounds really tough. I do agree that we were a bit more liberal/moderate over here and it could have been far worse. And it was in many other European countries such as Spain with their full, don’t leave the house lockdown.

I completely agree with you that Sweden was very clear from the offset on their overall strategy. I’m sure they tweaked it as the situation changed but they prioritised civil liberties and choice and were adamant they would not lockdown, even in the face of much criticism.

Here in the U.K. we’d go from a lockdown where couldn’t even eat a sandwich outdoors on a bench to ‘eat out to help out’! Packing the pubs out. No wonder people were confused and less compliant. Especially when many of the rules made no sense and we’re not science led.

I’m sure some children enjoyed not being at school @Emergency73 and my teen very much enjoyed getting more sleep. However more exercise? No. Not compared to the hours and hours of sports clubs and Pe and extra curricular activities and walking to and from school they do.

And I am an active parent so I made them do the Joe Wicks and I forced them out for runs and walks and it still didn’t come close. Many parents would not have made their children do any exercise.

Just because some children enjoyed being at home for a few months doesn’t mean their lives in the long term won’t be impacted.

That’s also 2/3rds that won’t have had their mental health improved. I know mine very much missed seeing their friends and socialising. Plus children won’t have clocked that they have fallen behind. Especially younger children.

We’ll have created more inequality in the system. Those with parents at home to home school and exercise them will have fared far better than disinterested parents or those juggling full time jobs. We can’t dress it up that is was some lovely Utopia.

I really appreciate the Swedish strategy, although I think our compliance was quite high

The downside was the huge emotive and psychological push to get that. So heavy messaging and curtailment of liberties, using every tactic to suppress them including emotive. Who said at one point there was questions re ethics of this - BPA?

Near the beginning of the pandemic I heard a radio interview with an elderly women in a care home who had been restricted to her room for three weeks - food was left for her at the door. And many residents of care homes were not allowed out of the facility, or to have visitors, for over a year. this is heartbreaking and worse tbh

I remember something similar with a husband saying that isolation had caused deterioration in his wife in short time and she had gone . So sad. Care homes were hard as people bring in virus but so difficult to hear.

There were certainly some students better off outside of school. I have a relative with a child who has special needs who was much better off out of school, so much so she was able to drop some medications.

I think this is something to be learned from. Particularly - there are some children - my relative for example - who are for some reason not a good fit for the school system and probably can't really have their needs met there. And secondly, that some school environments are quite poor even for fairly average children.

There's a real need to think about how to best manage the needs of the first group and what's gone wrong in schools for the second.