🌏 Planet B Media 🐝

Many by now will have seen this appalling piece of Alarmism, so it’s worth a comment.

Quite simply, Siouxsie Wiles has not scrutinized the data thoroughly enough.

Manaus in Brazil (the focus in that article) has not been shown to have had an unprecedented mortality rate for the year 2020, when compared to prior recent years.

Any talk of “excess death” (or busy hospitals) applies merely to roughly a 4 week period (weeks 14 – 17 of 2020).

But a 4 week bumper period doesn’t equate to an unprecedented (let alone catastrophic) year, particularly where the average age of those deaths is in line with normal (which they were). It just means some of the deaths for the 6 － 12 month period were concentrated in a shorter time frame.

This is the same pattern we see in Sweden, where 2020 also hasn’t been particularly bad in terms of mortality rate (i.e. its much the same as 2015, and milder than 2014), despite higher than average mortality for around 4 weeks in March/April.

And considering that Manaus was the worst hit spot in Brazil, Brazil is doing fine for not having implemented much in the way of society crippling lockdown measures.

Surely, if Manaus is the worst case example for a non-lockdown scenario, and the primary downsides that lockdowns have avoided is some short-term concentration of death (that were likely to eventuate over the next 6 – 12 months) along with a hard hit hospital system for 3 or 4 weeks – how on earth can that justify society destroying lockdowns?

If one has any decent grip of the eyewatering costs to both life and wellbeing over many coming years (to the entire population, with the burden dramatically increasing the younger and poorer you are) which the lockdowns have triggered directly and indirectly (and will continue to trigger as they are repeatedly implemented), its a no brainer: Sweden and Brazil got it right.