By Spencer Lindquist
A new study from the Rand Corporation and the University of Southern California titled “The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic And Policy Responses On Excess Mortality,” found that the lockdowns that were mandated in response to the Wuhan virus outbreak didn’t save lives, and even worse, they may have actually resulted in more deaths than would have occurred if shelter-in-place policies had not been mandated.
The paper, out this month, found that “following the implementation of shelter-in-place policies, excess mortality increases,” noting that “The increase in excess mortality is statistically significant in the immediate weeks following [shelter-in-place] implementation.”
“We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter-in-place] policies earlier, and in which [shelter-in-place] policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries-slash-U.S. states that were slower to implement [shelter-in-place] policies,” the researchers reported. “We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of [shelter-in-place] policies based on pre-[shelter-in-place] COVID-19 death rates.”
Though conservative leaders such as Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump were vocal opponents of the lockdowns, with the then-president supporting anti-lockdown protests, corporate media outlets derided their resistance, dubbing it “opposition to science” and calling the case against lockdowns “half-baked.” Democratic leaders did the same, with Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington complaining that Trump was “putting millions in danger of contracting Covid-19,” and referring to the president’s remarks as “unhinged rantings.”
It turns out conservatives weren’t flippantly opposing the science when they resisted lockdowns. In fact, the study also found that shelter-in-place policies “likely had several unintended consequences,” such as causing an “increase in stress and anxiety,” “increases in child abuse and domestic violence,” and worst of all, an “increase in substance abuse and suicides.”