President Trump sent people away seething by saying, “Don’t be afraid of COVID; don’t let it dominate your life,” and not without justification. He demonstrated a total lack of self-awareness, a lack of any recognition that he was uniquely cared for and that the virus has killed so many who didn’t share in that presidential privilege.
Yet, his indelicacy is no reason to sour on the premise that the current restrictive public health responses to COVID-19 have led to significant harms that must be reversed.
A group of epidemiologists has drafted a declaration making that case, calling attention to the grave and underrecognized risks of continuing on the lockdown path. The Great Barrington Declaration (written by Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford University, and Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, and signed by a few thousand other scientists) recommends that “those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal.” The consequences of not doing so, which have been building for months, will otherwise continue to build.
Anxiety and depression have been rising among young people as pandemic-induced social isolation persists. Children are losing proficiency in reading and math. If they were at a greater risk for suffering from COVID-19, keeping them safely at home would be worthy, but as the declaration points out, the risk of death in children is more than a thousandfold lower than in old and vulnerable populations.
More importantly, children and other populations have been missing out on routine vaccinations during the pandemic. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins testified to this before Congress in September. Bhattacharya predicts that lower vaccination rates will almost certainly lead to other disease outbreaks.
Aside from vaccinations, the lockdown circumstances have had “deleterious effects on how we handle other diseases,” according to Anthony Fauci. The declaration projects that all these consequences together will lead “to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.”
In a video interview accompanying the declaration, Bhattacharya said, “These costs are not ancillary, and they needed to be included in the calculus when we discussed the lockdown alongside the mathematical models of disease spread.” They must be included in the calculus going forward.
Sadly, as they focus on coronavirus cases and deaths, many in politics and in news media have been unwilling to consider seriously enough the various consequences of restrictions. At a recent NBC News town hall, when asked specifically about how he would balance combating the virus with concerns about the psychological and financial tolls caused by shutdowns and isolation, Biden pivoted to his favorite safe but empty platitude: “Science matters.” He went on about the importance of wearing masks. It’s just not an answer to the question.
The president’s behaviors, his language, and the incidences of infection within his White House make the argument for relaxing restrictions much harder to make, but Trump aside, there is a strong scientific and moral case against the lockdown reflex. The science on lockdown harm matters, too.
