New York Times Backtracks on COVID-19 Lockdown Harm

The New York Times (NYT), one of the leading media outlets to publish favorable articles on lockdowns and other extreme measures to battle the COVID-19 virus, has done an about-face on its position, at least on how such policies have impacted children and the lockdown harm they have caused.

On May 5, 2022, the media outlet ran an article titled, ‘Not Good for Learning,’ which details evidence that school shutdowns cost students dearly in terms of math and reading scores based on standardized Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) test results.

“Remote learning was a failure,” wrote the writer, David Leonhardt.

The impetus for the change on lockdown harm appears to come from a new study from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. The study, titled “Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” reviewed MAP test data for 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states, plus D.C.

The study revealed that, on average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window. However, students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse, losing an average of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

The article also referenced an October 2020 article by Emily Oster in The Atlantic titled, “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” which detailed data she had collected from 47 states that indicated an average student infection rate of a scant 0.13 percent. Even higher-risk staff were infected at a rate of only 0.24 percent.

Low-Risk Group

A few months into the pandemic, there was a growing body of evidence that school-aged children were among the lowest risk groups for serious infection or transmission of the SARS-CoV2 virus.

“The experience of Sweden shows that the school shutdowns were never justified,” said Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder, and president of the Brownstone Institute. “Even based on demographic data from January 2020, we knew this already. The elites sacrificed a whole generation of school kids, and the public is demanding answers now. Rightly so.”

Other MSM publications also have been slow to admit that early fearmongering and the resultant shutdowns are increasingly being demonstrated to have been pointless. Few have linked draconian policies to the devastating consequences being seen today such as supply chain shortages, empty retail and grocery shelves, soaring energy costs, and inflation, following the trillions of dollars that were pumped into the U.S. economy in the name of COVID-19 emergency relief.

Media narratives on lockdown harm began to soften in 2022 when poll after poll demonstrated the weariness of the public from the restrictions and a mid-term election looming in November. A key study gave media outlets little room for defending masks and lockdowns.

A meta-data analysis conducted by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden, and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies and published in January 2022, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020, including shelter in place orders, masks mandates, and social distancing, only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2 percent.

Still, Newsweek published a February 7, 2022 hit piece on the study titled, “Did a Johns Hopkins Study ‘Prove’ Lockdowns Don’t Work? What We Know So Far.” The article criticized the study for not being peer-reviewed and that alleged “right-leaning outlets,” including The National Post, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal had reported on the study.
The article failed to mention that peer reviews are not always the gold standard. In 2020, the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine retracted peer-reviewed studies discrediting off-label drugs to treat and prevent COVID-19.

The Newsweek article concluded not with a factual rebuttal of the study, but rather with a dogmatic claim, not by a medical scientist or epidemiologist, but by an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, named Seth Flaxman.

“Smoking causes cancer, the Earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission,” Flaxman said. “None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.”

Can’t Deny Growing Evidence

Tucker says it is impossible for mainstream media outlets to ignore the growing evidence that the lockdowns were a costly mistake.

“Not even the New York Times can deny the crisis caused by the shutdowns, which affects the whole of society, especially the catastrophic educational losses,” said Tucker. “What’s outrageous is the lack of responsibility here. The NYT essentially began this era with its promotion of COVID lockdowns. The losses are incalculable. We need honesty not only about the effects but also about the cause. Their own venue was a major player.”

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2022/06/lockdown-harm/

**********************************************

During the Omicron Wave, Death Rates Soared for Older People

Despite strong levels of vaccination among older people, Covid killed them at vastly higher rates during this winter’s Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses.

This winter’s wave of deaths in older people belied the Omicron variant’s relative mildness. Almost as many Americans 65 and older died in four months of the Omicron surge as did in six months of the Delta wave, even though the Delta variant, for any one person, tended to cause more severe illness.

While overall per capita Covid death rates have fallen, older people still account for an overwhelming share of them.

“This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor in global health at Boston University who studies age patterns of Covid deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.”

The Omicron Wave Was Deadlier Than Delta for Older People in the U.S.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

In much of the country, though, the booster campaign remains listless and disorganized, older people and their doctors said. Patients, many of whom struggle to drive or get online, have to maneuver through an often labyrinthine health care system to receive potentially lifesaving antivirals.

Nationwide Covid deaths in recent weeks have been near the lowest levels of the pandemic, below an average of 400 a day. But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as Covid deaths once again cluster around older people.

And the new wave of Omicron subvariants may create additional threats: While hospitalizations in younger age groups have remained relatively low, admission rates among people 70 and older in the Northeast have climbed to one-third of the winter Omicron wave’s towering peak.

“I think we are going to see the death rates rising,” said Dr. Sharon Inouye, a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “It is going to become more and more risky for older adults as their immunity wanes.”

Deaths have fallen from the heights of the winter wave in part because of growing levels of immunity from past infections, experts said. For older people, there is also a grimmer reason: So many of the most fragile Americans were killed by Covid over the winter that the virus now has fewer targets in that age group.

But scientists warned that many older Americans remained susceptible. To protect them, geriatricians called on nursing homes to organize in-home vaccinations or mandate additional shots.

In the longer term, scientists said that policymakers needed to address the economic and medical ills that have affected especially nonwhite older Americans, lest Covid continue cutting so many of their lives short.

“I don’t think we should treat the premature death of older adults as a means of ending the pandemic,” Dr. Stokes said. “There are still plenty of susceptible older adults — living with comorbid conditions or living in multigenerational households — who are highly vulnerable.”

The pattern of Covid deaths this year has recreated the dynamics from 2020 — before vaccines were introduced, when the virus killed older Americans at markedly higher rates. Early in the pandemic, mortality rates steadily climbed with each extra year of age, Dr. Stokes and his collaborators found in a recent study.

That changed last summer and fall, during the Delta surge. Older people were getting vaccinated more quickly than other groups: By November, the vaccination rate in Americans 65 and older was roughly 20 percentage points higher than that of those in their 40s. And critically, those older Americans had received vaccines relatively recently, leaving them with strong levels of residual protection.

As a result, older people suffered from Covid at lower rates than they had been before vaccines became available. Among people 85 and older, the death rate last fall was roughly 75 percent lower than it had been in the winter of 2020, Dr. Stokes’s recent study found.

At the same time, the virus walloped younger and less vaccinated Americans, many of whom were also returning to in-person work. Death rates for white people in their late 30s more than tripled last fall compared to the previous winter. Death rates for Black people in the same age group more than doubled.

The rebalancing of Covid deaths was so pronounced that, among Americans 80 and older, overall deaths returned to prepandemic levels in 2021, according to a study posted online in February. The opposite was true for middle-aged Americans: Life expectancy in that group, which had already dropped more than it had among the same age range in Europe, fell even further in 2021.

“In 2021, you see the mortality impact of the pandemic shift younger,” said Ridhi Kashyap, a lead author of that study and a demographer at the University of Oxford.

By the time the highly contagious Omicron variant took over, researchers said, more older Americans had gone a long time since their last Covid vaccination, weakening their immune defenses.

As of mid-May, more than one-quarter of Americans 65 and older had not had their most recent vaccine dose within a year. And more than half of people in that age group had not been given a shot in the last six months.

The Omicron variant was better than previous versions of the virus at evading those already weakening immune defenses, reducing the effectiveness of vaccines against infection and more serious illness. That was especially true for older people, whose immune systems respond less aggressively to vaccines in the first place.

For some people, even three vaccine doses appear to become less protective over time against Omicron-related hospital admissions. A study published recently in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine found that trend held for people with weakened immune systems, a category that older Americans were likelier to fall into. Sara Tartof, the study’s lead author and an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, said that roughly 9 percent of people 65 and older in the study were immunocompromised, compared with 2.5 percent of adults under 50.

During the Omicron wave, Covid death rates were once again dramatically higher for older Americans than younger ones, Dr. Stokes said. Older people also made up an overwhelming share of the excess deaths — the difference between the number of people who actually died and the number who would have been expected to die if the pandemic had never happened.

Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, found in a recent study that excess deaths were more heavily concentrated in people 65 and older during the Omicron wave than the Delta surge. Overall, the study found, there were more excess deaths in Massachusetts during the first eight weeks of Omicron than during the 23-week period when Delta dominated.

As older people began dying at higher rates, Covid deaths also came to include higher proportions of vaccinated people. In March, about 40 percent of the people who died from Covid were vaccinated, according to an analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fewer older Americans have also been infected during the pandemic than younger people, leading to lower levels of natural immunity. As of February, roughly one-third of people 65 and older showed evidence of prior infections, compared with about two-thirds of adults under 50.

A drop-off in Covid precautions this winter, combined with the high transmissibility of Omicron, left older people more exposed, scientists said. It is unclear how their own behavior may have changed. An earlier study, from scientists at Marquette University, suggested that while older people in Wisconsin had once been wearing masks at rates higher than those of younger people, that gap had effectively disappeared by mid-2021.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/health/omicron-deaths-age-65-elderly.html

************************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

**************************************************