An anti-lockdown , antivax journalist for the famously right-wing anti-reality Telegraph newspaper, wrote an article this week titled ‘Lockdown effects feared to be killing more people than Covid’. You can imagine the predictable reaction this elicited from the conspiracy theory community that the journalist serves. Whoops of delight. I told you so! Rejoice! Imagine being the sort of person who greets mass deaths with such enthusiasm and joy.
There is an ‘unexplained’ number of excess deaths at the moment, higher than the five year average. Although further investigation shows that the Telegraph article overstates this considerably. And further reading of the article itself doesn’t leave you any the wiser as to how lockdown is the cause, although the claim is repeated a couple of times. A doctor informs us that heart issues and diabetes deaths are particularly high.
It also repeats the long known, well documented issue of missed diagnoses and delayed treatment plans over the last couple of years. But this was caused by the novel coronavirus swamping hospitals with its victims, not lockdown. And that’s it. That’s as much as the article has. There’s no evidence to substantiate the claim that lockdown is the cause of the excess deaths, other than because the writer of the article said so. And needless to say, there was quite a degree of wailing and gnashing of teeth from some folk, because she didn’t blame the vaccine for the wave of deaths. Because, apparently, we all know they are to blame…
What might be causing these excess deaths? As much as the antivaxxers like to bang on about the dangers of the jab, the fact of the matter is that Covid 19 itself is known to cause much greater damage to internal organs, and could cause a spate of early deaths. And yet, just a little bit of due diligence and investigation shows that neither lockdown, the vaccines nor Covid are the root cause of this. If one or more were, then these excess deaths would be showing up all around the world. And they aren’t.
The most obvious, indeed demonstrable cause of the high number of deaths in the UK is the ongoing collapse of the NHS. The graph above comes from an article looking at why the number of working age folk not in employment has uniquely continued to grow in the UK, with the conclusion that the cause is rooted in the failure of the health service to treat patients promptly and properly. Assuming they actually live long enough to see the inside of a hospital, which is currently far from a given.
We are essentially, going round in circles. This will never end. We will continue to be forced to revisit resolved and well understood aspects of the pandemic over and over again on the basis of debunked conspiracy theories, outdated reports and unsubstantiated headlines. Lockdowns, masks, vaccines, rinse and repeat. Lockdowns kill! Masks give you pneumonia! Vaccines give you Covid! Rinse and repeat.
And all because the folk who have spent two and a half years demanding that we should all just get on with our lives are simply unable to let go and actually get on with their lives. That, folks, is Pandemic Derangement Syndrome.
The Mexile 
Chalk me up as a full-blown member of PDS. I live in a retirement community, in other words, a funeral home parking lot. My friends and neighbors dropped like flies and were in better shape than I. They thought they were free to travel after two shots and resume their lives. One little trip put them in ICU, sayonara.
Now we have four shots and they are still dying, nobody comes home from the hospital. You think the rest of us are scared, you better believe it!
Granted, we are all old and probably living on borrowed time, maybe their numbers just happened to come up but, I’m in no hurry to check out.
So, I will continue to wear my mask, get more shots and stay the hell home.
Wish me luck!
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Sounds like you have PDS’ closely related condition, Pandemic Terror Syndrome. And fair play – it’s an understandable condition. The vaccines have proven very effective at reducing deaths from Covid, for all age groups. But old folk remain susceptible to it, as they do with all nasties.
The PDS people will try and tell you that Omicron is just a cold now. Sure, it’s milder than Alpha and Delta. And yet, Omicron swept the poorly vaccinated population of Hong Kong earlier in the year with an IFR of near 1%, not far off the original strain.
The PDS folk will tell you that masks don’t work at all and they’ll point to old studies on flu and how that disease can’t be stopped and ignore everything learned since then. Including, and here’s an irony alert, the fact that masking has massively reduced incidences of flu. Lockdowns virtually eradicated the disease.
So you do whatever feels right for you, Sr Gomez.
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