Rita Panahi: Lockdown panic’s devastating toll on the young

The hysterical reaction to COVID-19 has prematurely killed hundreds of thousands of young and poor. You have to ask if the cure has been worse than the disease.

The young and the poor have paid a heavy price for the world’s COVID-19 hysteria.

It’s not the virus that has prematurely killed hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents in poor countries but the reaction to the virus; the lockdowns and restrictions that have disrupted vital services.

The UN estimates there have been 228,000 more deaths of children under five in just six Asian countries — Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan — due to coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions.

That’s not additional deaths of people aged over 85 with a number of pre-existing conditions but children under 5, with decades of life before them, dying because crucial services including immunisation programs have been disrupted by their government’s COVID-19 response.

You wouldn’t be blamed for asking whether the cure has been worse than the disease.

For many governments around the world the response to COVID-19 has been to lock up the healthy population to prevent the elderly and infirm from becoming infected. Picture: AFP

The UN report, the Direct and Indirect Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic and Response in South Asia, also found COVID lockdowns and disruption of essential services had a devastating effect on maternal deaths and caused thousands of additional deaths in adolescents who couldn’t get vital treatment for HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.

Those horrific figures are repeated in other poor countries across Africa and Latin America. Lockdowns have disrupted about 80 per cent of TB, HIV and malaria programs worldwide with catastrophic consequences.

Some experts predict an additional 1.4 million TB deaths alone, plus millions of additional deaths from other conditions where treatment will be disrupted or diagnosis delayed due to COVID restrictions.

Again, the overwhelming majority of these deaths aren’t in the very elderly.

The director of the World Health Organisation’s malaria program, Professor Pedro Alonso warned: “COVID-19 risks derailing all our efforts and taking us back to where we were 20 years ago.”

Late last year the WHO said that lockdowns should only ever be used as “the very, very last resort” urging countries to employ “a proportional and targeted response”.

The WHO special envoy on COVID David Nabarro said: “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources; protect your health workers who are exhausted.”

Lockdowns have disrupted about 80 per cent of TB, HIV and malaria programs worldwide.

But for many governments around the world the response to COVID-19 has been to lock up the healthy population to prevent the elderly and infirm from becoming infected.

Two weeks to flatten the curve has turned into 12 months of harsh restrictions.

That strategy not only has devastating consequences in the poorest parts of the world but also in the West where a surge in cancer and heart disease deaths is expected in the coming years along with a range of mental health issues.

The initial unbridled fear of coronavirus was justified, the virus was likened to the Spanish flu and the world was shocked by footage coming out of China of people supposedly dropping dead in the streets due to the virus.

After China locked down, much of the world followed but one look at the per capita death rates and it’s clear lockdowns are not the magic bullet for dealing with this pandemic.

Some of the best performing countries in the world, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, did not implement strict lockdowns like we’ve seen in the UK or parts of the US such as New York and California, all of which have big COVID-19 death rates.

No country is a better advertisement against lockdowns than the UK, where the government has locked down harder and longer than just about anywhere else in the world and yet has one of the worst per capita death rates.

The UK has locked down long and hard yet it has one of the worst per capita death rates. Picture: AFP

In fact the UK’s death rate is worse than the US, worse than most of Europe and much worse than Sweden which never locked down.

But many countries opted to lock up the young and healthy, recklessly destroying lives and livelihoods, and stripping people of hard-fought-for liberties to tackle a virus that disproportionately affects the very sick and the very old.

Instead of protecting those most vulnerable to dying or being hospitalised with COVID, we have locked down entire populations, the overwhelming majority of whom wouldn’t even know they had COVID-19 given most of those infected have no symptoms or very mild symptoms.

Indeed, a UK study found 86 per cent of people who tested positive to COVID-19 were asymptomatic.

Jay Bhattacharya, the renowned Stanford University Medical School professor, epidemiologist and public health policy expert, has called COVID lockdowns: “The single worst public health mistake in over a century”.

I spoke to Prof Bhattacharya earlier this month and he warned of a considerable jump in preventable deaths from heart disease, diabetes and cancer in the coming years.

“People were more scared of COVID than cancer when they should’ve been getting treated,” he said.

“The harms from the lockdown include absolutely devastating physical and psychological harm that affect basically every poor person on the face of the earth.”

Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist

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