Ross, Julia, and Amanda, three very successful young professionals living in Manhattan, all died of drug overdoses four years ago, in March 2021. The Wall Street Journal reported on their deaths as a story of fentanyl and the ease of getting drugs in the digital age.
Ross, an executive at Credit Suisse, lived in a penthouse with stunning views, but that penthouse felt like a prison in 2020 and early 2021. He was, the Wall Street Journal reported, “stressed about work. He had been cooped up at home instead of on the trading floor for most of the pandemic.”
Amanda, a social worker, had a similar experience. “Greenwich Village’s streets emptied in the pandemic,” the Wall Street Journal wrote to explain how she got into hard drugs. “Ms. Scher’s roommate left the city. … ‘Being home alone, I think that got to her,’ her father said.”
Julia, likewise, “was a driven professional with everything to live for,” her father said. She had graduated from Columbia Law School and started her career at a prestigious, high-paying firm. Notably, her graduation happened over Zoom, and her job was 100% remote.
Fentanyl killed them, but these were lockdown deaths. And there were countless thousands of such deaths across the country.
Drug use rose during the lockdowns, but it was far from the only lockdown killer.
Isolation and inactivity drove anxiety and depression. It made children anti-social, making some of them into violent criminals. The lockdowns even made our roads less safe. It made cancer patients miss treatments, and adults and children skip regular checkups or screenings.
Those of us who questioned the lockdowns were called “granny killers,” but the lockdowns themselves were killers as much as the virus was.
All of this was predictable. It’s the most obvious thing in the world that humans need interaction with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and family. Humans need regular activities. We all need to get out of our houses. Depriving people of these needs is cruel and harmful.
Our ruling class ignored and dismissed those harms. They myopically painted the lockdowns as a sacrifice of economic activity to prevent deaths — as if the only things we were missing were shopping trips and income. We were, in fact, missing Mass, shul, juma’a, school, potlucks, cookouts, pickup basketball, dog park trips, mommy-and-me yoga, library story hour, evenings at the pub, mornings at the coffee shop, days at the minor-league ballpark, hours in the bookstore, and so much more.
The cruelest in the media class reveled in our loss, mocking our need for human interaction as a vain demand “to get a pedicure.” The most callous or fearful governors, mayors, county executives, and school boards who locked us down for months didn’t merely take away our pastimes and diversions. They also took thousands of lives.
Overdoses
One in 10 Americans admitted to becoming first-time drug users during the pandemic. A third of those who already used drugs admitted to using more.
Overdose deaths accelerated in April and May of 2020 when lockdowns were the harshest.
San Francisco locked down hard in the summer and fall of 2020. When San Franciscans were told that hiding in their home and ignoring their neighbor was the height of civic-mindedness, they ignored the homeless and the otherwise vulnerable. When the bodies were counted, there were nearly three drug deaths for every COVID-19 death.
The major media liked to blame these horrific trends on worries about the virus, but surely the isolation, strict rules, and constant fearmongering were major drivers.
Loneliness and stress drive people to excessive drinking and drug use. Drinking by yourself at home is highly correlated with alcohol addiction, and most drinking was done at home and alone in the spring of 2020. But also, the physical separation from family, friends, and colleagues allowed the signs of depression, anxiety, and drug use to stay hidden until it was too late.
“Addiction thrives in secrecy,” Carla Marienfeld, a psychiatrist and addiction specialist, explained, “and in the pandemic, you have more people alone and not accountable to friends and family.”
‘The lockdowns were never really effective’
Even left-leaning media are admitting the costs five years later. The Boston Globe reported this month that the lockdowns “increased poverty and wealth disparities, spurred a dramatic rise in adolescent anxiety and depression, contributed to a surge in fatal drug overdoses, and led to devastating learning losses in schoolchildren, who have yet to recover, according to scientific studies.”
Leading epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, one of former President Joe Biden’s top COVID-19 advisers, said, “The lockdowns were never really effective.”
Democratic states were far more locked down than Republican states, which led to predictable charges from Democrats and the media that the GOP was anti-science and would kill people. The Boston Globe reported on the results:
“On average, states with Democratic governors had stay-at-home orders that were nearly three times longer than those in red states. Yet many so-called blue states — including California, New York, and New Mexico — had among the highest COVID-19 death rates, measured as a share of their population. And some red states, including Idaho and Utah, had among the lowest.”
The international lesson was the same.
Excess mortality is a statistic that compares all deaths in a given year or month to how many deaths that population normally experiences in a year or month, with adjustments for the population’s changing age. Excess mortality is a great measure of COVID-19 response because it includes COVID-19 deaths that may not have been identified as such, and it effectively omits some spurious COVID-19 deaths, such as a 98-year-old who caught COVID on her deathbed. Most importantly, excess mortality also includes lockdown deaths.
In all of Europe, from 2020 to 2023, the country with the lowest excess mortality was Sweden, which was famously attacked in 2020 for not locking down. The difference wasn’t small, either. Sweden saw deaths 4.4% higher than normal, while Norway, with the second-lowest excess mortality, was at 5%. The median European country had an excess mortality of 11.1%.
Beyond drug abuse and alcohol abuse, the lockdowns created all sorts of deadly harm.
Deadly car crashes increased by at least 18% during the lockdowns. The reasons included increased reckless driving on empty roads and drunk driving.
Nearly 10 million cancer screenings were skipped or canceled because of the lockdowns, according to a 2021 study by the Kansas University Medical Center. One author lamented, “By causing cancellations of appointments and cancer screenings, COVID will indirectly cause an increase in cancer deaths.”
The same tragic story applies to heart disease and other detectable and treatable deadly conditions.
COVID-19 lockdowns also helped spur crime waves across the country. Notably, the crime waves in many places were youth crime waves. The type of crimes that increased was telling. Carjackings skyrocketed in many cities and counties, but the increase was typically among high-school-aged children who took the car for a joyride before crashing it. Also typical of the youth crime wave were assaults, not as part of a robbery, but just pure violence.
The children who didn’t go to school for a year, whose team sports were canceled for multiple seasons, who couldn’t play pickup basketball because the county removed the hoops from the backboard — the lockdowns treated those children cruelly, and some of them reacted with violence. Take socializing from teenagers, and you get anti-social behavior from teenagers.
Between drug abuse, unhealthy habits, anti-social driving, and anti-social crime, the lockdowns caused tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of deaths.
THE BABY BUST HITS 30-SOMETHINGS
The example of Sweden, the comparison between red and blue states, and the conclusions of experts all suggest that these lockdowns may not have saved very many lives from the virus.
Until we learn this lesson, we have learned nothing from the pandemic.
