COVID-19 is terrifying, but so are lockdowns

The disease has been truly horrifying, but so have the consequences of lockdowns

Premier Jason Kenney chastised the mainstream media for continuing to fearmonger about the coronavirus at his news conference on Thursday.

Alberta is moving out of the pandemic, with zero COVID fatalities this past Wednesday, Kenney said.

“It's time for media to stop promoting fear when it comes to COVID -19 and to start actually looking at where we're at. With huge vaccine protection, we've crushed that third spike.”

Kenney's comment will resonate with lockdown skeptics, but I doubt it will persuade anxious people to set aside their fear of the virus.

For one thing, many will write off his comments as coming from a leader who cares too little about COVID and too much about the Calgary Stampede and the economy.

For another, COVID has been a deadly disease. It was reasonable to fear it. It's going to take time for that fear to fade.

If Kenney wants to speed up that recovery process, a better strategy would be to fight fire with fire, fear with fear.

Fear is a powerful motivator, and perhaps the most effective tool of political persuasion, but it's also a reasonable tool to employ when lives are on the line.

And, without a doubt, COVID gravely threatened us. But so did our preferred remedy for combating the disease, our strict lockdown policies.

We've had no end of fearmongering about the dread of COVID since March 2020, but we failed to dig in deeply enough to the lockdown and its related and fearsome diseases of despair. They played out in our lives as your spouse, your friend or your child suddenly finding themselves isolated and maybe unemployed, bringing on stress, sadness, even depression and possibly three related killers, opioid and alcohol abuse and suicide.

We're finally starting to get hard numbers on the lockdown's unaccounted toll. A new Statistics Canada report reports on what it calls “indirect consequences” of the pandemic, such as delayed medical procedures and increased substance use, and how they increased our death count year to year.

“Data reveal that indirect consequences of the pandemic are also having a significant impact on the number of excess deaths in Canada, particularly among younger Canadians.”

From March 2020, when the pandemic and lockdown started, to April 2021, 62,203 Canadians aged 0 to 64 died, which is 5,535 more than expected in a normal, non-pandemic time period.

Just 1,380 of those deaths were linked to COVID. This suggests that 4,155 Canadians under the age of 65 died due to “causes associated with substance use and misuse, including unintentional (accidental) poisonings and diseases and conditions related to alcohol consumption.”

There was mention of increases in opioid deaths during the lockdown, but not daily news conferences on the trend hosted by premiers and chief medical officers of health.

We obsessed about COVID case counts and fatality numbers, not on daily drug and alcohol death numbers. Nor did we have daily reports on the number of people out of work, on businesses going under, on young learners falling dangerously behind in their math and reading skills and on a locked down population struggling to remain physically fit and mentally well.

Instead, one great fear was raised up beyond all else, a dynamic that hardcore lockdown skeptic David Redman bemoans.

Redman, a retired lieutenantcolonel in the Canadian Armed Forces and the former head of Alberta's Emergency Management Agency, has worked tirelessly to question the effectiveness of lockdowns and to point out their harms.

He's not surprised by the new Statistics Canada data.

“It is the tip of the iceberg,” he said in an interview. “Mental health, societal health, the destruction of our children's education and socialization, deaths from other severe diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and the destruction of the economy and what it will do to our ability to treat societal and health issues in the future, those five areas ... have been emerging since last April (2020), and they've been ignored.”

Redman fears another lockdown this fall, noting that Kenney directed lockdowns in the past.

COVID case counts will again go up during cold and flu season this fall, Redman said. Medical authorities will raise fears about variants and about infections in children and vulnerable people.

“It's a never-ending siege of fear.”

I also expect fears to rise up again as case counts do so this fall.

But I doubt we will again lockdown. Vaccines have had a huge impact, inoculating us against COVID but also against the fear of a terrible outcome if we do catch it.

And the more data that comes out about the destruction wrought by lockdowns, the harder it will be to persuade Canadians to embrace them again.