Florida ‘proves’ lockdowns hurt working people
LOCKDOWNS have protected affluent professionals at the expense of working class people, the UK professor who helped in Florida’s successful restrictionfree fight against Covid has said.
Professor Sunetra Gupta has been part of a team whose “focused protection” approach was adopted by the governor of Florida, Ron Desantis.
Oxford’s Professor Gupta and colleagues had briefed Prime Minister Boris Johnson last September and advised a similar approach in the UK.
However, rising infection rates led to the decision to lock down in November, and then impose a fuller lockdown in January.
Florida took a different approach and had already started to remove restrictions in May last year. It has one of the lowest mortality rates in the US.
Professor Gupta said: “Florida’s Covid mortality rate has been significantly below the US average and protecting vulnerable groups saved lives.
‘Affluent classes
order online’
“In contrast the UK lockdowns allowed the virus to rip through vulnerable groups including poor people and the elderly. The affluent ‘Zoom’ classes were able to order food and goods online for other people to take the risk they didn’t want to take in order to deliver to them.”
Desantis had also consulted with professors Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, from Stanford and Harvard.the pair, along with Professor Gupta, were the authors of the
Great Barrington Declaration, which called for a focused protection approach.
The trio also met the US health secretary Alex Azar in October 2020, arguing countries can safely achieve widespread immunity to coronavirus by allowing it to spread among healthy people.
However their Great Barrington Declaration was widely attacked at the time of its publication, and in March US President Joe Biden criticised the lifting of mask and social distancing requirements as “Neanderthal thinking” when Texas and Mississippi followed Florida’s lead in relaxing rules.
However the authors say Florida shows the approach was the right one. In one round-table meeting with Professor Gupta last March, Desantis thanked her and other advisers for their work and justified why restrictions were removed, including the repayment of fines for all earlier breaches of Covid social distancing and mask mandates.
He said: “People are starting to acknowledge – and they were not willing to do this for a long time – that Florida’s strategy of focused protection has meant there are 40 states in the US that have higher Covid mortality than we do and we have many more over 65s than most states.
“Public health includes mental health and stress.the negative impact of lockdowns will be catalogued for years to come.”
Thanking Professor Gupta and the other advisers he said: “You have provided strong counsel and when they look back on this, people will think of you as focusing on the core principles of public health.”
Figures released last week show the Covid mortality in Florida is one of the lowest of all the big states in America and among the 10th lowest in the country overall.
It was also 50 per cent lower than the US national average with 118 deaths per hundred thousand people compared to 180 per hundred thousand across the whole country.
Professor Kulldorff said: “Florida proved that lockdowns did more damage than good.
“The key thing that Florida did to keep mortality down was it took strong efforts to protect the older population.
“It was illegal to send patients with infections into nursing homes.there was frequent testing of all staff working with older people.
“It did not carry out mass testing of university students, which has been shown to have made no difference to infection rates and mortality rates.
“Many of these measures are simply standard public health measures. Across the world countries thought lockdowns would protect people.we now know they did not.”
However, Sir Michael Marmot, Professor of Public Health at University College London, argued lockdowns had been necessary.
He said: “While I accept richer people could work from home, poorer people would not have been protected without the lockdowns.”