"We, the undersigned, believe that you should relax COVID-19 restrictions as soon as possible. We take this position for the following reasons.
Exposure to COVID-19 is only temporarily avoidable... and the cost to fully avoid it exceeds the benefits by a huge factor...
More damage is being caused by the lockdowns than prevented.
While lockdowns limit the number of deaths from COVID-19, they also increase deaths from other causes and cause widespread misery... [T]he lockdowns and the panic have also had a cost in shortening life for others:
- The lockdown will decrease national income by denying work to the most productive and this will have a measurable effect on the length of the average lifespan equivalent to thousands of casualties from COVID...
- Thousands of lives per month due to disrupted normal health services. This includes cancer deaths that would have been prevented with normal services, inoculations that were cancelled or postponed, and cancelled and postponed hospital operations. In the UK the UCL has estimated an increase in cancer deaths over the next 12 months of 20%...
- Thousands of future suicides...
Besides these direct life costs, there is also significant misery that has reduced the quality of life: the abused who are locked up with their abusers; the elder generations who are separated from their own families and friends; widespread loneliness; delayed IVF services; the misery of the unemployed; and disrupted education for a whole generation of Australian children.
If one values this widespread misery in terms of its effect on the wellbeing of the sufferers, the lockdowns cost hundreds of thousands of years of life per month, equivalent to tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19."
1,299 signatories as of November 10, 2020
© 2020 Australian Institute for Progress