The news that Ireland had no excess deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic will have come as something of a shock to those in Ireland who rely on RTÉ for their news and spent most of the lockdown waiting patiently for the death and case numbers to be somberly announced each evening at a Press Conference that was always timed perfectly for the main evening news at 6pm.
To recall the level of panic induced by the dreaded daily numbers, it’s worth mentioning just one day in particular: March 26th, 2021. On that day, NPHET informed the public, there were 584 new cases and 20 new deaths, bringing the rolling death total at that time to 4,651.
On that particular day, the enemy of the people was not pub lunches or house parties, but, of all things, children’s play dates, because the Government did not wish to blame schools for an apparent spike:
Earlier, the chief executive of the Health Service Executive (HSE) said play dates and house visits are driving increasing transmission of Covid-19 among children, rather than school attendance.
Paul Reid said play dates were “very clearly” one of the factors behind an increase in the number of cases among younger children.
Mr Reid reiterated that the data showed Covid-19 was “not transmitting highly within schools”. Where confirmed cases were identified, testing showed infections were not being passed on at high rates, he said.
Every now and then, I am reminded of how much credibility the Irish media burned during the covid pandemic: There can be fewer better examples of the daily spewing of nonsense than this example. Children were not catching covid at all, our leaders informed us, from eight hours a day in classrooms with other children. No, the real culprit was “play dates”. Once again, as ever in Ireland, the Government were blameless and the public were causing all the problems. This was accepted and repeated verbatim by an Irish media who simply repeated everything that they were told, however nonsensical it was. Perhaps now, if any of them read that back, they might have the good grace to be embarrassed.
Now, two years later, the public are essentially being told that all the panic was in a good cause: Why, Ireland had no excess deaths during the pandemic at all!
Ireland had no excess deaths during the core pandemic years of 2020-2022, the Department of Health has said, citing new research.
It cites a new ‘Working Paper’ from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showing that Ireland was one of nine OECD countries to avoid excess deaths during this period, registering the fourth lowest rate behind New Zealand, Iceland and Norway.
Two things, plainly, cannot be simultaneously true: Ireland cannot have had no excess deaths at the same time as the daily death numbers being pumped into people’s homes every night were a true and accurate reflection of the threat to public safety. Either the OECD figures are a nonsense, or almost all of RTÉ’s reporting during the pandemic was a nonsense in tone, if not in fact.
In fact, during the pandemic, RTÉ produced a report saying that Ireland had experienced 3,200 excess deaths during the pandemic than might be expected in a typical year:
One question that's repeatedly been asked is whether those who died with Covid-19 necessarily died due to it.
We'll never know for sure, but new analysis indicates about 3,200 more people died during the pandemic than would have in a typical year #rtepthttps://t.co/K67yFQwXYO
— RTÉ Prime Time (@RTE_PrimeTime) April 20, 2021
There were problems with that report at the time, because it took the novel and interesting approach of comparing deaths over a period of March to March, rather than the traditional approach of measuring over a traditional January to December calendar year, meaning it risked catching two winter death spikes (due to flu, and other seasonal ailments) as opposed to one. Nevertheless, I broadly accepted that report at the time, along with many others. And in fairness to RTÉ, their calculation of excess deaths was actually lower – by some 1,600 – than the official state figures.
But as I wrote at the time:
Proponents of lockdown will offer an unfalsifiable answer: That without lockdowns, we’d have had vastly more deaths. There is, put simply, no way to disprove that.
Unsurprisingly, this is also the new explanation from the Irish Government for the OECD report: We had no excess deaths precisely because we locked down so hard, and so long. It would make your head spin.
The sad reality of this is that we’ll probably never know the true answer, at least not while any of us are alive, because all data can be spun by those with a vested interest in presenting it a particular way. For Covid lockdown proponents, lower deaths are not proof that lockdowns were not needed, but proof that lockdowns worked. For the rest of us, that is a very conveniently unfalsifiable answer. We cannot go back in time and run the pandemic again with no lockdowns to prove it for the nonsense that I for one believe it to be.
What we can say, however, with some certainty, is that many of the statements made and actions taken by the Irish Government during the pandemic were observably nonsensical – from the example above where Covid could spread in a playdate but not a classroom, to the idea that buying a meal with your pint was so crucial to public safety that it must be made mandatory.
We can also say with certainty that those lockdown years had immense costs that have never been truthfully acknowledged by those who promoted the lockdowns: We see that in the ongoing excess death tally that has surged in Ireland in the years since lockdowns were lifted. We see it also in the number of elderly people who have never resumed a normal life.
And that is the only way we can assess lockdown honestly: Those who supported it can not point to any benefit that they can definitively prove. The rest of us can point to the ongoing and observable cost, both in terms of human life, and in terms of the loss of trust in our leaders, our media, and in the pharmaceutical industry that those two disastrous years precipitated.
Fifty years from now, chances are that lockdown being a disaster will be widely acknowledged. But that will not happen until all of those behind the policy, and behind promoting it to the public, are safely retired and insulated from the consequences