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**Hugh** · 30-03-2021, 13:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by pip08456

Meanwhile this gives pause for thought.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/arti...ic-propaganda/

Quote:

Panda’s chief argument is that lockdowns cause more death and destruction than the Covid-19 pandemic itself. As such, it has repeatedly lobbied the South African government to loosen restrictions.

But Panda’s core research findings have received withering criticism from independent experts who describe the group’s claims as little more than pseudoscientific disinformation.

In May 2020, for instance, Panda published its seminal report outlining the findings of its actuarial model, which claimed that the impact of lockdown would cause 30 times more deaths than the Covid-19 pandemic itself...

... Two top British experts have now told DM168 that Panda’s actuarial model is deeply flawed. “This paper is unfortunately a complete sham masquerading as science – it would never pass peer review in any reputable journal,” said Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist and statistical geneticist at Queen Mary University in London.

“It seems completely out of touch with reality and real-world evidence from across the globe … The estimated fatalities in South Africa from the model are clearly biased downwards – as the total mortality predicted by the model has already come to pass, and been exceeded in South Africa. The toll would have been much higher had the epidemic been allowed to continue unmitigated – we don’t need to imagine this, given this has already happened in some parts of the world.”

Gurdasani, who is published actively in the scientific literature on Covid-19, explained that “most of the assumptions in model” are “unjustified, and not based in real-world evidence or data.” The model ignores the impact of ‘long Covid’ on young people and children, which has been found to occur in between 10%-20% of all infected individuals, including 12%-14% of children.

“It does not consider the impact of this on the economy. Neither does it sufficiently examine the impact of health systems being overwhelmed without lockdowns and the impact of lack of healthcare on the population as a whole.”

She pointed out that the paper’s projection of a 10% increase in excess mortality for 10 years due to lockdown is devoid of “real-world data” that ignores the experience of other countries. The 20% increase in excess deaths in the UK since March 2020, for instance, is almost entirely accounted for by deaths from Covid-19 despite three UK lockdowns.

“While there may have been indirect impact of lockdowns on health, this seems to have been more than offset by fewer deaths from other causes, for example, flu, accidents and so on,” Gurdasani said.

Querying various technical assumptions used in the paper (its extrapolation from fatality rates in New York ignoring more robust datasets from elsewhere; presuming for no reason that “excess mortality loading weights per co-morbidity are 7 times higher for the elderly compared to the young”), she concluded that “the model has wildly overestimated indirect deaths from non-Covid-19 occurring during lockdowns. In fact, the real observational data from South Africa shows the huge impact Covid-19 can have and has had directly on mortality if allowed to spread, and the impact lockdowns have in containing these excess deaths.”

Panda’s Hudson repeatedly predicted in the first half of 2020 that just 10,000 people in South Africa would die of Covid-19.

“We are challenged to understand how any model for South Africa could reasonably produce a death forecast of more than 10,000,” Hudson stated in June 2020.

Analysis by Wits University School of Governance’s Alex van der Heever, published by GroundUp, has convincingly shown that excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 have been almost entirely due to Covid-19. What this strongly suggests is that the total number of Covid-19 deaths in South Africa thus far is nearing 140,000.

Gurdasani’s damning critique of the Panda report was echoed by top economist Professor Jonathan Portes of the School of Politics and Economics at Kings College London, who told DM168 that Panda’s “estimates of longer-term impacts on life expectancy resulting from economic damage are not credible nor based on evidence.”