Data Shows COVID-19 Restrictions Were Ineffective and Based on Wrong Assumptions: Data Analyst

Justin Hart, chief data analyst and founder of RationalGround.com, in an interview on for EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program on Oct. 12, 2022. Screenshot/The Epoch Times

Severe measures imposed on society in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were based on wrong assumptions and, as it turned out later, were ineffective in stopping the spread of the coronavirus, said Justin Hart, chief data analyst and founder of RationalGround.com.

During the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially after Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated a high COVID-19 mortality rate in his testimony before Congress, Hart was looking at the pandemic statistics and did not find the data as alarming as it was officially presented.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a congressional hearing in March 2020 that the estimated mortality rate of COVID-19 would be “around 1 percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.”

Hart told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program that he was wondering how bad the pandemic would be and whether it would be as bad as the 1918 Spanish flu. He then saw an article by John Ioannidis, a professor of medical sciences at Stanford University and one of the most-cited scientists worldwide.

Hart learned from Ioannidis’s study that the risk of dying from COVID-19 for people under the age of 65 is about the same as dying on their commute to work, and the risk for anyone over the age of 65 is about the risk that a professional truck driver faces.

Ioannidis estimated in a paper published a few months after the start of the pandemic that people under 65 “have very small risks of COVID-19 death even in pandemic epicenters.”

“Strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should be considered in managing the pandemic,” the paper said.

A recent paper co-authored by Ioannidis assessed that during the pre-vaccination era, the median infection fatality rate of COVID-19 was 0.035 percent for people under 60 years old and 0.095 percent among people under 70.

These mortality rate estimates in nonelderly populations are lower than previous calculations had suggested, the paper said.

When those estimates are taken into consideration, Hart said, “people pause and say, ‘well, why did we do a one-size-fits-all quarantine, social distancing, school closures, business closures, lockdowns?’ It made no sense.”

Impact of Restrictions

Children wearing masks stand holding signs during a Veterans Day ceremony at the John Philip Sousa Memorial Bandshell at Sunset Park in Port Washington, N.Y., on Nov. 11, 2021. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic affected students’ achievements, especially those from low-income households, Hart said.

Wearing masks in schools affected speech development in children. Hart singled out an example. In a school district in California during the spring of 2020, after schools switched to distance learning, one-third of the students did not attend the online classes, he said.

The loss of learning translates to a drastic increase in failing grades and may affect the future earnings of those students, Hart said.

National math test scores in fourth and eighth graders collected in early 2022 showed the biggest drop since 1990, and the reading level for the same students reverted to a level from three decades ago, according to a recent report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “Nation’s Report Card.”

“We are talking about a really serious erosion of children’s capacities to read and count in the next generation of the workforce,” said Beverly Perdue, chair of the governing board for NAEP and former governor of North Carolina, at an Oct. 2 press conference.

A research paper (pdf) commissioned by the World Bank concluded that “online education is an imperfect substitute for in-person learning, particularly for children from low-income families.”

The learning losses due to COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures may also limit opportunities for students to advance to higher levels of education, which may potentially result in losing trillions of dollars in their future income, the paper said.

California Versus Florida

Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom (L) speaks at a Veterans Affairs Facility in Los Angeles on Nov. 10, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times); Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis in an undated file photo. Courtesy of Ron DeSantis for Governor

California was locked down so severely that even a swing set in a local park was padlocked for a year, whereas Florida was relatively open from the spring, Hart said. The COVID-19 mortality rate was basically the same in both states after adjusting for age, he said.

“While California used a wide array of restrictive mandates, Florida used a targeted approach that focused on those segments of society more vulnerable to the lethal effects of COVID-19,” said James Doti, president emeritus and professor of economics at Chapman University.

“California’s broad-based use of mandates led to a sharper loss in overall economic activity than Florida’s more targeted approach,” Doti wrote for The Epoch Times. “California lost more jobs than Florida on a relative basis. California’s non-farm job total is still lower than its pre-recession high, while Florida’s is 3 percent higher.”

The raw cumulative COVID-19 death rate through July 2022 was higher in Florida (328 per 100,000 people) than in California (242 per 100,000 people), but it has to be taken into consideration that Florida has an older population with a median age of 43 years, while California is one of the youngest states with a median age of 37, Doti explained.

After the COVID-19 mortality rates are adjusted for these age differences, “California’s age-adjusted death rate of 261 per 100,000 was roughly the same as Florida’s rate of 267 per 100,000,” Doti said.

Moreover, when using age adjustment, California and Florida had the same all-cause excess death rate of 18.8 percent over the whole pandemic period, he added. The excess deaths rate is a percentage of expected deaths over the period of March 2020 to March 2022.

COVID-19 Lockdowns Were Not Effective

The policies to mitigate the spread of coronavirus during the pandemic required people to stay at home and implemented closures of most businesses such as stores, restaurants, gyms, museums, and entertainment services. In some states, parks and beaches were closed.

Such policies that required people stay at home outside of sunlight and incentivized them to eat takeout food went against the known correlation between obesity and severe COVID-19 outcomes, Hart said.

“That was a terrible, terrible policy,” Hart noted. “Our obesity rates here in the United States are very, very high compared to other countries.”

A study conducted in the spring of 2020 by researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy concluded that “obesity is a strong, independent risk factor for respiratory failure, admission to the ICU, and death among COVID-19 patients.”

Even patients with mild obesity had a 2.5 times greater risk of respiratory failure and five times greater risk of being admitted to an intensive care unit than non-obese patients, the study said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report in September 2021 stating that children and teenagers in the United States saw their body mass almost double during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic period.

The report suggested that COVID-19 lockdowns and rules may have contributed to the higher-than-usual weight gain.

A lack of vitamin D could also exacerbate the outcome of COVID-19, Hart said.

“Why did we stick people outside the sun?” Hart asked, adding that even policemen chased down paddle boarders in California at that time.

Four large systematic meta-analyses stated that the data consistently show that low vitamin D levels raise the risk of COVID-19 while higher levels lower all risks by 1.5 to three times, wrote Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, the founder of Mercola.com, and a best-selling author.

“Proper amounts of sun exposure allow your body to optimize production of vitamin D,” Mercola said.

Act Locally

Hart wrote the book “Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane,” which he meant to be a kind of reference book for people to educate themselves, he said.

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• How COVID Vaccines and Fake Data Drove People Insane: Justin Hart

“I also want people to use it for their friends, their family, their neighbors, their county supervisors or school board to convince them that we can’t go down this road again,” Hart said.

Hart encourages the public to find like-minded people in their local area, find out who are the people making health policies locally in their county or state, and pressure them to push back on these policies that infringe upon people’s rights.

“It’s really difficult for the vast amount of people to sort of admit that what we did had little to no impact and maybe made things worse,” Hart said. “It’s hard to own up to all the sacrifices we all made with staying at home and keeping our kids in quarantines and masks and whatnot, that it was all for nothing, right? No one wants to admit to that, but that’s the case.”

“We’re not going to be able to make it through the next pandemic unless people wise up as to what’s happening,” Hart concluded.

Terri Wu and Jack Phillips contributed to this report.