The present work consolidates the most reliable epidemiological data gathered by international databases and governments of several countries with data from pertinent previous publications listed in References.

The data summarized in this article indicates that unusually restrictive measures were mandated largely in response to predictions made by computer modeling of the pandemic. In particular, the predictions reported by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modeling, of the prestigious Imperial College of London, projected that without drastic intervention (like lock downs and quarantines), 7 billion infections worldwide and 40 million deaths during 2020 alone. These figures are compared in this article with actual data reported during 2020 and at the end of the pandemic (2023) demonstrating that computer predictions of the evolution of the pandemic were a blunder with catastrophic global consequences.

The analysis in this study corroborates the stational progression of the pandemic which explain why measures intended to prevent person-to-person transmission of the disease (like lock-downs, wearing face masks, and social distancing) should have failed in containing COVID-19. This notion is supported by presented data on the ineffectiveness of lock-downs, use of face masks, and social distancing in selected countries.

The lower mortality registered in developing countries in comparison to developed countries where more hospital beds and respirators were employed, suggests that hospital infections resulting from intensive medical intervention and not SARS-Co V-2 could have accounted for the majority of deaths among patients otherwise healthy and without compounding health conditions.

A RESTRICTED WORLD.

The early response to COVID 19 paralyzed most countries by closing national borders, schools, restaurants, theaters, places of worship, social and sport gatherings, and halted normal human life by confining healthy individuals in their homes, distancing them from each other, and mandating the use of face masks, before quickly rushed experimental vaccines were available. Collectively, these restrictive mandates were imposed for the first time in human history in a global scale without a precise idea of their potential consequences.

Remarkably, these measures did not halt COVID-19; rather, the pandemic progressed at a sustained rate despite reports of 1.7 billion under some form of indoor confinement from March 26, 2020, that increased to 3.9 billion people by the first week of April 2020 which amounts to more than half of the world’s population in quarantine or in-house lockdowns.

Research data reported early in the pandemic, demonstrating that many characteristics like mortality and environmental hardiness of SARS -CoV-2 were neither new nor remarkable, prescribed a moderate response.

For example, early on, the U.K. had almost no social-isolation measures in place, and according to some reports, the government planned to let the virus run its course through the population, with the exception of the elderly, who were to be kept indoors.

The idea was to let enough people get naturally infected and recover from the mild version of the disease, to create “herd immunity”, a process well known and described in most texts of immunology and epidemiology

APOCALYPTIC PREDICTIONS.

Unfortunately, health policy changed swiftly after predictive computer modeling of COVID-19 reported by the WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modeling, of the prestigious Imperial College of London, projected 7 billion infections worldwide and 40 million deaths during 2020 alone.

The institution’s reports also projected that without drastic interventions, more than half a million Britons would die from COVID -19 in 2020 with more than 2 million deaths in the United States, again barring interventions. The predictions were broadly disseminated by the press without scientific evaluation. Some of the news headlines quickly read: “Without implementing strategies like lockdowns to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus, there would be 7 billion infections and 40 million deaths in 2020 alone, according to a report published Thursday from researchers at the Imperial College of London”.

This article in the Business Insider stated “that the report from the Imperial College has not been published nor peer-reviewed”. The lack of peer review and the absence of independent confirmation must have been disregarded by the health advisors of many countries in view of the weight and prestige carried by the institution involved. The stark predicted numbers prompted the UK and many other countries to change course, shutting down public life and ordering the population to stay at home.

IGNORING CRITICS OF VIRTUAL MODELLING

Lockdown of healthy individuals was swiftly mandated by 165 governments in panic despite several articles quickly criticizing policy-making based on computer modeling. Some of the critical articles had titles like: “Don’t Believe the COVID-19 Models. That’s not what they’re for”, another “Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say”, and yet another entitled “Meet the Covid Models That Are Running the World” analyzed the profound limitations of computer modeling.

These articles, as well as any other critics to the pred ictions from the Imperial College, were equally disregarded by policy-makers around the world. It is clear that the overestimation (7 billion infections and 40 million deaths in 2020 alone) reported by the Imperial College in London was instrumental in policy decision-making because the model predicted far fewer deaths if lockdown measures — measures such as those taken by the British and other governments — were undertaken.

Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who created the highly cited Imperial College London coronavirus model, retracted and downgraded the predictions soon after release of the report, but the cat was already out of the bag. Sensationalism by some sections of the press and the institutional prestige of the Imperial College had convinced many countries to ignore warnings about policy making based on computer modeling, disregarding often input from their own national scientists, and rushed to enact 1168 emergency laws confining healthy individuals to their homes.

The result in many countries was no work, no classes, no visits to sick parents, no celebration of children’s birthdays, no weddings or funerals, and massive economic and social collapse. All this social and economic catastrophe resulted mainly by panic produced by a few individua ls playing simulation epidemiology computer games and presenting their apocalyptic conclusions in a non-peer reviewed report.

Therefore, a main difference between COVID-19 and previous pandemics was the drastic actions taken by many countries of the world in no small part due to the dramatic predictions that came from a prestigious institution.

It is frequently argued that without quarantine and lockdowns of healthy individuals, the pandemic would have been worse. The hypothesis may sound reasonable but if true, then there should be a significant difference between the infection rate (infections per million inhabitants) and death rate (the percent of deaths per infections) in countries with quarantine and lockdowns versus countries that did not mandate lockdowns. This was not the case as demonstrated by analyzing the freely available statistics from Johns Hopkins’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

An early research article of us compared the epidemiological data for a dozen countries in Europe, half a dozen countries in Latin America, and half a dozen countries in central and east Asia, whose governments decided not to lockdown healthy citizen with an equal number of other countries in each continent whose governments imposed strict restrictive measures and the comparative data is presented in Figure 2. Unexpectedly, the statistical analysis demonstrated no difference (statistical significance level p < 0.01) in the number of infection rates (infections per million inhabitants), infection mortality rates (deaths per infection x 100), or population mortality rates (deaths per million inhabitants) between countries that instituted early long-lasting nationwide stay-at-home orders versus countries that did not.

... a cursory inspection of freely available statistical data during 2020 among “unlocked” countries and countries that mandated lockdowns would have shown that imposing quarantine by assuming apocalyptic consequences was going to be a blunder of global proportions. Similar to other types of predictions (end-of-the-world, astrological, etc.), predictions made by computer simulation are cited and only remembered if they happened to be correct. In contrast, predictions on COVID-19 made by virtual simulation appear to have been rather consistently wrong.

Deaths actually produced by common hospital pathogens and government incentives for care of COVID-19 patients in some countries could have inflated the mortality of SARS-CoV-2.

the number of deaths caused by COVID-19 corrected by deaths caused by hospital pathogens after aggressive intubation and ventilation or by other diseases reported as COVID-19 could be assumed to be between 1.4 million to 1.7 million from the beginning of the pandemic to its official end in 2023. Subtracting them from the total, these figures indicate that several million people could have died as a result of aggressive and unnecessary public health policies...

Furthermore, these estimates do not include the increased number of suicides by unnecessary isolation or deaths by other diseases not cared during the pandemic.

Together with quarantines and lockdowns, the additional non-medical measures intended to control the pandemic were social distancing (6 feet or 2 meters) and face masks. The lack of an increase in COVID-19 nfections after a gathering of one-quarter million people in close proximity and limited wearing of face masks as illustrated in Figure 3, discarded any beneficial effect of social distancing and of mask wearing during the pandemic.

The data demonstrates in Panel A that large crowds gathered in Argentina to the funeral of soccer star Diego Maradona on November 26-27, 2020, where only 46 +5% wear face masks (Main Panel of Figure 3) did not result in any increase in infections as depicted in Panel B.

Similar results were obtained less than a year later also in Argentina on July 10, 2021 were several million people spontaneously gathered to celebrate the national team’s victory of the soccer World Cup. In these popular celebrations 84 +7% of the participants did not wear face masks. Again, COVID-19 infections remained largely unchanged from weeks before to weeks after-the massive event.

In addition to lock downs, face masks and social distancing, vaccination campaigns with a variety of experimental vaccines of different origin also failed in controlling the pandemic, at least as demonstrated by official data available from several South American countries.

The variety of vaccines employed in the South American countries listed in Figure 4 resulted in the data compiled in Figure 5.The data demonstrates that massive and costly vaccination campaigns did not prevent COVID-19 infections in the South American countries analyzed, since infectivity and mortality remained not statistically different before, during vaccination, nor after over 42 to 76 % of the countries’ population had received at least two dose of the vaccines (Figure 5).

Regardless of the inefficiency of massive vaccination in the progression of COVID-19 in the countries studied, refusal by individuals to receive experimental vaccines resulted too often in lost jobs and a severe hardship that seems to have escaped the attention of lawyers in most countries.

In any case, the wrong predictions from the Imperial College of London are only part of the story in this turn of events. Part of the responsibility also sits squarely between a world dazzled by computers and sensationalist news from an industry leaning frequently toward show business, that moved many (but not all) governments to accept (without understanding the limitations and caveats underlying computer modeling) a non-peer reviewed report with apocalyptic predictions coming from the virtual world. Often discounting advice from local scientists, many governments chose to take action running with the stampeding herd.

The global handling of COVID-19 questions whether elected government officials as well as managers of scientific institutions, used to decide political and economic matters, are qualified to take scientifically responsible measures to control epidemics caused even by a germ having relatively low mortality rate as SARS-CoV-2.

Regardless of the qualifications and expertise of the agency’s political appointees or the pressures exerted by major donors and pharmaceutical corporations, the WHO demonstrated to be unable to control the pandemic. The performance during the pandemic indicates that the WHO may have reached the end of its useful life and could hinder future public health more than promote it. Although homogeneous response to a pandemic under total control of WHO, may sound desirable, the option is contrary to diversity of response which has guaranteed survival of those species that make the right decisions. In contrast, identical response by every country to a future pandemic caused by a high mortality germ could result in extinction of the human race if WHO dictates again ineffective responses as the agency repeatedly did during COVID-19.

Last but not least, the complicity of a large segment of the medical community readily imposing to their patients untested mandated health measures that often contradicted well established principles of virology, epidemiology, and immunology, condemned millions of people to unnecessary and deadly hospitalization and intubation, deprived them of the freedom to roam outdoors, isolated individuals from family and friends, recommended them to breathe through masks that could decrease oxygen intake to the brain, and forced even undecided and healthy patients as well as asymptomatic children to be injected with experimental vaccines some which, that by reverse transcribing into genomic DNA, could impair the long-term health of vaccine recipients and also of their offspring.

Without individual and institutional accountability for: irrational predictions, sensationalist press news, irresponsible governments, and for medical practices (all of which promoting unnecessary lockdowns, hospitalizations, staggering numbers of unnecessary deaths, economic loss and individual suffering) the world population will remain vulnerable to similar catastrophic policies, practices, and outcomes during the next pandemic.

To maintain independence from questionable WHO global mandates, each country should be wise in identifying a group of true experts (as demonstrated by documented pertinent achievements), within, as well as outside government institutions, from which meaningful counsel and guidance may be drawn in times of a health crisis. This panel or council of experts in infectious diseases should be identified before it is needed. The next germ to emerge could be one of the many pathogens producing much higher mortality than coronaviruses. Any germ of fulminant virulence could not give enough time to identify experts without risking another deadly and costly confusion where many governments, rather blindly, embrace apocalyptic predictions as unfounded as those considered during COVID-19 and make policies that devastate the world.

It is hoped that the present article will promote free and honest discussion and constructive criticism leading to improved public health responses in future pandemics. This goal will only be attainable without

a) the censorship by any scientific journals
b) sensationalisms of news media,
c) greed from pharmaceutical corporations,
d) servitude and ignorance of large segments of the medical community, and
e) expectations of personal gain (political or economic) by some high visibility governmental public health servants.

Inferences

The data and findings presented in this article, as supported by the pertinent references allow to draw the following considerations:

I. Lockdowns, quarantines, face mask use and social distancing were ineffective in controlling COVID-19.

II. The actual cause of death of uncompromised patients that were hospitalized, intubated and likely died of iatrogenic infections during the pandemic must be statistically established.

III. Massive campaigns with experimental vaccines did not reduce infections nor mortality at least in the countries of South America that were studied here.

IV. The burden of proof must always fall with demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of mandated public measures and not in demonstrating their irrelevance.

V. Computer simulation, although cheaper and less laborious than laboratory or field research, could, at best, complement but never replace actual data in policy making.

VI. A sensationalist press, more eager of attention and rating than truth, is a major enemy during health emergencies. Within this definition fall leading “scientific” journals that censored research critical of official mandates, thus preventing scientific discourse and dissent.

VII. Politicians or managers in charge of scientific institutions were unable to make adequate scientific decisions during the pandemic. A national panel of experts selected only by their merits in pertinent disciplines like infectious diseases, immunology and epidemiology, seems a safer alternative to draw guidance when it is necessary to take decisions during a public health emergency.

VIII. WHO failed to control the pandemic. Homogeneous response by every country to ineffective measures dictated by WHO could prevent diversity of national responses and result in catastrophic global consequences.

IX. A medical community that does not critically evaluates guidelines for soundness and follows blindly untested government measures is responsible of negative health outcomes during the pandemic and is unqualified to serve the public.

X. To capitalize for the future the experience that could be gained from the pandemic, the number of unnecessary deaths produced by ineffective public health measures should be approximated and any criminal and civil responsibilities during COVID-19 should be delineated.