France's "COVID-peak" (over 30,000 deaths) was caused by France's lockdown

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Aug 22, 2020, 11:12:09 AM8/22/20

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Evaluation of the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 in France, from all-cause mortality 1946-2020

by D.G. Rancourt, Maurine Baudin, Jérémie Mercier

Technical Report (PDF Available) · August 2020 with 7,521 Reads

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16836.65920/1

Abstract

We analyzed historic and recent all-cause mortality data for France, and other jurisdictions

for comparison, using model fitting to quantify winter-burden deaths, and deaths from exceptional

events. In this way, COVID-19 is put in historic perspective. We prove that the "COVID-peak" feature

that is present in the all-cause mortality data of certain mid-latitude Northern hemisphere jurisdictions,

including France, cannot be a natural epidemiological event occurring in the absence of a large non-

pathogenic perturbation.

We are certain that this "COVID-peak" is artificial because it:

i. occurs sharply (one-month width) at an unprecedented location in the seasonal cycle of all-cause

mortality (centered at the end of March),

2 ii. is absent in many jurisdictions (34 of the USA States have no "COVID-peak"), and iii. varies widely

in magnitude from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in which it occurs.

We suggest that:

• the unprecedented strict mass quarantine and isolation of both sick and healthy elderly people, together

and separately, killed many of them,

• that this quarantine and isolation is the cause of the "COVID-peak" event that we have quantified,

• and that the medical mechanism is mainly via psychological stress and social isolation of individuals

with health vulnerabilities.

According to our calculations, this caused some 30.2 K deaths in France in March and April 2020.

However, even including the "COVID-peak", the 2019-2020 winter-burden all-cause mortality is not

statistically larger than usual. Therefore SARS-CoV-2 is not an unusually virulent viral respiratory

disease pathogen. By analyzing the all-cause mortality data from 1946 to 2020, we also identified

a large and steady increase in all-cause mortality that began in approximately 2008, which is too

large to be explained by population growth in the relevant age structure, and which may be related