Government-mandated stay-at-home orders, school and business shutdowns, mandatory face masks, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions to stop the spread of COVID-19, had “little to no effect” on mortality while increasing excess and “collateral” deaths, according to a report.

“Widespread, economy-wide lockdown policies were a disaster. They had only marginal effects on the ultimate number of deaths, but imposed enormous costs,” says a paper authored by Douglas Allen, professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, and produced by the Fraser Institute.

Allen previously wrote a peer-revieweed article on the issue, and his latest report published Jan. 19, 2023, marks his final installment, titled “Lockdown: A Final Assessment.”

He told The Epoch Times that lockdowns “will go down in history as the greatest of peacetime policy disasters.”

Allen said when he first started assessing data for his report, he estimated the costs of lockdowns just in the first year to be “141 times any benefits.” He said this was an “enormous underestimate.”

“During COVID, we did the equivalent of killing thousands of lives ‘to save one,'” he said.

After combining all lockdowns and their resulting effects, the end result was “grossly inaccurate cost/benefit estimates,” according to the report, published as part of a larger series, “COVID-19 Lessons We Should Have Learned.”

Allen’s reports note that governments got into a “’double down’ political equilibrium.” He said the world’s governments “panicked” in February and March of 2020, “concluding only a severe lockdown could isolate the virus and stop it from spreading.”

“They quickly became aware of the failure and cost of this action and were faced with a choice: they could admit their terrible mistake or double down, continue with the policy, and hope that an endemic state would come soon,” said Allen.

The report examined two years of research following the declaration of the pandemic and criticized government-mandated lockdowns as a “radical and untried social policy,” to purportedly reduce the load on hospitals and prevent the health-care system from being overrun.

Governments continued to enforce lockdowns, repeating the same “ineffective but extremely costly policies,” even when the overall lethality of the virus declined, said the report.

In one study cited by the report, a breakdown was calculated of excess deaths attributed to COVID-19 directly, and those deaths attributed to lockdowns. The study concluded COVID excess deaths were 63 percent of excess mortality, while lockdowns increased all-cause mortality, basically offsetting any lives saved from lockdowns.

Lockdowns also caused “collateral deaths,” with widespread changes to societal behaviour that increased mortality in some cases, said the report, noting many individuals missed regular medical checkups out of fear of exposure to COVID-19.

“Estimates in the US show that there were 171,000 excess non-COVID-19 deaths through to the end of 2021. By that time the US had recorded 825,929 COVID-19 deaths. However, if lockdowns only reduce deaths by 3.2 percent, then only 27,303 lives were saved by lockdowns,” said the report.

Allen wrote that governments acted on faulty or incomplete data in crafting their pandemic policies.

“All of the early models made death predictions that were off by factors of 10 or more,” said the report, citing the infamous models produced by Imperial College London’s Neil Ferguson, which initially projected 132,687 COVID deaths in Canada by July 30, 2020.

There were 9,019 actual deaths by that date.

The report criticized epidemiological models as failing to account for changes in human behaviour in response to the coronavirus.

The report notes that there have been no estimates available on how much lockdowns cost society in terms of worldwide food insecurity, international trade reductions, reduced travel, increased domestic violence, increased drug/ alcohol/mental health issues, and employment disruptions.

It added that the impact of lockdowns on children’s well-being is still being analyzed, but that it is generally acknowledged that children suffered significantly in terms of physical well-being, lost education, early development, and social abilities.