August 30, 2020 | The Washington Times
“Steamboat Institute holds in-person conference, speakers blast shutdowns over coronavirus”
“Plucky conservatives gathered here over the weekend to spread a message proving increasingly contagious: That the economic and social shutdowns aimed at slowing the novel coronavirus have become more harmful than the disease.
At the Steamboat Institute Freedom Conference, Dr. Scott Atlas pointed to the economic devastation and its correlation with human life expectancy, as well as the 25% surge in suicidal ideation in June among young adults 18-24, which he attributed to the lockdown, not the virus.
“The first two months of the lockdown lost more years of life by far than the virus itself caused as a life-years-loss equation,” said Dr. Atlas, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. “In other words, the lockdown itself was more harmful than the virus. And I think that is clearly happening now, despite the fact that the virus is very serious, no one’s minimizing that.”
Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald said the “lockdowns are based on what now can only be regarded as a deliberate disregard of science.”
“Since March, we have known there is virtually no outdoor transmission, that the risk of death from the coronavirus is confined to a small and isolatable segment of the population, and for everyone else, yes, this really does represent a severe case of the flu,” she said. “Yet millions of Americans are still huddled at home, scared to death.””