If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now

A team of scholars at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise conducted a review of the relevant literature on Covid lockdowns and found that government imposed lockdowns enacted to mitigate the spread of Covid not only don't work, they're positively harmful.

A lot of people have been saying this for two years, and some of them have been kicked off social media platforms for expressing that opinion.

Now, however, with the publication of this authoritative study from Johns Hopkins, maybe the twenty somethings who decide who'll be allowed to say what on social media, along with our political and public health officials, will realize, even if they don't admit it, that the lockdowns they imposed and supported were a mistake.

As one example of how mistaken they were, researchers led by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College of London predicted in 2020 that a suppression strategy based on a lockdown would reduce COVID-19 mortality by up to 98%.

It turns out that, according to the Johns Hopkins study, that prediction was wildly incorrect.

Here are some slightly edited excerpts from the study:

While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.

We use “NPI” (Nonpharmaceutical interventions) to describe any government mandate which directly restricts peoples’ possibilities. Our definition does not include governmental recommendations, governmental information campaigns, access to mass testing, voluntary social distancing, etc., but does include mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above.

We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality. There is some evidence that business closures reduce COVID-19 mortality, but the variation in estimates is large and the effect seems related to closing bars.

There may be an effect of mask mandates, but just two studies look at this, one of which one only looks at the effect of employee mask mandates.

We find no clear evidence that SIPOs (Shelter In Place Orders) had a noticeable impact on COVID-19 mortality.

Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% (cf. the 98% prediction mentioned above) compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%.

Unintended consequences may play a larger role than recognized. We already pointed to the possible unintended consequence of SIPOs, which may isolate an infected person at home with his/her family where he/she risks infecting family members with a higher viral load, causing more severe illness.

Lockdowns often have also limited peoples’ access to safe (outdoor) places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe (indoor) places.

Indeed, we do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased COVID-19 mortality.

The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality. The effect is little to none.

However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.

These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument (Italics mine).

Maybe the next time we're visited by a pandemic or a resurgence of Covid, our political and public health leaders will actually follow the science instead of depriving people of their livelihoods, education and psychological well-being.