From The Wall Street Journal:
Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health--first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in.
Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn't contain the disease's spread and reopening it didn't unleash a second wave of infections.
Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well-documented long-term public-health consequences beyond Covid, imposing them appears to have been a large policy error.
At the beginning, when little was known, officials acted in ways they thought prudent. But now evidence proves that lockdowns were an expensive treatment with serious side effects and no benefit to society.
TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project.
We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns.
This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland�s Transportation Institute into a "Social Distancing Index."
Measuring from the start of the year to each state�s point of maximum lockdown--which range from April 5 to April 18--it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks.
The five places with the harshest lockdowns--the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts--had the heaviest caseloads.
It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads.
And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.
3 comments:
This was not just about medicine and outcome. It was a national social experiment, not unlike the small (and famous) Green-Brown eye experiment conducted by a teacher years ago.
Those who choose not to mask, are the pariah. They are the social credit nightmare Americans who continue to be punished for free will.
The urban blight from this experiment will last for years. A mile from my home, a large and popular gym which went bankrupt and now has their massive wall of windows covered with plywood.
What we will not know for years, because longitudinal studies will be needed, is the effect of masking on small children. When the monster is not just under the bed, but in the air - you know the outcome.
Let the games continue....
It is turning a whole generation of children into agorophobic hypochondriacs.
I agree. And who will support the generation coming up who refuse to leave their homes for fear of everything; unable to take risks; lacking both faith and courage?
* When I grew up in southern Mexico, a child of Protestant missionaries, we ate everything that was handed to us in the villages: iguana, fried grasshoppers, hot tortillas dropped on the dirt floor and picked up and handed to us with a smile. Drank goat's milk fresh out of the animal, and ate cow tongue tacos and all manner of delicacies. Grew strong and healthy, in the toughest of circumstances. Our immune systems were sufficiently challenged and a life out in the sunshine did the rest.
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