Following the Science: The Lockdowns Failed
The costs wildly outpaced the gains... if there were actually any gains at all
In 2019, a World Health Organization Report categorized quarantines of exposed individuals as “not recommended in any circumstances.”
Anthony Fauci, for his part, said in January 2020 regarding the extreme Chinese lockdowns going on in Wuhan at the time,
“That’s something that I don’t think we could possibly do in the United States… Whether or not it does or does not is really open to question because historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”
This was basically the entire mainstream media’s chorus…
…Until it wasn’t.
Then “15 days to slow the spread” morphed into a strategy of mass containment, which never made much sense given, by its own logic, the moment you let up the virus would come out in force. Thus, the whole charade was little more than a delaying tactic. And while this was happening the makeshift field hospitals that had been set up at the beginning of the crisis were being closed due to a lack of patients and hospitals were furloughing medical staff.
After well over a year of on-again, off-again lockdowns we’re still picking up the pieces as the Covid pandemic moves into wave 4. (Or lab leak 2 perhaps?)
And of course, lockdowns worked, right? Following and trusting the science says they work… until it didn’t.
From the most recent paper from Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung and Steve H. Hanke of the notable spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theorists at *checks notes* John Hopkins University,
“Lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs [Stay in Place Orders] were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.
“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.”
If anything, the correlations appear to be in the wrong direction (although with very weak R-squared value).
For those who have paid attention, this shouldn’t be a surprising result. A mountain of evidence has accumulated in the almost two years since the United States and countries around the world implemented a new experiment in locking down their societies to fend off a global respiratory pandemic.
In January of 2021, a paper from researchers affiliated with Stanford University compared 10 countries’ responses to Covid and noted “we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions] on case growth in any country.” This was just one of seven early studies showing the lockdowns didn’t work. Not that the lockdowns weren’t worth the cost, but that they simply didn’t work.
Other analysis’ found similar results. A state-by-state comparison by The Wall Street Journal found no connection between lockdown stringency at effectiveness and another analysis from WalletHub found, well, it found this:
Red and green represent states with few restrictions and blue and grey were states with many restrictions… so basically no difference.
Philippe Lemoine also published a great piece for The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology comparing countries and states and the effects of the various restrictions they implemented. Here for example, is the comparison between the EU average and Sweden, which famously never locked down.
Lemoine also shows during the first wave of Covid that the lockdowns did not generally coincide with the peaks of infections or with what you would expect them to be after the virus’ incubation period. Here, for example, is France where the case rate was starting to peter out before the lockdown even began (and remember, there is a incubation period of at least five days with Covid-19).
This mirrors the analysis of Douglas Axe, William Briggs and Jay Richards in their book The Price of Panic.
The Costs Versus Benefits of the Lockdowns
The conservative website Revolver did an analysis back in mid-2020 comparing the number of lives expected to be saved versus the normal excess mortality that comes with recessions and “concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens.”
One could argue we would have had a recession either way, but that doesn’t fit with history. Neither the 1957 or 1968 pandemics came with recessions and not even the infamous Spanish Flu of 1918 caused one. It was the lockdowns that sent the economy spiraling downward.
Of course, Revolver is a conservative website and its authors are biased. But it appears they may have undershot the costs actually.
In September of 2021, Douglas W. Allen of Simon Fraser University published a meta analysis of 100 studies and concluded,
“Using a method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan along with estimates of lockdown benefits based on the econometric evidence, I calculate a number of cost/benefit ratios of lockdowns in terms of life-years saved. Using a mid-point estimate for costs and benefits, the reasonable estimate for Canada is a cost/benefit ratio of 141.”
141 to 1.
He concludes in a rather blunt manner for academic papers, “It is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in modern history.”
The Specific Costs of the Lockdowns
This will be a long list, so we’ll use bullet points:
The US obliterated its previous record for a federal deficit in 2020 at over $3 trillion with 2021 coming in just behind over $2.5 trillion. Right now, the federal debt has exceeded a mind-boggling $30 trillion.
Something like 40 percent of all dollars in circulation were printed in the last two years and inflation is now at 7.5 percent, the highest its been since the early 80s.
The unemployment rate spiked to almost 15 percent and the economy dipped into a severe recession.
And yes, the lockdowns were responsible. Here’s another chart from the WalletHub analysis noted above on lock stringency versus unemployment rate (green and grey are few restrictions).
400,000 small businesses closed with many never reopening. Even by September, 2020, 49 percent of small businesses in San Francisco remained closed.
An early 2020 report estimated there would be an excess 75,000 deaths of despair (i.e. suicide, overdose, etc.) back when it was thought the lockdowns would be a distant memory by 2021. It will likely be much worse. For example, according to the CDC, “an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before.”
The UN estimated an additional “42 million to 66 million children could fall into extreme poverty.”
UNICEF estimated an additional 1.2 million children’s deaths in developing countries.
Oxford estimated as many as 130 million were at risk from starvation.
The New York Times estimated the developing world could see an additional 1.4 million deaths from tuberculosis, 500,000 from HIV and 385,000 from Malaria.
The Lancet estimates that there was a 53 percent greater chance of death for dementia patients during the lockdowns.
Domestic violence and child abuse skyrocketed during the pandemic/lockdowns.
Divorces skyrocketed during the pandemic.
While small businesses were destroyed and many were financially ruined, billionaires made $3.9 trillion during the pandemic.
I mean, just look at Amazon’s market cap during 2020:
It almost doubled in one year!
And that doesn’t even get into how incredibly divisive they’ve been and the huge increase in government power and curtailment of civil liberties. I mean, is Australia even still a free country?
This meme is much more true than many would like to admit.
What’s Done is Done, But…
The lockdowns happened. They shouldn’t have, but they did. And when Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the study from John Hopkins noted at the beginning of this article, she basically agreed:
“We are not pushing lockdowns, we’ve not been pro-lockdown, that has not been his agenda. Most of the lockdowns actually happened under the previous President.”
OK, that’s an interesting spin, but I’ll take it. Of course, my brother Phillip and I were way ahead of the press secretary on this one:
There will be another pandemic and so it’s critical to come to a conclusion on this. No, the lockdowns did not work and were nowhere close to being worth the cost. Targeted lockdowns of the most vulnerable, i.e. the elderly (the opposite of what happened this time around) and perhaps cancelling large events for a short while is about all that can be justified.
Let’s see if we can actually learn this lesson from history.