Donald L. Luskin: COVID-19 lockdowns are a failed experiment — didn’t contain spread of disease
Imposing shutdowns appears to have been a large policy error
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}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.
ONE IN 10 PEOPLE SPENT LOCKDOWN WORKING ON HOME AND MAKING IT WORSE, SURVEY SAYS
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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.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}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.”
A man stands in the middle of a cable car tracks on a near empty California Street in San Francisco, Saturday, March 21, 2020. Some 40 million Californians are coping with their first weekend under a statewide order requiring them to stay at home to help curb the spread of the coronavirus(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
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.
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