“The lockdowns implemented in the name of public health led to health-related drawbacks that were not adequately considered. Lockdowns can prevent some COVID-19 deaths by flattening the curve of cases and preventing stress for hospitals. At the same time, lockdowns are causing serious adverse effects on many millions of people, disproportionately affecting those of us who are already underserved.
The collateral damage includes severe losses to current and future well-being due to unemployment, poverty, food security, interrupted preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic health care, interrupted education, loneliness and deterioration of mental health, and intimate partner violence. The economic recession has been framed as 'economy versus saving lives through COVID-19', but this is a false dichotomy. The economic recession, through cuts in government spending on the social determinants of health, is expected to cause far more loss of life and well-being in the long run than COVID-19 can.
We need to open up society to save many more lives than we can by trying to avoid every case (or even most cases) of COVID-19. It's past time to take a laborious pause, calibrate our response to the real risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses, and put an end to lockdown groupthink.“
From: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink, Ari Joffe, University of Alberta
I have looked at a dozen scientific evaluations of lockdowns in recent weeks and read some of them. There was not one that convincingly demonstrated that lockdowns have had a major positive impact on public health. Usually not even on the corona fight sec. The Canadian scientist Douglas W. Allen (Simon Fraser University, Canada) has compared about 80 (eighty!) scientific evaluations: a 'meta-study'.
The whole report (English, approx. 45 pages): Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature
A strong section starts on page 35. With the data of all European and US countries, Allen does the following. He takes the figures from the OurworldInData "Stringency Index“ (a figure for the severity of the measures) and compares it with the Mortality per million inhabitants. There is nothing statistically significant to be gained from this because there are too many influencing factors, there seems to be too much noise. Then he comes up with the idea of giving the countries that are islands a different valuation in terms of isolation. After all, they are already more isolated by nature. When he does, a surprising picture emerges:
Contrary to popular belief, lockdowns are not associated with fewer deaths per million, but more.
Douglas W. Allen, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Now I like to put this sentence big here, but he only does so to make a point understandable and not as a substitute for an extensive statistical analysis. So he claims not that the lockdowns have made things worse, although he does leave that possibility open, especially if QALY (lost quality years of life) were to be taken into account. However, he wants to show that "If lockdowns had the effect that proponents claimed, then that should be visible in a simple comparison between countries."So I'm actually taking this piece a bit out of context. Therefore, below are his own summary and conclusions, translated into Dutch.
In his conclusion, Allen summarizes the purport of the 80 reports. It confirms what everyone in my bubble has been trying to make clear to the incumbent and its followers since April last year.
Summary
A review of more than 80 Covid-19 studies shows that people often relied on assumptions that were incorrect, and tended to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs of lockdown.
As a result, most early cost/benefit studies came to conclusions that were later refuted by facts that made the cost/benefit ideas prove incorrect.
Research over the past six months has found that lockdowns have had a marginal effect on Covid-19 deaths at best. In general, the (in)effectiveness of lockdowns stems from voluntary changes in behaviour. Lockdown regions were unable to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary behavioral changes that mimicked lockdowns.
The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, are not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown in all countries.
Using a cost/benefit method proposed by Professor Bryan Caplan, and using two extreme assumptions of lockdown effectiveness, the cost/benefit ratio of lockdowns in Canada, in terms of life years saved, is between 3.6 and 282. That means the lockdown will potentially go down as one of the biggest peacetime failures in Canada's history.
Conclusion
A review of the Covid-19 lockdown cost/benefit literature shows that the early case analyses of lockdowns rely on several unrealistic assumptions. These assumptions include that the virus continues to spread exponentially until herd immunity is achieved, that individuals never change their behavior in the face of a viral threat, and that the value of lives lost is age-independent and amounts to around $10 million. Over the course of the past year, research has found that simple SIRS models do not predict the progression of the virus, that individual responses to the virus are important, and that the costs of blanket lockdowns are far-reaching and high.
Lockdowns have some effect on cases, transmissions, and deaths, but these effects are marginal. As a result, lockdowns fail a cost-benefit test. One could argue that Covid-19's lockdown policy was wrong only in hindsight: "In hindsight, that policy was made with the knowledge of 2020, and looking back is unfair. In March 2020, faced with an unknown virus and expert advice that millions of people would die without confinement and isolation, politicians and public health officials made the right decision at the time."
Such an argument is reasonable for March 2020, and possibly even for April 2020. However, as noted in the literature review, it was already known by the end of April that i) the empirical predictions of the SIRS-based models were incorrect, ii) that the models were based on a number of questionable assumptions, iii) that the deaths were very skewed relative to the elderly, and iv) that the costs were high.
The increasing scientific knowledge has not led to advancing insight into policy. That has not fundamentally changed. In August, there was enough information available to show that a reasonable cost-benefit analysis would show that lockdowns caused more harm than good. It is unreasonable to suggest that a good decision could not have been made in the autumn, when the second wave of infections hit.
Douglas W. Allen, Department of Economics , Simon Fraser University
Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature
Some other articles worth reading, to indicate that similar sounds are heard from all directions:
Did Lockdown Work? An Economist's Cross-Country Comparison
This is an Oxford Academic study, from a different, econometric angle:
https://academic.oup.com/cesifo/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cesifo/ifab003/6199605
By comparing the weekly mortality rates of 24 European countries in the first half of 2017-2020, addressing the endogeneity of policies in two different ways, and taking into account the timing, I find no clear link between lockdown policies and the development of mortality.
Christian Bjørnskov, Aarhus University, Department of Economic
The Lockdown paradigm collapses
Just a readable article from Jeffrey A. Tucker, American Institute for Economic Research
https://www.aier.org/article/the-lockdown-paradigm-is-collapsing/
The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seems to be completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has collected 33 case studies from around the world that show this to be true.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research
In American Lockdown states, COVID is now growing the fastest
If you Zerohedge a debatable source just skip it.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/texas-ended-lockdowns-mask-mandates-now-locked-down-states-are-where-covid-growing-most
Don't expect Fauci and his supporters to stop insisting that New York and Michigan are doing "the right thing" and Texas and Florida are making "human sacrifice" as part of a "death cult." The actual figures paint a very different picture, and Even unsuspecting observers can now see that the old story was very wrong.
Zerohedge
Example of a dissenting voice (i.e. Pro-lockdown)
In this study (from August 2020 already) they take Sweden as an example of what happens to mortality without a (strict) lockdown. They then compare that with America, so all states with their population densities, urbanization degrees, climatic conditions, seasonal characteristics etc. etc. in one heap.
After a lot of statistical wanderings, only talking about the period up to June 2020, they come to the following conclusion:
If we compare the daily incidence and death rates in the U.S. with Sweden, the daily death rates in the U.S. are lower than those in Sweden in some days, while they are consistently lower in many days. From this, it can be deduced that the effectiveness of lockdown in the US during the study period was enormous.
Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health
They use the negative binomial integer autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model formulated to treat overdispersion and autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity of the incidence.
I don't even half understand what that is but
If you have to make the "enormous effectiveness of lockdowns" somewhat visible in such a statistically cumbersome way, it reminds me of a PCR test with too many cycles. I can't really call that a success. The negative effects of lockdowns are far too thick on top for that.
Anton (let me quote 🙂 myself too)
Ben je geïnteresseerd in meer wetenschappelijke stukken dan heb je die vast al gevonden; ze liggen voor het oprapen op pubmed en in de referenties van het eerstgenoemde artikel
