I wanted to write about this sooner, but it took me until yesterday to find a link to an interesting study published by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health and the Study of Business Enterprise. Before I was able to locate it, I read all sorts of news articles from conservative and liberal pundits. They are experts at everything without reading anything. I preferred waiting so I could at least read it, and then try to break it down for you.
As for my own biases, readers of this blog should know I support and encourage vaccines. I agree they should be mandatory among healthcare workers, but generally oppose vaccine mandates in other fields. I have no problem with face mask mandates because they are a minor inconvenience and no one likes to look at my face anyway. I also have no problem with social distancing because that's always how it's been for me. I'm a miserable bastard. People tend to keep their distance.
While I encourage vaccines (a friend of mine who refused to get vaccinated died recently from COVID-19), long-time readers of this blog know I was highly critical of Governor Tom Wolf's pandemic lockdown. He applied a cleaver to a problem that required a scalpel. He gave no no consideration to how he was hurting the unemployed and self-employed, most of whom waited several months before getting a dime. He closed the state offices designed to help people at the time they were needed most. He gave no thought to children deprived of meaningful education. Nor did he consider the increases in suicide and drug use. Wolf and Rachel Levine, a pediatrician and not an epidemiologist, engaged in aegrescit medendo. We are still reeling from all the predictable results, from hoarding to supply shortages to inflation. So what does the Johns Hopkins Study (it's actually an analysis of numerous studies) say?
First, it is written by three economists. While they obviously would be unable to treat your broken ankle, these are precisely the kind of people who can crunch the numbers with a focus on the economics, not public health.
Second, they coin a new phrase, at least for me. They refer to lockdowns as something that is "bioplausible," i.e. something that on the surface seems to make sense. It does seem logical that shutting everyone in their home would reduce spread. But as they note from the data, bioplausibility and reality are two different things.
Third, this analysis is based on a review of thousands of studies, in which 24 were set aside for more detailed analysis. It included what was going on in 186 different countries.
Fourth, lockdowns in Europe and the US only reduced OVID-19 mortality by 0.2%. Ironically, as more stringent measures were imposed, deaths actually increased slightly. (This could be because the stringent measures were put in place too late)
Fifth, where lockdowns did result in negative economic and social impacts in places where they were imposed. Thus, the study concludes "lockdown policies are ill founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
Sixth, the analysis excludes early lockdowns, which I find a bit odd. The earlier you impose a lockdown, the more likely it would be that you'd mitigate the spread. But in the US and Europe, most lockdown orders came after it was too late to stop spread. I think this study would be better had it included places that were much quicker than most of the US in imposing lockdowns.
Seventh, the analysis only looks at deaths, not new cases or hospitalizations.
Overall, I find this Monday morning quarterback study to be quite interesting. My takeaway is that, to be effective, a lockdown must be very early and very stringent. And that's the problem. No one notices an infectious virus until it's too late for a lockdown to be effective.
36 comments:
Come on down to Chinatown. Its safe. No mask needed.
Signed , Nancy Pelosi
Hey? Where's my Joe Biden, Made In China, free, at home testing kits that I ordered January 18, 2022????
I read it too. Good analysis
Very early on, it became quite evident that attending these so called "Super Spreader" events that you put many people in Jeopardy of getting sick and dying (especially if you weren't vaccinated. Appears to me that we were damned if we do and damned if we didn't. Common sense was to prevail and you saw how that worked. Yes a lot of people got hurt but we'll never know how many people didn't die because of these policies. As i said we were damned if we did and damned if we didn't
First the authors argue that social scientists can judge the effects of mortality surrounding lockdowns better than epidemiologists.
As to economic effects sure yet they downplay their own belief that shutting down non-essential businesses had a reduction of 10.6 percent mortality for example.
So what is more important living people or economic profits?
Our Government does such a good job==Praise the poltical claqss
You cannot rule out reckless behavior as the root of spread. If I should pass because of covid, I would want everyone to know and learn how it might have contracted it and how it may have been prevented. We have learned a lot on best practice treatment since inception. That what science is. That what science does. Imagine if we did not "down play it" or "slow the testing down"?
I 100% agree the lockdown was ineffective for most of the reasons you state.
To be fair - NOBODY, Wolf, Trump, the entire planet, had any tried and true playbook on "What to do in the Event of a Global Virus Break Out".
The fact that it was allowed to be politicized was an across the board failure and could have been avoided. Some base standards and messaging on what citizens could do to help could have/should have been put in place on a national level, then extra measures could have been adopted as needed on a local level.
That it became the political football where some states did this and others did that was the biggest failure. Even in the "lockdown" people still moved around the country, and as the saying goes, "there's a reason there isn't a peeing section of the local community pool".
Thanks Bernie,
Once again you prove to your bloggers that Trump is responsible for our slow response.
He is the killer and chief.
Hopefully he will be found guilty of the numerous crimes he has committed and the truth about him and his family finally comes out. What a bunch of swamp things.
I often wonder how many lives woiulkd have been saved if our former president had given a national press conference and told everybody that face masking was the patriotic thing to do. When vaccinations became available what would have been the result of telling his die hard constituents as well as the rest of us that getting vaccinated was the right thing t do? Instead this pandemic has become politicized to the detriment of everyone.
February 8, 2022 at 8:22 AM
"there's a reason there isn't a peeing section of the local community pool".
So you think because there's a "rule", people aren't going to do it?
That's why they invented chlorine.
Thanks for posting this, since much of the main-stream media seems to be ignoring it.
Expect the legitimacy of lockdowns to be the first of many fake-science dominos to fall. We're also suddenly seeing politicians changing their tunes on masking in schools.
And spare me the "science has changed" argument. Similar studies and discussions were shut down well over a year ago, as democrats and the Left tried to label anything that wasn't in agreement with their one-size-fits-all approach as being "misinformation" (and that's still going on).
Thank God that we live in a country where individual states could decide how to approach to the virus, otherwise the federal politicians currently in power would have us locked down and masked up forever.
The reality is that if you lived in a democrat-controlled state, you likely had two years of your life stolen from you - from old people already in the final years of their lives who were cut off from their loved ones, to children who missed large chunks of school. At least sanity held the day in other states, where lockdowns and masking were done away with early and the focus was put on treating those who were most vulnerable to the virus.
Even here in PA, there is a vastly different experience between where we live and what's still going on in Philly and Pittsburgh. The virus is the same everywhere, but our experience varied by who we elected. If only covid was the only issue where that was true.
I guess once they're forced to end the covid restrictions, democrats can go back to telling us their usual fairytales like how much they care about their under-performing public schools and the kids stuck going there.
This gets back to it is all about money!. From an Economist the economic perspective.
On the surface a lock down should have worked if it were fully and truely implemented. However roughly 605% of the work force remained active and out and about. Schools and children and families in spite of periodic stoppages remained active. The Rich traveled from country to country uninhibited. So many justified why they should be out and about. The lock down was never truely achieve. Only a small portion of this country ever really locked down. I doubt anyone reading this block can truely said they separated them from society the way a lock down is really supposed to work.
Can't stop stores from opening because people might not be able to by groceries on their daily plan, Can't close restaurants because people might not eat, Can' shut the Amazon warehouse because people might not get their precious shirt, and so on and so on.
AND YOU CAN"T shut ANY OF IT DOWN MORE IMPORTATLY BECAUSE IT WILL CAUSE ECONMIC CHAOS and POTENTIAL COLLAPSE!
How would the government make money? How would the rich get richer, and most important how would the economic thieves pad their pockets.
Just imagine if no one ordered from Amazon for a month, Or no one purchased gas for a month, Or no one purchased stuff in stores that the government gets sales from. Oh the impacts.
Instead it is about managed impacts and the failure thereof.
Q) Who could have predicted the ineffectiveness and/or danger of lockdowns?
A) A lot of us, and from the very beginning. We predicted worse consequences from increases in drug abuse, overdose, suicide, domestic violence, and cancers that went undetected as regular medicine paused and people were terrified. We've still t to experience the rest of the pandemic - the full brunt of these self-inflicted problems that will be with us for a generation or more. Let's keep masking and terrifying children who are at little to no risk from CoViD, while we ignore the things that really kill children (and in far greater numbers) - drowning, cancer, auto accidents caused by mom and dad texting with precious children in the car.
Hey Bernie, why didn't you publish my comment saying this is a bad, un-reviewed "study" written by a guy who works for a right-wing think tank?
Lockdowns were effective...in creating supply chain chaos and empty grocery shelves and other global shortages of essential goods like integrated circuits and derailing public education and pushing American schoolchildren even further behind their peers abroad. The "every job is essential" and "kids need to be in school" crowd was deemed crazy and dangerous at the time. Now, it turns out they were right.
I decline to publish comments from people condemning this study without having read it first. I don’t give a shit whose side you”re on. Just as it’s time for people to admit vaccines work, it’s time for people to recognize the lockdown was nonsense
I decline to publish comments that attack the authors or claim the study is flawed without stating why. I do not agree with its conclusions in their entirety and have stated what I think is wrong and right about it. If you just have ad hominems or generalized complaints do not expect to see your comment.
Was the article peer-reviewed? Where was it published? Is it a "working copy" or the final version?
from the study page30
". Hence, the
4,766 averted COVID-19 deaths in Europe and the 1,969 averted COVID-19 deaths in the
United States corresponds to 2.8% and 2.0% of all COVID-19 deaths, respectively, with an
arithmetic average of 2.4%
So lockdown averted almost two thousand dead
The authors--"we find little evidence that lockdowns
had a noticeable impact on COVID-19 mortality"
So i guess two thousand people dead is no big deal.
from page 40
" Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced
COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%."
So a little more than two thousand dead.
from page 40
". However, closing non-essential
businesses seems to have had some effect (reducing COVID-19 mortality by 10.6%)"
Adding those up you get--15.9 percent.
So roughly 20 thousand dead were avoided.
Lastly that is only deaths--The number of people who went thru the ICU was reduced.
So it depends on how much saving lives is worth versus doing nothing.
The study tries to show that some things are not effective.
Yet New Zealand --53 deaths---5 million pop.
Australia---4300 deaths--25 million pop
US --900 thousand dead---332 million pop.
There certainly was room for improvement in the US
Looking deeper then their report I see they base much of their hypothesis on a OxCGRT rating.
https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker/blob/master/documentation/codebook.md#containment-and-closure-policies
What I cannot find is the correlation to the percentage of population impacted by the lockdown. I would have thought that make the study more empirical they would have related to that. If you have a sieve and you Block some of the holes you have all the other holes still open so thereby you have numerous other avenues. My thought is similarly if you have one implement lock downs on a portion of a populace you still have so many option of transmission.
Ok then, here are just a few of the problems I found (full disclosure, I am a biologist but not an epidemiologist):
Sweden in the spring of 2020 is a very bad baseline because a) it is a very particular place with unrepresentatively extensive social safety net programs and high state capacity, high median income (and therefore individual level flexibility regarding employment, child care options etc.), and low population density. It is also a relatively small country, and therefore susceptible to high statistical noise. It would have been much better to use aggregate metrics of multiple jurisdictions without lockdowns from around the world.
Much of the data is poorly sourced. Many of the figures they used cite "Our World in Data" as a data source, but Our World in Data itself uses data aggregated from other sources to make appealing graphics to communicate that data. Not citing original datasources is considered bad practice and is typically a way for unscrupulous (or lazy) researchers to make it hard to reproduce their analyses.
Their response variable (mortality) is unsuitable as a response variable to lockdowns because it is too far downstream of the purpose of lockdowns, which is to prevent spread of the virus (which is to say cases). Using deaths captures effects of a number of variables that are somewhat dependent of lockdowns themselves: including general quality of health care, capacity of hospitals to deal with patient loads, ability of people to acquire food and other necessities of life while in quarantine after testing positive, etc.
Part 1
Part 2
They cherry-picked the studies they included in their analysis, and hand-waive around results that are contrary to their own, sometimes because they don't understand the analyses being employed. For example, on pg 17 for Chernozhukov et al.(2021):
"Results: Finds that mandatory masks for employees and closing K-12 schools reduces deaths. SIPO and closing business (average of closed businesses, restaurants and movie theaters) has no statistically significant effect. The effect of school closures is highly sensitive to the inclusion of national case and death data.
Notes: States that ”our regression specification for case and death growths is explicitly guided by a SIR model although our causal approach does not hinge on the validity of a SIR model.” We are uncertain if this means that data are managed to fit an SIR-model (and thus should fail our eligibility criteria)."
They also note that the studies they reviewed had a number of ways dealing with causality (i.e., whether lockdowns failed to reduce mortality, or were implemented because of rising cases or mortality), but never seriously tried to disentangle this for themselves. In one case they accept, rather credulously in my opinion, that there is no relationship between increasing cases and lockdown or mandate stringency, but there is a relationship between the implementation of such measures between neighboring jurisdictions. So they assume that policy experience spatial auto-correlation but somehow a communicable disease doesn't. They treat the lagtime between case onset and mortality similarly, accepting a variety of different lagtimes and interpretations of their consequences from the papers they reviewed, but never attempting to address these discrepancies with much seriousness.
The authors also note that studies with findings contrary to theirs use epidemiological models to generate their null hypotheses without considering behavior. In itself, I do not find this a satisfactory reason to reject epidemiological models as null hypotheses. But then they do not, themselves, find a convincing way to incorporate behavior into their own analyses or null hypothesis, even with data drawn from a variety of different kinds of places in which widely disparate behaviors should be expected; from workplaces to schools, individual cites, whole countries, relatively authoritarian governments to more libertarian ones.
Finally, the language they use at numerous points throughout the paper make clear that they are trying to get the attention of the media, rather than present something meant to be taken seriously by their colleagues. This, for instance, is the sort of broad, interdisciplinary smack-talk that would never ever make it through peer review at serious academic journal: "While it is true that epidemiologists and researchers in natural sciences should, in principle, know much more about COVID-19 and how it spreads than social scientists, social scientists are, in principle, experts in evaluating the effect of various policy interventions. Thus, we distinguish between studies published by scholars in social sciences and by scholars from other fields of research. We perceive the former as being better suited for examining the effects of lockdowns on mortality."
In short, this paper shouldn't be taken as serious proof that lockdowns don't work. It is riddled with problems, whether you agree with its conclusions or not.
"Was the article peer-reviewed? Where was it published? Is it a "working copy" or the final version?"
Translation: I have not read the study so I will use talking points from several articles about this in left-leaning news sites. In fact I have not even read this blog, which answers two of my three questions.
This kind of idiocy, from both left and right, really annoys me. I am sick of it. ]
This study confirms what we saw ourselves.
"Thanks for posting this, since much of the main-stream media seems to be ignoring it."
This is nonsense, too. It has received heavy coverage. You are repeating an article I saw on FOX.
Can any of you think for yourselves?
I thank those of you who finally started reading the report and telling me what they find problematic.
Yes Bernie we can think for ouselves-- The democratys are ruining this country. Biden and his people do not care about the AMERICAN PEOPLE. He cas ruined the border and his democratic friends have destroyed our cities. He could care less about inflation--COme NOvember us thinkers will vote them out hopefully for good.
11:14 AM
" often wonder how many lives woiulkd have been saved if our former president had given a national press conference and told everybody that face masking was the patriotic thing to do."
Should he have done that before or after Fauci said masks don't work?
"Yes Bernie we can think for ouselves-- The democratys are ruining this country. Biden and his people do not care about the AMERICAN PEOPLE. He cas ruined the border and his democratic friends have destroyed our cities. He could care less about inflation--COme NOvember us thinkers will vote them out hopefully for good."
Your comment reveals your inability to think for yourself. First, you blame all Democrats for whatever is wrong. The notion that ALL Democrats are responsible for what some Democrats espouse is just as illogical as the assertion that ALL Republicans are responsible for what some of them espouse. You are basically in a tribe, condemning another tribe and vilifying them.
In addition to your illogic, your grammar could use some work. It's "couldn't care less," not "could care less." It's "we thinkers," not "us thinkers."
To sum up all the studies and all the opinions, This is a virus, a new virus, everyone will eventually contract this virus, flattening the curve made sense, most everything else is just p******g into the wind. As this virus mutates it will most likely also weaken, that coupled with most people having some immunity will make it much like other seasonal viruses.
"This is nonsense, too. It has received heavy coverage. You are repeating an article I saw on FOX."
Bernie please simply do a Google search. You will certainly see there is scant coverage by any of our "main stream media" in the results.
https://www.google.com/search?q=johns+hopkins+study+-+lockdowns+ineffective+ny+times&source=lnms&tbm=nws&tbs=qdr:w&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTr-T6zfL1AhVTSjABHZTJC0M4ChD8BSgBegQIARAD&cshid=1644409379505957&biw=1707&bih=826&dpr=0.8
"Bernie please simply do a Google search. You will certainly see there is scant coverage by any of our "main stream media" in the results."
I did Google searches for several days before writing this story. I saw numerous articles. Right-leaning sources claimed no one was covering it, which is horseshit. Left-leaning sources attacked the authors or then lack of a peer review (although they have no issue with non peer reviewed studies that support their conclusions). What I was unable to find was the study itself. No one was linking to it bc no one had read it.
I solicited comments about the study itself. I have no interest in the attacks on the authors or the talking points from the right or left. I have declined to publish comments that simply rergurgitate these talking points.
Boy did the dems lie to us.
I am glad to read the Biden Administration is trying to find a way out of all this before the Mid-Term Elections. You know, that’s Science . . . POLITICAL Science. We must follow the Science, after all.
There's a great book by Michael Lewis on early COVID called "The Premonition". It chronicles the efforts of local health officials when the pandemic was hitting (think January 2020 not March). One of the points of the book was that our government (top to bottom) was to slow to act. If COVID was a fire, by the time we locked down the building was fully engulfed. The issue is that everyone treats this as black and white when there was a hell of a lot of grey.
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