It seems appropriate to put this out at the end of our Level 4 lockdown, especially since the regime we’re now entering is not much below it.
This article analysing the effectiveness of lockdowns was published on April 21 so has been able to look at some solid data from the COVID-19 outbreak from Italy, Spain and France where lockdowns happened in early-mid March.
If strict lockdowns actually saved lives, I would be all for them, even if they had large economic costs. But, put simply, the scientific and medical case for strict lockdowns is paper-thin.
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At this point, the question I usually get is, “What’s your evidence that lockdowns don’t work?”
It’s a strange question. Why should I have to prove that lockdowns don’t work? The burden of proof is to show that they do work! If you’re going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work.
First off though, a lockdown has to be defined:
- People are ordered to stay at home or required to provide a reason for movement outside of home.
- Assemblies are limited to a very small (usually single-digit) threshold.
- Many businesses and activities are forced to close, even if they do not technically constitute assemblies and would like to stay open.
Without those three features, it’s not a lockdown, and that list certainly fits New Zealand’s.
First the article looks at the history of lockdowns.
There are very few documented cases of lockdowns being used to fight epidemic diseases in the past. One example where lockdowns were used was to fight Ebola in West Africa. However, it’s hard to study these lockdowns, since they also included a door-to-door campaign delivering information and supplies to almost 70 percent of the impacted areas.
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Nor does the 1918 influenza pandemic provide much help to lockdown advocates. The most severe restrictions during that pandemic, which dramatically reduced deaths, were in St. Louis.
Restrictions – but it wasn’t a lockdown:
St. Louis’s measures included closures of specific assemblies like churches, closure of all “amusements,” restricted business hours, mask orders, school cancellations, and centralized quarantine procedures. St. Louis never issued a stay-at-home order, and only imposed a complete cancellation of business for about forty-eight hours.
Moving to the current situation takes into account the specific data about COVID-19:
At this point, enough research has been done that it’s possible to say with some confidence how long it takes to die of COVID. Across numerous medical studies, COVID has reliably been found to take anywhere from two to ten days to incubate (but most usually four to six days), and from twelve to twenty-four days to kill a person after incubation. Across all studies, these estimate places typical death time at about twenty to twenty-five days after first exposure.
And that time of twenty-twenty five days is important when assessing the effect of a lockdown:
As such, practically speaking, lockdowns should not create an appreciable decline in deaths earlier than twenty days after a lockdown. If deaths begin to decline very rapidly after a policy measure is put in place, it suggests the real force reducing deaths occurred much earlier.
He casts a glance at the lockdown in the Wuhan province but concludes that the Chinese data can’t be trusted (there’s a lot of that going around recently). Instead he looks at the actual results of the lockdowns undertaken by Spain , France and the Lombardy region of Italy. In each case using Change In Daily Deaths vs. 1-Year Previously, to avoid the current issue of incorrectly coding deaths as COVID-19, a problem the Italians are already looking into and which has caused strange one-day spikes in NYC and France.
What we see in Spain’s case, however, is that the spike in deaths plateaued around March 25–30, just ten to fifteen days after the lockdown, and began to fall about eighteen days after the lockdown.
And that can also be seen with the worldometer graph for Spain:
Similarly for France:
France went into lockdown on March 16, but the spike in deaths appears to have more or less stabilized some time between March 25 and April 6—thus, again, before the lockdown could have saved lives by preventing infections.
… and the Lombardy region of Italy:
Again, the death spike in Lombardy had already plateaued or even begun to decline before the region-wide lockdown could have been responsible.
He’s also built models to look at the Netherlands and Sweden, which did not go the lockdown path, plus a county-based analysis of the USA. However, as interesting as that is I don’t think we need it to prove any further the main contention, and in any case it’s plunging down the rabbit-hole of models that got us into this mess in the first place.
It’s enough that comparing Lombardy-Italy, France, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands has shown that:
- In the nations where lockdown occurred the drops in deaths began too early for the lockdown to have been the cause.
- Sweden and the Netherland have suffered no worse, and have actually done better, than many lockdown nations despite the claims that refusing lockdown would mean the disease would rip through their nations unimpeded. If that was true they should be much worse off, and they’re not.
And now there is an article in the WSJ where others have crunched the numbers and come to the same conclusion, Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No!:
To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.
We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)
No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York.
Getting back to the first article, it’s not as if the author is recommending doing nothing, which is the straw man response and not true of Sweden or the Netherlands. In fact they are doing what has worked in past pandemics and which he finishes up with as the set of recommendations for dealing with future outbreaks like this one.
But ordering people to cower in their homes, harassing people for having playdates in the park, and ordering small businesses to close up shop regardless of their hygienic procedures simply has no demonstrated effectiveness.
None of the actual examples of lockdowns around the world provides particularly compelling evidence that lockdowns actually work. We don’t need to have a national debate about whether the economic costs of lockdowns outweigh their public health benefits, because lockdowns do not provide public health benefits.
The actions that do have public health benefits and that have a history of supporting evidence are:
No Minister 