Lockdowns Are Useless Except As Political Theater

The young people I know who are involved in medicine are all pearl-clutchers when it comes to the 'rona.  They think this is a plague of Bibilical proportions; knowing some history might mitigate that somewhat (1968 Hong Kong flu, anyone?) but they're too young to know any history.

I don't need to be doctor, nurse, or pharmacist to read data, and the data says that lockdowns didn't do much to stop the spread of the virus.  They were great exercises in governmental control (read: fascism) but ineffective in their stated purpose.  The virus gave politicians all over the world the grandest stage on which to show they were "doing something", which was the true purpose.

How many lives have been unnecessarily upended by such hubris?

In 1932, Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously called the states “laboratories of democracy.” Different states can test out different policies, and they can learn from each other. That proved true in 2020. Governors in different states responded to the COVID-19 pandemic at different times and in different ways. Some states, such as California, ordered sweeping shutdowns. Others, such as Florida, took a more targeted approach. Still others, such as South Dakota, dispensed information but had no lockdowns at all.

As a result, we can now compare outcomes in different states, to test the question no one wants to ask: Did the lockdowns make a difference?

If lockdowns really altered the course of this pandemic, then coronavirus case counts should have clearly dropped whenever and wherever lockdowns took place. The effect should have been obvious, though with a time lag. It takes time for new coronavirus infections to be officially counted, so we would expect the numbers to plummet as soon as the waiting time was over.

How long? New infections should drop on day one and be noticed about ten or eleven days from the beginning of the lockdown. By day six, the number of people with first symptoms of infection should plummet (six days is the average time for symptoms to appear). By day nine or ten, far fewer people would be heading to doctors with worsening symptoms. If COVID-19 tests were performed right away, we would expect the positives to drop clearly on day ten or eleven (assuming quick turnarounds on tests).

To judge from the evidence, the answer is clear: Mandated lockdowns had little effect on the spread of the coronavirus. The charts below show the daily case curves for the United States as a whole and for thirteen U.S. states. As in almost every country, we consistently see a steep climb as the virus spreads, followed by a transition (marked by the gray circles) to a flatter curve. At some point, the curves always slope downward, though this wasn’t obvious for all states until the summer.

The lockdowns can’t be the cause of these transitions. In the first place, the transition happened even in places without lockdown orders (see Iowa and Arkansas). And where there were lockdowns, the transitions tended to occur well before the lockdowns could have had any serious effect. The only possible exceptions are California, which on March 19 became the first state to officially lock down, and Connecticut, which followed four days later.

Even in these places, though, the downward transitions probably started before the lockdowns could have altered the curves. The reason is that a one-day turnaround for COVID-19 test results probably wasn’t met in either state. On March 30, the Los Angeles Times reported the turnaround time to be eight days. That would make the delay from infection to confirmation not the 10 we assumed, but more like 17 days (6 for symptoms to appear, 3 for them to develop, and 8 for test processing). In early April, the Hartford Courant reported similar problems with delayed test results in Connecticut.

What’s more, there’s no decisive drop on the dates when lockdowns should have changed the course of the curves. Instead, the curves gradually bend downward for reasons that predate the lockdowns, with no clear changes ten days later.

Lockdown partisans might say that the curves would have been higher after the ten-day mark without the lockdown. While we can’t redo history to prove them wrong, the point is that the sudden and dramatic changes we should see if they were right aren’t there. If we showed people these curves without any markings, they would not be able to discern when or even if lockdowns went into effect.

 Science would indicate that you follow the data, not your intuition.

Update, 10/5/20:  What about Sweden?

MORE EVIDENCE AGAINST LOCKDOWNS: Explaining Sweden’s Covid Cases. The mortality rate in Sweden, while lower than in the U.S. and Britain, has been higher than in neighboring Nordic countries, which critics claimed was proof that it should have emulated their lockdown policies. But a new analysis points to another explanation: Sweden had far more vulnerable elderly people (“dry tinder,” as researchers call it) than its neighbors because its previous two flu seasons had been milder than theirs. “My results,” Jonas Herby concludes, “illustrate that plain coincidences may be important when understanding the COVID-19-death toll in a country compared to national lockdown policies.” His conclusions jibe with a previous analysis of Sweden and its neighbors.