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.
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.
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.”...........To Read More.....
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