Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence

AIER Staff – December 19, 2020

 

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion. 

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control. 

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better. 

(These studies are focused only on lockdown and their relationship to virus control. They do not get into the myriad associated issues that have vexed the world such as mask mandates, PCR-testing issues, death misclassification problem, or any particular issues associated with travel restrictions, restaurant closures, and hundreds of other particulars about which whole libraries will be written in the future.) 

1. “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes”.....
2. “Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary?””.....
3. “Estimation of the current development of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Germany”.....
4. Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?.....
5. “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020): The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe”.....
6. Professor Ben Israel’s Analysis of virus transmission......
7. “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: a quasi-experimental study”.....
8. “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic”.....
9. “Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe”.....
10. “Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions”.....
11. “Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis”.....
12. Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control,.....
13. “Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy”.....
14. “SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution”.....
15. “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison”.....
16. ”Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19” (alt-link).....
17. “How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe?.....
18. “Association between living with children and outcomes from COVID-19: an OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England””.....
19. “Exploring inter-country coronavirus mortality“.....
20. “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation”.....
21. “States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions”.....
22. The Mystery of Taiwan: .....
    
23. “Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line”  .....
    
24. “Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response”.....
25. “Lockdowns and Closures vs COVID – 19: COVID Wins”..............
26. “Effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19: A Tale of Three Models”...........
27. “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” ...........”
28. “Lockdown Effects on Sars-CoV-2 Transmission – The evidence from Northern Jutland”................
29.  “A First Literature Review: Lockdowns Only Had a Small Effect on COVID-19”.............

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