Did the Lockdown Save Lives?

For two to three months, Americans have suffered the loss of liberty, security, and prosperity in the name of virus control. The psychological impact has been beyond description. We thought we could count on basic rights and freedoms. Then over a few days in March, it all ended in ways hardly anyone could believe possible.

The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that proves it was all real.

So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy: when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error, you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just admitting the mistake.

Thus have many people written me to say that whether you agree or disagree with the lockdown, we have to admit that it has saved millions of lives. I always write back and ask how they know that. They send me a link to a projection – those very projections that presume all kinds of things about cause and effect that we cannot know and which have proven wrong time and again throughout this crisis.

So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,” in the words of Knut Wittkowski.

So even if lockdowns slow the spread in the short run, it’s not clear that they have saved lives from the coronavirus, even if it results in more death overall from deferred surgeries and diagnostics, suicides, drug overdoses, and depression.

The trouble here is that certain features of this experience stand out to contradict the idea that lockdowns are saving lives over the longer term. In New York, two thirds of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were in fact sheltering in place during the lockdown, essentially living in forced isolation. The lockdown didn’t help them; it might have contributed to making matters worse.

Meanwhile, despite the media hate poured out against Florida’s youthful spring break revelers, where hundreds of thousands declined to socially distance at the height of the virus risk, I’ve yet to find a credible report of fatalities beyond two that were probably unpreventable. This is because the risks to the younger population are negligible, as we’ve known for a long time now.

In many countries, 30% to 60% of excess deaths trace to nursing homes. The numbers in the U.S. are shocking.

These environments are neither locked down nor open; the virus spread among the most vulnerable population after even just one exposure due to possible negligence and distraction by mass frenzy. In the midst of locking down the whole world, and our politicians were consumed with the desire to enforce stay-at-home orders and forced separation, the population that needed the most care was neglected. Even worse, in New York, California, and New Jersey, nursing homes were forced to take in COVID-19 patients.

One way we might discern whether and to what extent lockdowns have had any effect on infection and death is to examine the empirical case. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, T.J. Rodgers examined all the existing studies:

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis.

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. This wide variation means that other variables—like population density or subway use—were more important. Our correlation coefficient for per-capita death rates vs. the population density was 44%. That suggests New York City might have benefited from its shutdown—but blindly copying New York’s policies in places with low Covid-19 death rates, such as my native Wisconsin, doesn’t make sense.

Turning to the international front, consider the work of Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development. His detailed study from around the world compares locked down countries with those that stayed open. The Times of Israel summarizes his findings as follows.

A prominent Israeli mathematician, analyst and former general claims simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it.

Even a casual look at the open societies of Sweden and Korea – despite going too far in interventions – demonstrate that they experienced lower rates of death than Europe and the U.K. Even the World Health Organization has praised Sweden’s response.

On the basis of the available data, we find that a lockdown in Sweden would not have limited the number of infections or the number of COVID-19 deaths. Theory suggests that this may be the result of people maintaining a larger social distance even in the absence of a lockdown—there could be, in other words, voluntary social restraint. Krueger et al. (2020), in particular, show this in the context of a formal model and suggest that this may be the relevant case for Sweden

Finally, we have a decisive study from Bloomberg that carefully charts lockdowns and death, concluding:

There’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends.

Cause and effect are notoriously difficult to discern in human affairs on a macroscale. Even if it connects somehow to intuition that locking down keeps the virus away, they do not deal with the reality that the virus is still there, even if temporarily contained (which itself is arguable).

Quarantines, lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders and so on reflect a premodern bias and an unscientific impulse to run away and hide, a method used from the ancient world through selective quarantines in some cities in 1918. Then we got smart, developed a modern theory of viruses (well explained here), and eschewed them in every pandemic since World War II. Then, somehow, and mysteriously, one century flipped to the next and we got dumb again and here we are.

Did the lockdown save lives? It’s possible but not yet proven, and the evidence so far points to a negative answer. No matter how much we try to spin this in our heads, no matter how much we want to believe that something good has come out of this catastrophe, we are all going to have someday to deal with the terrible but likely reality that it was all for naught.

I conclude with the words of the great physician who is credited with smallpox eradication, Donald A. Henderson (1928-2016).

The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.

come on, FauXi, Gates and the CDC and Wuhan had/have
patents on this weaponized-HIVladen-ATROCITY.

there is money to be made,
and an election to be controlled,
and people and their children to be killed.

meanwhile the collaborators PREEN before the
press, waiting to “cure” the FIRE they started.

I increasingly see this as being like a lunatic pushing three people off a boat, then watching two of them drown while rescuing the third. Then walking away saying, “That’s how I roll, saving lives, being cool. You can all thank me later.”

As an effective means of containing the spread and mortality of COVID-10 Wuhan virus, it was pretty much of a wash - perhaps MORE deaths were caused by the lockdown and poor management of the elderly in nursing home localities, than would have happened if the disease had been permitted to run its course, using only social distancing and liberal frequent hand washing.

But hey, as a social experiment, the lockdown proved conclusively what we all knew intuitively - there CAN be an almost immediate change in the degree of air pollution that was supposed to contribute to “global warming”, and that these supposed pollutants rapidly disappear in very short order, having no lasting effects one way or the other.

The second thing proven was the massive almost instant poverty that occurs when the engines of capitalism are stilled for even a short while. We shall be paying for THAT outcome for years.

Interesting headline:
Did the Lockdown Save Lives?
Past tense.
The zeitgeist recognizes it's over...

Bring Out Your Dead

Post to me or FReep mail to be on/off the Bring Out Your Dead ping list.

The purpose of the “Bring Out Your Dead” ping list (formerly the “Ebola” ping list) is very early warning of emerging pandemics, as such it has a high false positive rate.

The false positive rate was 100%.

At some point we may well have a high mortality pandemic, and likely as not the “Bring Out Your Dead” threads will miss the beginning entirely.

*sigh* Such is life, and death...

If a quarantine saves just one child's or one old fart’s life, it's worth it.

I seriously doubt it. It is a virus. Virus' are fought by being exposed to said viruses and the body developing antibodies to fight them off.

But the National lock down was not instituted for the purpose of saving lives. It was instituted to drive President Trump out of Office and to wreck the American economy.

In raw numbers, the lockdown is not responsible for saving lives.

- There were fewer deaths by accidents of all types.

- There are/will be more deaths due to lack of treatment of other medical conditions.

- While many who would have caught the virus, avoid it, they're not generally the ones who would have died from it.

Lockdowns don’t save lives. Some restrictions do. But businesses can work around those restrictions (crowds) with some common sense and ingenuity, if the demand exists. Much of the problem is caused by the lack of demand.

https://www.foxnews.com/health/wearing-face-mask-reduce-coronavirus-transmission-75-percent-study-shows
Wearing a face mask can reduce coronavirus transmission by up to 75 percent, study says
By David Aaro
Fox News
May 20, 2020
“That infection rate went up to 33 percent when the mask barrier was only used to cover the healthy hamsters’ cage. With no mask barriers at all, roughly two-thirds of the healthy hamsters were infected with the virus within a week,...Researchers added that the hamsters who were infected even with the mask barrier had less of the virus in their bodies when compared to those infected without the masks.”

The *Deaths of Despair* numbers will be staggering.

Suicides, substance abuse, DV, and essential medical procedures and treatments being skipped has caused many deaths among cancer and cardiac patients. Kidney patients don’t get their dialysis. People are too terrorized to go to the doctor or ER when they need to. Some of those canceled *elective* surgeries were things like kidney transplants.

This should infuriate all Americans.

And for what? The new data rolling in shows that lockdown made things worse. We created a nation of Petri dishes. There was no opportunity to naturally acquire herd immunity.

Americans know who did this. They also know that Bad Orange Man went rogue for them, bucked his own experts, and forced the reopening of the country to stop the damage from getting worse.

Americans know who did this. They also know that Bad Orange Man went rogue for them, bucked his own experts, and forced the reopening of the country to stop the damage from getting worse.

I think the only people left who want to remain shut down ae: The Dem politicians, the media, and those on a public payroll.

I'm reading the linked paper "SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?" by Shing Hei Zhan, Benjamin E. Deverman, and Yujia Alina Chan. In this paper is this interesting item:

...phylogenetic tracking suggests that SARS-CoV-2 had been imported into the [Wuhan seafood / wet] market by humans. To look for clues regarding an intermediate animal host, we turned to samples collected from the market in January, 2020. In contrast to the thorough and swift animal sampling executed in response to the 2002-2004 SARS-CoV outbreaks to identify intermediate hosts (37,53), no animal sampling prior to the shut down and sanitization of the market was reported. Details about the sampling are sparse: 515 out of 585 samples are environmental samples, and the other 70 were collected from wild animal vendors; it is unclear whether the latter samples are from animals, humans, and/or the environment. Only 4 of the samples, which were all environmental samples from the market, have passable coverage of SARS-CoV-2 genomes for analysis.

There were two original SARS-CoV outbreaks. It's interesting that the Chinese did "thorough and swift animal sampling" during those outbreaks, but NONE during the current SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. That strikes me as damning evidence of Chinese malfeasance or intention in 2020.

I like the analogy. I'd tweak it a bit. I'd say a boat coming across a drowning man and one of the boaters pushing two of the others out just to make room to rescue the one already in the water.

How can we know?

Deaths by other were attributed to Covid19 only because it was present, there was recording hanky panky, people delayed treatment for or discovery of other ailments, poisoning by supplement abuse, more alcohol abuse, suicides from depression, etc. are factors.

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