As I've already outlined in great detail, lockdowns are one of the most destructive, anti-human, civilization-destroying ideas to have graced this century thus far. Lockdowns have never been tried before, and never been recommended before. Thus, it is reasonable for us to question their effectiveness.
Surely our wise and gracious public authorities have substantial evidence that these policies would be overwhelmingly successful at mitigating COVID-19 and saving lives! Surely they are basing their lockdown decisions off of a wealth of evidence favoring their position! They must be sure that lockdowns are saving far more lives than they're killing!
If the same people's non-existent evidence favoring masks is any indicator - no, they aren't.
Lets dive into the evidence. On a surface level, we should immediately notice the complete lack of any correlation between the speed of the lockdown and the number of deaths.
From the article: "we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21 day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million. A states 'days to shutdown' was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down"
The trendline slopes downward - states that delayed lockdowns more tended to have lower death rates. However, the claim here is not that this trend is significant/meaningful (low correlation coefficient: 5.5%). The real takeaway here is the complete lack of evidence supporting lockdown effectiveness. It's quite difficult to have causation without correlation after all. If lockdowns worked we would expect a significant positive trend here.
There's also no correlation between less movement (stricter lockdowns) and fewer deaths per million. (Based on Google Mobility Data)
Could the above graph simply be an inverse relationship? Did worse outbreaks drive stronger distancing/lockdown reactions? Not likely.
When the data is plotted by country we get a similar result.
We can also check "time spent at home". Again, we find the opposite of what lockdown proponents would expect.
At this point it's clear that any potential benefits to be found from lockdowns are certainly less than obvious. What do more professional studies say?
One method by which analysts can gauge impact of lockdown policies is by measuring changes in the virus' growth rate and reproduction trends. In this paper, we find no substantial change to suggest lockdowns have any impact.
Another paper studying the U.K. came to similar conclusions, stating - "-the U.K. lockdown was both superfluous (it did not prevent an otherwise explosive behavior of the spread of the coronavirus) and ineffective (it did not slow down the growth rate visibly)"
Essentially, the trend in the below graph should change at the lockdown+23days mark if lockdowns were effective.
The evidence is piling up against lockdowns and it doesn't look good.
Another paper arguing that the importance of non-pharmaceutical interventions in virus mitigation is often overstated.
Yet another:
The case in favor of lockdown effectiveness gets far weaker once its understood that any potential benefits ascertained from lockdowns should be obvious if officials could ever hope to justify such horrifical destructive actions. When a Governor makes the deadly decision to lock down her state, she had better have ample evidence she's saving lives on net as a result. Unfortunately, Governors would rather use the heavy hand of the state than make a solid case for their actions.
None of this information should be surprising to those who remember what the original arguments were for lockdowns. "Two weeks to flatten the curve!" they said. "We only want to slow the spread! Not decrease the # of deaths!" they proclaimed. Lockdowns were never meant to decrease overall deaths or infections. Jeffery Tucker says it best:
Instead of acknowledging the complete and utter failure of their lockdown policies, public officials would rather dig their heels in. There seems to be no number of people politicians aren't willing to kill to prevent themselves from having to admit they were wrong. Or perhaps they have convinced themselves of their own success, despite all the evidence. After all, it has become common practice for Governors to blame their "irresponsible" constituents for any and all shortcomings of lockdowns. Either way, we are witnessing an unparalleled display of shameless arrogance and hubris by our public officials.
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