Lockdowns Don’t Work

Clickbait title. The author isn’t saying “lockdowns don’t work“, he is hypothesising that other measures are enough. He bases this on the fact that deaths start dropping 15 days after lockdown when they should only reasonably be expected to start dropping 21 days after lockdown.

Inane argument:

1. many days before a country goes into lockdown, things are bad and people are volunteerily going into lockdown.

2. He would need to wait for more than say 30 days after lockdown to see if lockdown did affect death rate. Especially if the tallying of deaths has many days of lag before numbers get recorded to their real values.

3. He assumes deaths are a wall at 21 days, instead of thinking there could be a spread starting at less than 21 days.

4. When a health system is under stress, perhaps people die quicker than his assumption of 21 days.

Generally a poor article, needs more time and data before he can make even a little sense of the data. Another economist looking at cherry picked data and jumping to conclusions from it.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/witherspoon-institute/ — “questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for the purpose of profit or influence (Learn More). Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact checked on a per article basis. Reasoning: Extreme Right, Propaganda“.

It must be really weird to be a conservative think tank largely focused on anti-abortion think pieces, and then be tasked with coming up with arguments that will cause death for large numbers of people.

> Why should I have to prove that lockdowns don’t work? The burden of proof is to show that they do work!

Okay. Australia and New Zealand have done well:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The main difference seems to be that they started their lockdowns early enough. Other countries delayed and by then it had already been widely spread.

Australia is one of several countries who did impose restrictions early and the data is pretty compelling. We meet all criteria: "Stay-at-home orders, low assembly thresholds, and business closures".

We have several states with 0 new infections for several days and all states in single digits. 78 deaths so far.

Maybe there is something here but it is hard to read as the text goes from:

"Lockdowns don't work."

To

"But, put simply, the scientific and medical case for strict lockdowns is paper-thin."

That's not quite the same thing...

Then it dances around what a 'lockdown' even is.