No evidence lockdown saves lives – Professor Briggs

I'm not surprised that a professor that is a well-known, outspoken climate change denier is also opposed to the quarantine. It's honestly the same problem; does one tolerate any economic harm for the public good? If you are opposed, the only way to maintain good optics is to deny that there is any public harm worth hurting the economy over.

Here is an interesting (and completely deranged) article written by him that is only written with the slightest bit of irony https://stream.org/i-am-a-climate-denier/

Complete and utter bullshit.

A look at the homepage for William M. Briggs tells you the kind of person he is - it seems every article he's shared repeats obviously incorrect nonsense from biased sources. A quick lookup shows that he's also attempted to use statistics to deny the existence of climate change.[1]

But these are just ad hominems, nothing I say actually shows that this article is completely incorrect. To look at the article we can see that the first graph shown[2], by a self-claimed statistician, doesn't make any sense. I would tear it apart but I can't even tell what it's supposed to be saying. Are the X and Y axes the same? Why is there a curve if the data is sorted by deaths per million?

In the next graph[3] data is arranged better. We can see that there seems to be a correlation between there not being a coronavirus lockdown and lower deaths. It doesn't mention that the United States (one of the more lethal dots, in lockdown) has conducted 1.11 tests per million people versus Ethiopia's 0.03 tests, Myanmar's 0.01 tests, and Coromos and Burundi (all four of these being exemplary countries with no lockdowns) not having any data on testing whatsoever.[4]

What Briggs fails to keep in mind - which I don't see as anything but willful ignorance being that he's a statistician, is that correlation is not causation. There's no logical reason lockdown would cost more lives than lax restrictions.

He should be ashamed of even thinking suck bollocks given his education but I think he lost his sense of shame long ago. I just hope nobody's foolish enough to believe a word he says.

[1] - https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/02/01/william-m-brig...

[2] - https://i2.wp.com/wmbriggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/lo...

[3] - https://i1.wp.com/wmbriggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/lo...

[4] - https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-country-by-country?co... (scroll to the middle of the page)

This question is radioactive right now, but it's starting to look possible that this is true (or at least that the effect is a lot smaller than supposed).

Worth noting that the relative alternative is "asking people to socially distance, wear masks in some contexts, perhaps contact tracing, etc". It's not "don't worry, be happy".

Also worth noting that lockdown is not "free", in terms of human death and misery. We know it will itself cause a lot of this.