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Comment by gilbetron | Hacker News Reader

From the study:

"Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm that lockdowns have had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% compared to a COVID-19 policy based solely on recommendations. Shelter-in-place orders (SIPOs) were also ineffective. They only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%."

But there is some nuance in there, worth reading.

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At least based on my experience in the US the "lockdown" orders in practice were not significantly more strict than the government issuing very strong recommendations.

I agree on a social behavior point of view. However, there is nuance. Very strong recommendations don't close public and private schools, day care, public parks and beaches, nor significantly curtail economic activity in restaurants and other non-essential businesses.

Schools here had already been closed for two weeks before a stay-at-home order was issued, but I get your point.

That said, in April 2020 I assure you that economic activity in restaurants and non-essential businesses would have been severely disrupted regardless of government action. Most were already closed or take-out only.

The first few months where everything was closed, including parks and beaches?

I don't recall any point, at least in my region: Bay Area, CA, when people universally complied with these closures. I think OP's point is: regardless of whether things were ordered closed, enough people were out and about horsing around, ignoring the closures, that nothing was effectively closed.

There was no real lockdown in the USA, if you go beyond just looking at the mandates and take into account people's actual behavior. So I'm not sure how they review effects of a lockdown that never happened.

Unless you plan on deploying the U.S. military on every street and beach during the next lockdown, what we saw was what happens when a lockdown is declared. They're measuring the efficacy of an intervention: lockdowns being declared; high/low compliance is irrelevant to the intervention's effectiveness, since compliance isn't within the government's control.

'There was no real lockdown in the USA '

Not really true.

Hawaii closed parks, trails, and beaches. https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/hawaii-coronavi... ' Honolulu, city parks were closed on Aug. 8 along with beaches and state parks and indoor attractions like bowling alleys and arcades. '

Colorado closed all ski areas. https://coloradosun.com/2020/03/14/jared-polis-executive-ord...

The problem is that the effectiveness of lockdowns depends on the degree to which you are able to compartmentalize. If some regions have a lockdown and not others, but people are able to freely move from one region to another, then the least strict policy will be the one (roughly speaking) limiting disease transmission.

The stringency index should be aggregated as the minimum of all areas that allow for freedom of movement.

Is it possible to stop movement of wild animals which are infected and transmit it back to humans? Impossible goal posts to pursue.

No, and it's not even possible to completely stop human movement. At the end of the day you need trucks to get across, etc. But getting close to perfect isolation is feasible: this is where monitoring and testing becomes most important, as you have to react quickly to contain any outbreak leakage.

Importantly, the key benefit of this approach is that it allows you to open up in a controlled fashion areas that are clear of any outbreaks. So while the measures are most extreme and most costly up front, they ultimately are economically advantageous because they are of shorter duration.

Closing parks and beaches is definitely something but is it fair to call that a "real lockdown"? Compared to places with curfews and travel restrictions?

It's definitely something, I would call it a crappy ineffective and poorly advised lockdown

I have no idea about your area.

Here in Lincoln, NE, everything was locked down to the point where open air parks had bright orange fencing around the playground equipment.

Grocery stores, Home Depot and Walmart were all that were open.

Walmart had a block long line, socially distanced of people waiting to get in. A Walmart employee was controlling the flow and ensuring masks.

The streets were empty. You couldn't go anywhere even if you wanted to.

So where authoritarianism doesn't exist they're pointless because they're ineffectual symbolism? In any case it appears they should be eschewed. If something severe enough comes along people will do what needs done, I reckon.

And I dunno, Louis Rossman has a lot of videos up, NYC was definitely impacted.

Other then the businesses actually being closed? Streets were empty in San Francisco at least. People were allowed to exercise outside but that was about it. Saying that was effectively not a shutdown is a bit disengenious.

Lockdown orders across a lot of the US required non essential businesses to close. It wasn't a "recommendation" as people were thrown in jail for having businesses open

Well, here a recommendation have been the same as "You must do this".

Only the legislation does not support using that wording, so recommendation was chosen.

I would be curious to know if they were sufficiently able to remove confounding variables to make this claim. For comparison to another statistical quirk: someone I know made this chart which fails to show any correlation between vaccination rates and death rates in the last 14 days on a state-by-state basis in the US: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x9sKFsr-3VpdjvjZqHql...

Now, we have evidence from other sources that the vaccine is definitely highly effective in every particular state (this should not require a citation, but here you go anyways: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...). But it seems there are too many confounding variables here (age, population density, etc.) such that attempting a simple region-by-region comparison over any particular time period might incorrectly conclude that the vaccine does not work.

Was JHU able to address that data collection and comparison problem here?

If the majority of people receiving the vaccine are new to the vaccine and from 5-25 years, then you won't see any correlation between vaccination rates and death rates.

It's also interesting that lockdowns seem to be a wasted effort. Much suck for Ireland that imposed some of the worst lockdowns.

https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus/nis...

Thankfully all restrictions have just been lifted here in Denmark.

"... you won't see any correlation between vaccination rates and death rates."

That sums it up nicely.

Good that some of Europe is opening.

It’s hard to consider .2% reduction in mortality non-significant. Nearly 6 million people have died from COVID as of now. 0.2% of that is nearly 12,000 lives. Calling SIPOs ineffective as well because they only reduced mortality by 2.9% is a bit deceptive since that is nearly 174,000 lives.

Those percentages only apply during active lockdowns; your premise is that there's been a continuous, worldwide lockdown for the past 2 years. The actual numbers will be far less.

Also, this study only measures impacts of lockdowns on Covid mortality, and doesn't include the human and financial costs of lockdowns.

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