Johns Hopkins study says ill-founded lockdowns did little to limit Covid deaths | Hacker News Reader

Johns Hopkins study says ill-founded lockdowns did little to limit Covid deaths

health.wusf.usf.edu

30 pointskerneloftruth30 comments

This is very frustrating. We know that it was not meant to reduce deaths.

The lockdowns were, and are, meant to spread out the deaths that we knew were going to happen. The goal was, and is, to avoid acutely overwhelming our hospital systems so people with emergency ailments like a heart attack could still get immediate care.

That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely. There were lots of estimates all over the place that said X amount of deaths in 6 months with lockdowns, and X amount with out, and things like staying home 2 weeks vs 3 weeks will save X many lives.

It's my understanding that there are STILL places with some sort of lockdown going on.

The effect of lockdowns is particularly difficult to quantify though because the results seem to have been mostly the same in my area which had no lockdowns / restrictions / masking after May 1 2020 and some other places which have had all manner of restrictions and some people are even still wearing masks nearly two years later.

There are really so many variables and variable outcomes. It's really kind of a dream scenario for a data scientist because I don't know that there has ever been such a large push to make statistical information available. Their needs to be some sort of gauge / metric to quantify the level of restrictions and also look at the externalities of those.

> That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely

What did you think "bend the curve" meant, exactly? But that was the mantra when these measures were instituted.

That wasn’t the only justification!

The hope was also that by preventing such ‘overwhelming’, net lives would be saved – whether just by keeping those other non-COVID medical services available, or also by delaying COVID cases to later when knowledge or capacity would allow better treatment.

If you believe this meta-analysis, even that capacity-sparing aspect showed very little effect on total deaths.

No we didn't know buddy.

"Fauci defends coronavirus lockdowns as saving 'millions of lives'"

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/503468-fauci-defends-c...

Did people in countries that did not do a lockdown fail to get immediate care for their heart attacks because the hospitals were overwhelmed?

Thankfully we have control groups in Sweden and Florida, so you can prove your point in a very simple way by showing me the increased heart attack deaths in both those places.

and also buy time until we had better treatments and prevention.

Sounds like one hell of a clickbait title of scientific lit to me: "A LITERATURE REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWNS ON COVID-19 MORTALITY"

FYI written by a bunch of economists.

Economists study the impacts of policy decisions.

I have no qualm with that - though they don't necessary think of all the issues and are measuring only one outcome. Economists sometimes focus on the box they can contain and aren't actually measuring all the externalities due to the challenge of it.

1. If we didn't lockdown - hospital system would have likely collapsed - more deaths illness in the system and secondary effects.

2. The rate of spread would have been faster and probably we would have seen variants get more traction.

3. Lockdowns bought us time to get vaccinations developed, manufactured and distributed and taking off some of the burden on our health care system for which we are only still paying the costs of (burn out for employees, delayed procedures etc).

These guys clearly have an agenda .. one of them works at the Cato Institute. The also released this under the brand of John Hopkins knowing full well it would get attention for its Health reputation but its John Hopkins economics. Slimy.

1. Should we measure the impact of lockdowns on other types of deaths or adverse effects? Suicide, drug overdose, alcohol, the effects on children social learning? There will be adverse tertiary effects of lockdowns that we won't be able to measure for a few years.

2. The rate spread could have been much faster, leading us to Omicron, a mild variant with little impact.

3. Lockdowns brought economic/financial hardship on many people. Stimulus efforts provided little for those whose livelihood was impacted by government decisions.

Your focus is on the healthcare system, but the economy is an extensively complex system that has been significantly impacted. Sure the report was released out of John Hopkins, but the authors knew it would reach a larger audience than released under the Cato Institute. These studies and findings are to enable discussion about future policy decisions.

Listen - we could go toe to toe all day and we wouldn't change each other opinions. It's a very complicated issue both health care system and economic system are incredibly complicated and not possible to define to one metric - which is the point I am trying to make through giving some examples.

These guys knew what they were doing and they knew it was a topic that is very inflammatory, they are releasing it DURING the pandemic. Their backgrounds reduces most value that they bring to the table. There is an ideological cloud over their findings. They are doing this for publicity - maybe a Joe Rogan interview in the near future to discuss.

I am not about to investigate all the sources to uncover the likely cherry picked findings or unrealistic comparisons

Please re-evaluate your statement that Omicron is a mild variant with little impact. Daily deaths in the U.S. caused by Covid are now higher than it has ever been at any time during the pandemic. For example, just yesterday there were 3,622 deaths in the U.S. due to Covid. Omicron is "mild" if you're fully vaccinated, which sadly only applies to 65% of the U.S. population.

Wasn’t the point of lockdowns to not cause a rush to the hospital all at once?

Did that happen in all countries that didn't do a lockdown?

That was pretty much the case! Also except for some time in 2020, there was no lockdown in US. The only thing that varied depending on the community transmission were the indoor mask mandates (and nothing of that sort in red states). Seems like a strawman.

Lockdowns in Europe however were pretty brutal, lasting for months at times. I regularly had to wait up to half an hour in line for groceries here in UK, because home deliveries were obliterated by demand.

If you have kids you've probably experienced some sort of forced quarantine based on incidental exposure. I would call that a targeted lockdown of sorts. It's interesting that it completely screws over the generations ostensibly most responsible for the future of the country. But we are all replaceable I suppose.

More ill-FOLLOWED, than ill-founded.

A political scientist and two economists walk into a room and setup that headline. Sounds like this one needs some critical examination from expert sources before it's taken for anything.

At least these guys are consistent. Herby in 2020: [0]

My results show that a large share of the excess mortality in Sweden in April 2020 may be partially explained by a vulnerable, elderly population due to very mild flu seasons in 18/19 and 19/20 as well as very few deaths during the 2019 summer compared to earlier years and compared to other Nordic countries.

My results illustrate – and I cannot stress this enough – that plain coincidences may be important when understanding the COVID-19-death toll in a country compared to national lockdown policies.

Note: Funding: I work for a libertarian think tank in Denmark. The funding is mostly undisclosed - even for employees - except for a few charitable foundations.

Conflict of Interest: None.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3702595

As far as I remember, the majority of lock-downs were imposed only _after_ the local medical system was becoming overwhelmed, and in a direct response to that happening.

The current spike in cases could be seen as a control scenario for what would have happened without lockdowns (remember "flatten the curve"?). For the Alpha variant, the case-fatality rate for the original variant was about 1%. In the US, the latest numbers are 424k/day. So we can suppose that if numbers were as high then, we'd have seen about 4.2k deaths/day, compared to the actual spring 2020 peak of ~2500. And that doesn't consider the probable knock-on effects on our medical system, since the hospitalization rate would have likely been much higher.

That case fatality rate was initially so high because there was no testing available and testing was saved for the most severe cases. If you tried to get a test you couldn’t, they wouldn’t give you a test at all unless you had confirmed contact with another person with a positive case, who also couldn’t get testing.

Very true, though people were also unvaccinated so it's difficult to disentangle. Do you know what the case fatality rate is for unvaccinated folks with delta & omicron? I looked but was unable to find a good source.

Let me know when someone has a rebuttal

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34813628/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34161818/

Also the meta-study submitted is certainly creative in their understanding of the studies. For exmaple:

> Using the OxCGRT and the World Bank datasets, our regression analysis reveals that containment policies have a significant direct effect in reducing the fatality rate of COVID-19 pandemic.

Becomes:

>A stricter lockdown (1 stringency point) reduces deaths by 0,1% after 4 weeks. After 8 weeks the effect is insignificant.

(the 0,1% comes from nowhere on the paper)

sigh... Thank you for this.

I'm pulling my music from Spotify. Good enough?

Ha! Actual intelligent discourse takes too much time, let me just take a virtue-signalling action and call it a day

Reply on news.ycombinator.com