Did lockdowns work? The verdict on Covid restrictions
iea.org.uk
iea.org.uk
It is extremely secretive about who it is funded by, to the point of deliberately losing court cases to avoid having to disclose anything.
Even it's address, 55 Tufton Street is notorious as the home of multiple organisations which promote the same viewpoints, but it is by far the best known.
A brief attempt by Prime Minister Liz Truss to embrace it's economic wisdom by implementing massive tax cuts primarily for the wealthy without any decrease in spending almost crashed the UK economy and ended her term in office after a few weeks.
This doesn't mean everything they write is nonsense, but they most definitely will have started with a predefined conclusion and worked backwards to find a way to justify it.
The American libertarianism brand is tainted by the Koch brothers and their CATO institute, a think-tank that put out false IPCC "addendums" in furtherance of denying climate change and promulgation of junk science to support industrial pollution and deregulation.
https://whistleblower.org/politicization-of-climate-science/...
Wow. I distinctly remember how toxic this place became when anyone even hinted at questioning the lockdowns. …or even just asking for more information.
I hope many are spending some time reflecting on their horrible behavior and rash to judgement but I doubt it.
Also note that you are quoting a relatively biased pro-business thinktank who is only looking at mortality and extrapolating success/failure. A complete perspective would need to look at reduction of local hospital system burden as well.
Quote from the book 1491:
“One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside.”
And here’s 3Blue1Brown running a simulation:
It mostly seems to be for the same reason that several other things didn't work: half the population doesn't do it and ruins it for everyone else.
But half of the US at least is actively hostile to doing anything to help anyone. Our society is broken and doomed.
If all the states with masks and social distancing mandates had, on average, 30% less cases per capita than states without, that would be a strong signal even if it's not conclusive given all the other variables involved. I doubt any other variable could be found that would show that much signal. But we haven't see anything like that.
And we fail to find signal, or can find whatever "signal" we want to find in all kinds of other noisy data. What says any kind of useful info is here to find?
That doesn't mean masks and distancing didn't work. It's quite possible that if they weren't being observed at all in public, the spread might have been a lot higher in this space.
Assuming the above is true, it's quite possible that public + private spread would have driven the pandemic to much higher numbers.
It's not that it doesn't help at all. It's that it doesn't help enough to be worth the cost. As an analogy, consider that a wholesale ban on trains would help prevent things like what happened in East Palestine, but nobody thinks doing that would be a good idea.
> Social distancing works.
The paper concedes this point, but wants to argue that government mandates are not worth it. The Introduction continues:
> If you keep distance from others, your risk of being infected with a communicable disease is reduced. However, the fact that social distancing works does not imply that compulsory non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), commonly known as ‘lockdowns’ – policies that restrict internal movement, close schools and businesses, ban international travel and/or other activities – work.
They actually find that many of these activities do work. They just argue that compulsory government intervention saved many fewer lives than the actions were anticipated to save at the time and had other negative effects.
The concept is no different putting in fire breaks to stop a forest fire - isolate the infected, infection burns itself out, end of pandemic without need for global vaccination campaign.
Lockdowns are a good idea at the beginning, bad idea in the middle, inconsequential idea at the end
The "cure" was worse than the disease.
We didn’t have one. We didn’t even seem to have an infeasible strategy for a long time! And as a consequence, lockdown became performative rather than strategic.
If we’d have locked down hard enough, and if infection had fully died away without meaningful transmission to animals, then we’d have been able to unlock.
But we didn’t lock down hard, and probably we realistically could not have done so.
https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Perspectives-_...
But it’s good to stiff the economy. That will make up for all the other policy failures. And more people will be on board with that next time so there won’t be any of that pesky criticism of the settled science that there was this time.
But good to stiff the economy. That’s what matters.
> The IEA is an educational charity and free market think tank.
> Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of the markets in solving economic and social problems. Given the current economic challenges facing Britain and the wider global environment, it is more vital than ever that we promote the intellectual case for a free economy, low taxes, freedom in education, health and welfare and lower levels of regulation.
Which explains why they appear to be using weasel words and strained comparisons to downplay the benefits of regulation.
> Mask mandates, which most countries avoided in Spring 2020, reduced mortality by 18.7 per cent, particularly mandates in workplaces; and
20% less deaths in exchange for mandating wearing a paper mask seems like a good deal? Esepecially as they're not comparing to not wearing masks, but just not requiring masks to be worn.
> 20% less deaths in exchange for mandating wearing a paper mask seems like a good deal? Esepecially as they're not comparing to not wearing masks, but just not requiring masks to be worn
That would be great if paper masks did anything to "control" an aerosolized virus. The RCT studies showing the worthlessness of masks in doing so are legion, and even the CDC and WHO wrote as much as far back as 2016.