Studies which show social restrictions do not lead to lower Covid mortality and infection rates are numerous (see this collection of 31 from AIER, which is kept up to date).
We now have another paper to add to the collection. Published last week in Scientific Reports in Nature, it looks at whether the extent to which people stayed at home (measured using Google mobility data) is associated with Covid mortality in different countries. Doesn’t look like it, the researchers conclude. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
Countries with over 100 deaths and with a Healthcare Access and Quality Index of at least 67 were included. Data were pre-processed and analysed using the difference between number of deaths per million between two regions and the difference between the percentage of staying at home. … After pre-processing the data, 87 regions around the world were included, yielding 3,741 pairwise comparisons for linear regression analysis. Only 63 (1.6%) comparisons were significant. With our results, we were not able to explain if COVID-19 mortality is reduced by staying at home in around 98% of the comparisons after epidemiological weeks 9 to 34.
The authors add:
We were not able to explain the variation of deaths per million in different regions in the world by social isolation, herein analysed as differences in staying at home, compared to baseline. In the restrictive and global comparisons, only 3% and 1.6% of the comparisons were significantly different, respectively.
They explain that this is in line with the findings of others, and criticise the model-based studies which come to different conclusions.
Our results are different from those published by Flaxman et al. The authors applied a very complex calculation that NPIs would prevent 3.1 million deaths across 11 European countries. The discrepant results can be explained by different approaches to the data. While Flaxman et al. assumed a constant reproduction number (Rt) to calculate the total number of deaths, which eventually did not occur, we calculated the difference between the actual number of deaths between two countries/regions. The projections published by Flaxman et al. have been disputed by other authors. Kuhbandner and Homburg described the circular logic that this study involved. Flaxman et al. estimated the Rt from daily deaths associated with SARS-CoV-2 using an a priori restriction that Rt may only change on those dates when interventions become effective. However, in the case of a finite population, the effective reproduction number falls automatically and necessarily over time since the number of infections would otherwise diverge. A recent preprint report from Chin et al. explored the two models proposed by Imperial College by expanding the scope to 14 European countries from the 11 countries studied in the original paper. They added a third model that considered banning public events as the only covariate. The authors concluded that the claimed benefits of lockdown appear grossly exaggerated since inferences drawn from effects of NPIs are non-robust and highly sensitive to model specification.
The same explanation for the discrepancy can be applied to other publications where mathematical models were created to predict outcomes. Most of these studies dealt with COVID-19 cases and not observed deaths. Despite its limitations, reported deaths are likely to be more reliable than new case data. Further explanations for different results in the literature, besides methodological aspects, could be justified by the complexity of the virus dynamic, by its interaction with the environment, or they may be related to a seasonal pattern that was, by coincidence, established at the same time when infection rates started to decrease due to seasonal dynamics. It is unwise to try to explain a complex and multifactorial condition, with the inherent constant changes, using a single variable. An initial approach would employ a linear regression to verify the influence of one factor over an outcome. Herein we were not able to identify this association. Our study was not designed to explain why the stay-at-home measures do not contain the spread of the virus SARS-CoV-2. However, possible explanations that need further analysis may involve genetic factors, the increment of viral load, and transmission in households and in close quarters where ventilation is reduced.
No doubt it is counterintuitive that people staying at home more does not significantly reduce transmission of an infectious disease. This is one reason the sceptical case can be hard to make and sound to lockdowners like sophistry. They may assume there must be some hidden variable we haven’t accounted for, or that we are just exploiting the notoriously slippery nature of statistics. Indeed, for many sceptics (myself included) we originally expected that lockdowns would “work” in terms of suppressing the spread, but just thought they were pointless in that they delayed the inevitable and thus were harmful and unethical. The idea that lockdowns didn’t even manage to achieve the one thing they were supposed to came as a surprise to many of us, and the data had to convince us of something that at first seemed unlikely.
Why does lockdown not significantly suppress the virus? One suggestion is that people are already voluntarily social distancing sufficiently, so Government diktats don’t add anything. But the present study looks at whether people are actually moving around less, not just whether Government tells them to, and finds no relationship with Covid deaths. So that seems to rule that one out.
One reason will be that much of the spread, particularly which leads to serious disease and death, occurs in hospitals and care homes. Forty per cent of Covid deaths in England and Wales in spring were care home residents, while Public Health Scotland found that between half and two thirds of serious infections were picked up in hospital. PHS also found that shielding – essentially an extreme version of lockdown – was ineffective, largely because of household transmission. But that prompts the question of where, under lockdown and social distancing, other household members are picking it up from?
In terms of community transmission, even during a stringent lockdown such as in the UK this winter, around half the workforce are travelling to work, while only around a third work exclusively from home. Add to that that many people still use supermarkets and other shops, and many children still attend school (even where the schools are only open for key workers’ children), and that’s a lot of social interaction. It appears that this level of interaction is enough to allow the virus to reach about the same number of people, particularly among those who are susceptible to serious illness, regardless of what other interaction is avoided.
Masks, of course, have little or no effect on transmission, mainly because they do not (and cannot, since people must breathe) prevent virus-carrying-aerosols from filling the air in a poorly ventilated space such as most rooms we spend any amount of time in (we are after all trying to keep them warm). Breathing such air is the main mode of transmission.
It might be thought that it is asymptomatic carriers who are spreading it unawares, since that is the message the Government has been pumping out. However, contrary to early reports from China, recent studies suggest that, as with other viruses, asymptomatic carriers are barely infectious and account for just 0.7% of transmission. This means community transmission must be being driven by symptomatic people who are not currently self-isolating – perhaps because they cannot, or cannot afford to, or because they think it is just a mild cold.
Whatever the reason, the data is consistent and clear. Lockdowns (including voluntarily staying at home) are not associated with reducing Covid mortality or infection rates. This new study is just one more piece of research evidence testifying to that fact.
Stop Press: Yesterday an “Editor’s Note” appeared on the paper, suggesting some people are not happy with it.
Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow once all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full.
That’ll be an interesting one to watch out for.
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But, as we know, pro-lockdown “science” is science and anti-lockdown science is conspiracy theories. At east that’s what the Guardian told me.
“Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors.”
All scientific papers are subject to criticisms. That’s sort of the point of science.
If you don’t agree with it, write a response paper.
yes, its a funny remark
‘the paper is going through a normal review process’
Boris Johnson and the British Government’s respond to covid-19 can be compared to imbeciles trying to micromanage a skip fire.
It’s one of those classic British disasters. The Somme. The Scott South Polar mission. The Comet. Thalidomide. Grenfell Tower.
Arrogance. Ignorance. The class system. And a wildly misplaced sense of intellectual superiority. All conspiring to inflict the maximum amount of misery and suffering on people too gullible and otherwise invested in British cultural bullshit to know when they are about to be murdered.
“Boris Johnson and the British Government’s respond to covid-19 can be compared to imbeciles trying to micromanage a skip fire.”
I like this!
but its hardly a British phenomenon in this case
Leave out the Comet – that was a case of the genuine unknown, not willful malpractice. And the Scott expedition was the risk balance going tits up, rather than the reverse.
I agree with much of what you say, but think that the term ‘class system’ needs to be re-defined.
For many, the class system appears to be some sort of pyramid with aristos etc. at the top and people such as me & the family I was born into at the bottom. That’s the way I saw it as a youth.
Thanks to the good fortune of going to a grammar school, various scholarships, perhaps decisions along the way but probably – mostly – luck, I have had a life that brought me into contact with much of that hierarchy both in this country & abroad. 50+ years after leaving school I still see a class system, but it has little to do with the one I thought I saw as a schoolboy.
The modern ‘upper class’ toffs are the self-serving political establishment. In my experience, psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists and the like are over represented there. They exist in governments and acadaemia at all levels – look at local council behaviour over the past year. Very few of them seem to come from the traditional idea of upper class (i.e. aristos, public schools etc.), but if you look at their behaviour you see the same psychological traits. Mostly, they seem to be concerned with protecting and extending their own privileged existence. Other countries don’t have the same historical connotations of ‘class’, but they are suffering from the same mis-governance as the UK. They do, however, have the same class system and are burdened with the same consequences.
In a nutshell, Herr Dr Gauss’ distribution describes it. There are a few saints at one end, a few sinners at the other & most of us are somewhere in between. At present, however, governments around the world (not just the Westminster Windbags, but the Whitehall Wormtongues – at all levels) are skewed strongly towards the sinner tail. How to fix that? History doesn’t help, but maybe Mao Tse Tung’s ‘cultural revolution’ had some merit.
Even if lockdowns reduced covid deaths they still wouldn’t be justified
But Imperial’s model shows lockdowns increase covid deaths
Plus lockdown deaths
Should have stuck to the normal pandemic response plan – after all it was designed for something like this
Good article by Will Jones, ‘new study confirms lockdowns don’t reduce covid deaths’
The studies continue to show lockdowns don’t work from a data analysis perspective.
And as Will explains there are many solid scientific reasons to explain why they don’t work and even could make things worse, although it’s clearly multi-factorial and hard to pin down the inter-related contributions of each factor.
And that’s before you consider all the indirect deaths caused by enforced lockdowns, and the damage caused by destroying freedoms and societies.
The sad thing is that if the government and the concensus opinion of the science industry (which I take to mean conflicted ‘scientists’ failing to apply the scientific method of testing hypotheses) tell us lockdowns do work, it seems that most people will just believe the government and science industry. And the mainstream media are set up to communicate this one sided narrative only. How much evidence there is is irrelevant, if it is simply ignored.
All we can do is to try and communicate the reality through whatever means we can find. But at the moment it’s simply not enough.
I would like to think most people don’t want to live this way and that’s the only real force that will get us out of this mess.
You’ve touched on what is the key central point : Lock-ups can only be justified if there is clear, indisputable evidence of a beneficial effect that outweighs the massive costs. We’re not talking about marginal effects that are hard to discern.
In fact, there is increasing evidence that the effects of lock-up are entirely on the debit side – and that obviously increases as time goes on.
So – the case against lock-ups is clear : they have no benefit whatsoever.
Looking at the study in Nature, it seems the age of the population is not taken into account. I doubt how you can make relevant comparisons then.