Many people still struggle to accept the idea that lockdowns don’t have any appreciable impact on Covid cases and deaths. After all, it’s obvious, isn’t it, that keeping people apart will stop the virus spreading?
Tom Harwood, formerly of Guido Fawkes now of GB News, tweeted a typically incredulous response to the idea: “Cannot understand how some can claim ‘lockdowns don’t work’ with a straight face. As if stopping people from mixing wouldn’t hit transmission? Sure argue the cost is too high, imposition on liberty too extreme, just don’t invent a fairytale denying the basics of germ theory.”
Even some die-hard lockdown sceptics will say that lockdowns work, in the sense of suppressing transmission for a time, but they just delay the inevitable so are pointlessly costly.
The models churned out by university academics and relied on by the Government to set policy all assume lockdown restrictions work, and even claim to quantify how much impact each intervention makes.
But what does the data say? What do the studies show that actually look at the evidence rather than just making a priori assumptions about how things “must surely” be?
There have been at least seven peer-reviewed studies which look at the question of lockdowns from a data point of view, and all of them come to the same basic conclusion: lockdowns do not have a statistically significant relationship with Covid cases or deaths. Here is a list of them with a key quote for ease of reference.
- “Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.” “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. CESifo Economic Studies March 29th, 2021.
- “Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.” “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, November 19th, 2020.
- “Lockdowns do not reduce COVID-19 deaths.” “Government mandated lockdowns do not reduce Covid-19 deaths: implications for evaluating the stringent New Zealand response” by John Gibson. New Zealand Economic Papers, August 25th, 2020.
- “While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs.” “Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19” by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, John P.A. Ioannidis. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, January 5th, 2021.
- “Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behaviour, and small but adverse effects on the economy.” “Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Christopher R. Berry, Anthony Fowler, Tamara Glazer, Samantha Handel-Meyer, and Alec MacMillen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA, April 13th, 2021.
- “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.” “Stay-at-home policy is a case of exception fallacy: an internet-based ecological study,” by R. F. Savaris, G. Pumi, J. Dalzochio & R. Kunst. Scientific Reports (Nature), March 5th, 2021.
- “Full lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.” “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine (The Lancet) 25 (2020) 100464, July 21st, 2020.
Many of these studies attribute a large part of the drop in infections and deaths to the voluntary measures introduced prior to the legally-enforced restrictions. However, this is typically introduced as an assumption with no robust evidence provided in support of it, and with no consideration of the other possible reasons that infections might have fallen, such as seasonality or growing population immunity. On the rare occasion that rigorous analysis is applied to this question as well, as with Savaris et al in their article in Nature looking at whether people staying at home (measured using mobility data) is associated with Covid deaths, the finding is similarly negative. Voluntary measures make little difference either.
This may seem to defy “the basics of germ theory”, as Mr Harwood put it. But it doesn’t, it just means we need to understand better how the virus is getting round.
First of all, much of the spread, particularly that which leads to serious disease and death, occurs in hospitals and care homes. Forty per cent of Covid deaths in England and Wales in the spring were care home residents, while Public Health Scotland found that between half and two thirds of serious infections were picked up in hospital. Between these and transmission in private homes, this accounts for much of it.
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. We also know from a major UK survey that less than half of people with Covid symptoms fully self-isolate, giving reasons such as going to work, going to the shops or regarding the symptoms as mild. This means we don’t need to resort to unsubstantiated ideas of asymptomatic infection being a major driver of transmission (which is unsupported by evidence, since, as with other similar viruses, asymptomatic infection is barely infectious and contributes very little to spread) to explain ongoing community transmission.
The idea that locking down and keeping people apart will stop a virus spreading may be seductively intuitive. But intuitive ideas can be wrong. The job of science is to examine ideas and test them with evidence to see if they are more than just speculation. And the science here is clear. Lockdowns do not control the coronavirus.
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I don’t know how Chris keeps going in the face of the msm lie machine and the dishonest scientists on the other side. Well done though I do notice climate scepticism becoming more mainstream especially on the right.
Scepticism in science is essential. Otherwise it isn’t science, it is activism.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard P. Feynman
“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
Richard P. Feynman
An incredibly smart man, he knew that he didn’t know. This is how scientists should think.
$cientists on the other hand…
nod———-Or “Ah yes, science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain.
Scepticism = science; consensus = religion.
One of the main controllers of climate is El Nino and El Nina events. But data regarding these huge weather changing oscillations only goes back to 1989. ——It is worth pointing out to people who have already decided what is true about climate that there is actually nothing unusual about current temperatures or climate. To those people who are always saying things like “Climate Change is real and is happening now” what are you talking about? These kind of statements are about as scientific as a monkey with a test tube.
I’d say that climate change is normal; the climate is not normally stable at all. The real scam is manipulating the language, and perhaps the lack of understanding, so as to promote a campaign.
Remember when you say that “climate change is normal”, that the term “climate change” has come to mean changes allegedly caused by humans. It does not mean changes that occur naturally.
And Malenkevich cycles. The wobbles and orbits of the earth are not stable and affect hownclose we are to the sun.
And sunspot activity. Climate change and global warming are lies by green communists
I still worry about the polar bears.
“When Al Gore was born there were about 5,000 polar bears, today only 25,000 remain.”
Someone forgot to tell them bears they are supposed to be in deep sh.t
“The arctic will be ice free by 2015”
– John Kerry 2009
A true visionary.
It must be catastrophic. There are no penguins left in the Arctic and the polar bears obviously can’t cope with the lack of ice in Antarctica.
I was about to politely correct you and then saw what you did there, faffor
…and the fish population of Mt Everest has been utterly devastated.
I don’t see anything soaring. What I see is an incredibly stable pattern which confirms to me the absolutely staggering and amazing predictability of our weather.
The seasons come and go almost like clockwork. Temperatures move within the narrowest of bands.
How something so vast and complex works so elegantly is really a thing of beauty. Much like the human body or any living organism.
Which is what makes the idea that you can just control the weather by fiddling with CO2 so comical and preposterous.
Thanks beautifully expressed post.
Played for Fools
Great article, as ever. It seems to me that the western world are being played for a bunch of fools on climate change;
China has announced its new climate envoy;
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202401/1305432.shtml
Whilst at the same time China continues to burn coal as if butter would not melt in their mouths!
”There are a total of 3,092 operating coal-fired power plant units in China. As of January 2023, the province of Shandong, which lies to the south of Beijing, houses the greatest number of coal power plants, at over 400 units.3 Jan 2024”
As I say, it seems to me that we are being played for a bunch of fools, while China, Russia etc. plan the demise of the western world.
We are being played for fools? ——-But the western world is complaint with this. To understand why, you need to realise what the politics are all about. Then to realise that the Sustainable Development Politics isn’t really about the climate. The climate is simply the excuse given to the public for the politics.
Western world is compliant. Exactly. Fat, lazy and stupid we have become.
Lucky you realised I meant compliant rather than complaint.
Club of Rome 1972.
China and Russia don’t have to play us for fools we are doing OK just destroying ourselves.
nod——–Then you have to figure out why. Once you do, it will explain why there really isn’t a climate crisis and why a crisis is essential for putting political agenda’s in place and government never want to let a good crisis go to waste.
Excellent article as always, Chris. I wish there was some mechanism within the DS software to give articles ‘likes’ (as on FB) or…stars? (As on Off Guardian.)
There used to be, but what works better for ranking is activity, i.e. comments BTL.
Seconded
There was a large increase but November was rather low so it doesn’t take the level to anything extraordinary. As you can see from this chart, if you look at the whole of 2023 ice extents followed the the 2010-20 average pretty closely.
Tony Heller you are emphatically not; is there no end to the Diversity of your Expertise?
Yeah I saw this story on the BBC