53192
  • Log in
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Forum
  • Donate
  • Newsletter
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

Seven Peer-Reviewed Studies That Agree: Lockdowns Do Not Suppress the Coronavirus

by Will Jones
15 April 2021 1:18 AM

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.”

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.

— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) April 14, 2021

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.

Tags: Asymptomatic SpreadLockdownsThe ScienceTransmission

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

Physical Inactivity Doubles Risk of Covid Death, Study Suggests

Next Post

News Round Up

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

51 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

 

DONATE

PODCAST

Nick Dixon and Toby Young Talk About Caroline Dinenage’s Power Grab, Rishi Becoming a Proper Conservative and Justin Trudeau’s Confusion About Nazis

by Will Jones
26 September 2023
9

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Most Read
  • Most Commented
  • Editors Picks

Horrendous Number of Eagle Deaths From Wind Farms

1 October 2023
by Chris Morrison

News Round-Up

1 October 2023
by Will Jones

mRNA Vaccines Must Be Banned Once and For All

1 October 2023
by Dr Angus Dalgleish

Drivers Shocked as Insurers Quote Over £5,000 for Electric Vehicles – if They Insure Them at All

30 September 2023
by Will Jones

Reverend Calvin Robinson Wins Settlement Over Royal Academy of Dance Dismissal Due to Opposition to Drag Queen Storytelling

1 October 2023
by Richard Eldred

News Round-Up

59

Kemi Badenoch: We Can’t Bankrupt Ourselves Getting to Net Zero

35

Horrendous Number of Eagle Deaths From Wind Farms

26

mRNA Vaccines Must Be Banned Once and For All

34

Drivers Shocked as Insurers Quote Over £5,000 for Electric Vehicles – if They Insure Them at All

42

mRNA Vaccines Must Be Banned Once and For All

1 October 2023
by Dr Angus Dalgleish

Horrendous Number of Eagle Deaths From Wind Farms

1 October 2023
by Chris Morrison

Covid Care Home “Carnage” Exposed in New Study

30 September 2023
by Dr Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson

Scott Gottlieb and the CIA’s Takeover of America’s Pandemic Response

30 September 2023
by Dr Robert Malone
harries.jpg

The Covid Backpedalling Race Hots Up

29 September 2023
by Dr Tom Jefferson

POSTS BY DATE

April 2021
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
« Mar   May »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Forum
  • Donate
  • Newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Create New Account!

Please note: To be able to comment on our articles you'll need to be a registered donor

Already have an account?
Please click here to login Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to

Move Comment