At this stage of the pandemic, you really can’t get away with sweeping, unqualified claims about the virtues of lockdown – there’s just too much evidence in the other direction. So the LA Times discovered last week.
On May 19th, the paper published a column entitled: “The evidence is clear – COVID lockdowns saved lives without harming economies.” However, when it shared the article on Twitter, it ended up getting severely ratioed. As of this writing, the relevant tweet has 384 likes and 3.8 thousand comments – the vast majority of them critical.
One of the most popular replies says, “Tell that to the 100,000 people that lost their businesses, livelihood, and life’s work.” The user followed this up with, “My bad. I mean 200,000”, linking to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
So what arguments did the LA Times columnist put forward?
He begins by claiming that “lockdowns played a significant role in reducing infection rates” and that “they had a very modest role in producing economic damage”. He then argues that “evidence for both propositions has been expertly compiled by Noah Smith”, linking to a recent article by Smith.
However, as I noted in a previous post, Smith doesn’t discuss any of the evidence contradicting his thesis, of which there is plenty. See here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
The author moves on to the comparison between California and Florida, noting that “California now boasts among the lowest case, hospitalisation and death rates in the nation, as well as a recovering economy”. However, the fact that its case and death numbers are currently “among the lowest” is more-or-less irrelevant, given that the virus is in retreat across the entire country.
And although the state’s GDP declined by only 2.8% last year – compared to Florida’s 2.9% – its unemployment rate is the second worst of all 50 states. 8.3% of Californians are currently out of work, versus only 4.8% of Floridians.
The author then claims, “Numerous studies from across the world have found that lockdowns succeeded in suppressing transmission rates.” He refers to three papers. The first analysed data from across countries and over time to see whether lockdowns were associated with lower case numbers.
While the authors did find a negative effect of lockdowns on case numbers in the worldwide sample, they actually found a positive effect in the European subsample. In other words, lockdowns were associated with higher case numbers in Europe, at least initially. It’s therefore difficult to see how this paper constitutes evidence in support of lockdowns in Western countries.
The second and third papers are based on fitting epidemiological models to the data, and there is good reason to be sceptical of such model-fitting exercises. Moreover, the main finding of the third paper – that stay-at-home orders reduced case numbers in the United States – is contradicted by a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Overall, these three papers do not provide strong evidence in favour of lockdowns, especially when weighed against all the papers finding that lockdown measures had little or no impact on COVID outcomes.
The author of the LA Times article proceeds to discuss the economic impact of lockdowns, noting, “there’s very little evidence that lockdowns themselves damaged local economies more than individual behavior that would have happened anyway”.
Now, it’s true that not all the drop in economic output can be blamed on lockdowns; some certainly would have happened anyway. But the claim that lockdowns had no impact on the economy is a non-starter.
The author relies on a paper by two Chicago economists, which compared consumer activity on either side of the Illinois/Iowa border during the spring of 2020. Shelter-in-place orders were issued on the Illinois side, but not on the Iowa side. However, the drop in consumer activity was only slightly greater on the Illinois side, suggesting that shelter-in-place orders didn’t have a big impact on the economy.
While the analysis in this paper is well done, the authors only examined data up to May 16th last year. And as Phil Magness points out, once you include a longer time period, a large gap in mobility opens up between the two sides of the border. The reason this gap did not appear initially is that, in the early weeks of the pandemic (when the characteristics of the virus were not-yet well understood), practically everyone stayed at home out of fear.
Finally, the author comments on Sweden. He claims that the country “suffered a devastating human toll, compared to its Nordic neighbors”. As I’ve noted in several previous posts, the argument that “we have to compare Sweden to its neighbours” isn’t very convincing. And in any case, if you take the average of 2019 and 2020, Sweden had lower mortality than both Denmark and Finland.
The author goes on to say, “Sweden got no economic reward for sacrificing so many residents. Its economy shrank by 2.8% in 2020, about the same as Finland but worse than Norway (down 2.7%) and much worse than Denmark (down 0.8%), according to Eurostat.”
To begin with, the figure he gives for Denmark is simply incorrect. If you follow the link to the Eurostat database, you find that Denmark’s economy shrank by 2.7% last year – about the same as Sweden’s. And if you use the IMF database, Denmark’s economy contracted by more than Sweden’s.
What’s more, Sweden had higher GDP growth last year than the vast majority of European countries – even if it didn’t beat the other Nordics. The Netherlands’ economy shrank by 3.8%, Germany’s by 4.9%, France’s by 8.2%, the UK’s by 9.9% and Spain’s by 11%.
In summary, last week’s LA Times article does not put forward a compelling case for lockdowns, and given the bold headline, I’m not surprised it got ratioed.
Stop Press: Ethan Yang has also written a critique of the LA Times column for AIER. You can read his article here.
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Some questions I would like to be asked of Cummings today
1 Was the dictatorship aware of the dubious circumstances under which Drosten’s PCR paper was reviewed and published?
2 What is the false positive rate for the PCR test?
3 If you do not know the answer to 2 do you accept that at no point did the dictatorship ever know the true level of covid infections in the UK?
I’d like to hear from the authors of the pre-2020 pandemic response plan that was thrown in the bin
Even were the questions you pose asked, Cummings, no stranger to self-promotion and making up “the facts” to fit his narrative, appears not even on nodding terms with truth or candour. Answers, if any, would probably blame someone else.
And as much to the point: what number of cycles was used to determine positive cases??
According to the live blog published on YouTube by Channel4 News, very early in his testimony (at 09:56), “Cummings claims he is not a smart man”, and I’ve no doubt that he did this with the precise intention of avoiding specific technical questions like these. His testimony will almost certainly stick to “who said what to who and when”, where his testimony cannot easily be challenged..
Exactly the kind of question, clear, simple, and to the point, that no one in the main stream media ever asked.
Disturbing incident this morning
When I woke up there was a severed human head in my bed
There was a note attached which sad ‘Died of the Indian variant. Get vaccinated Matt’
I think it is some kind of message but from whom?
LOL – excellent!!
Next trip to LA, I’m going to pitch some movie ideas..
‘They cannot be serious’… even the most devout Covidians would surely take issue with that one??
‘Ratioed’ ? (Not a Twitter user)
More comments than likes. It’s generally a sign of disagreement.
90% then, thank you.
i didnt know either thank you .am enjoying the twitter comments very much
I’d love to know how anyone can claim lockdowns “had a very modest role in producing economic damage” when at a minimum all of hospitality + tourism has been closed down for most of the past year.
Because it depends how you calculate GDP. If you count dole money and “stimulus” freebies, as we do and presumably California does, then it looks as though “production” isn’t dropping much
Of course, this is patently nonsense, since those are explicitly covering up for the exact opposite of production. And yet economists claim that any money that the State can see changing hands represents productivity, because if they can see it, they can steal it.
A gross amount of government funny money being doled out in blue states has had the effect of keeping the workforce from working.
Because they lie for a living and deny reality, e.g. you can change your sex and men competing against women is equality.
My best guess is the people behind this report, are literally living in LaLa Land. Have they been to some of the poorer neighbourhoods, had a walk around and talked to business owners?
I suppose there is some small crumb of comfort in seeing and knowing that print media in the USA publish as much supine, biased, and just plain wrong bollocks, as do our own; bribed as they are with tens of millions of taxpayer money, disbursed for Government propaganda/advertising space.
The U.S. media is probably even worse than in the UK from what I’ve seen and heard over the last five years. Most of the news outlets are nothing more than the propaganda wing of the Democrat party.
But alternative media in the US is well established.
Noah Smith is the Neil Ferguson of economic commentary.
Never knowingly correct.
These people are masters in trying to look like they have an argument (hence all the charts and references), which is all the gullible that want to believe need to see.
every day I type ‘astrazeneca vaccine’ into google and then press ‘news’
usually all the articles are about how the rollout is going, how doctors are saying the side-effects are small etc
until today
every story is about deaths by stroke or bloodclot, especially younger people
Probably to get people onto the RNA trojan-horse.
I think AZ is just first. I’m not having a vaccine but if I did it would be AZ over the mRNA ones.
I think they are likely much of a muchness, but with AZ you get the added bonus of the adenovirus which can lead to short term autoimmune attack, as well as the other short and longer term risks of all of them resulting from the spike protein.
US post that worth considering before placing any faith in any of them.
glad you won’t either . i will never get any of them . i read the a z is also genetically engineered ,
no way . is gates, gates = poison alert ! no thanks
Venice Beach has always been a bit eclectic, which is what most love about it, but apparently it’s not doing too well at the moment.
https://www.foxla.com/news/homeless-in-venice-dont-plan-to-leave-their-outdoor-beach-lifestyle-living-anytime-soon
The LA Times was an odd paper even when owned by the Chandlers. Now its just a rich guys vanity project. The rich guy is a medial bio-tech billionaire. Enough said. Like the San Francisco Chronicle the LA Times ceased being a serious newspaper about a decade ago. I’d put it in the same league as the Huffington Post as a source of real information.
The actual effect of the lockdown in LA has been catastrophic. The economy was very weak before 2020, the city has been losing well paying employment for more than a decade. Add to that out of control crime and a de-facto collapse of city government and its almost back to same level of social dysfunction as before the riots in 1992.
The lockdown turned a serious crisis into a real catastrophe.
The LA Times is the mouthpiece for the Woke Brigade in Los Angeles. It has been a propaganda rag of the worst sort throughout this whole affair. So, it is not surprising it would still be running narrative for the Covidian cultists in LA county. But, on the ground, people are under no illusions that this shit show has been a disaster for the state, and that our Winter death rate was among the highest in the world anyway. The very day after the CDC loosened its guidelines, the old normal has come right back, masks largely gone except in the most Covidian haunts … and this in spite of the Governor dragging his feat about ending the restrictions, now set for June 15.