Lockdown Works, or It Doesn’t

It’s clear by now that China’s lockdown ‘worked’. By this I mean that it stopped the virus in its tracks and kept a lid on further outbreaks for at least a year, possibly three.

Although China’s official Covid deaths data are unreliable (more so than most countries’, I mean), there are good-quality excess deaths data from Hong Kong and Macao. These show no major upticks until March of 2021 in the case of Hong and December of 2021 in the case of Macao.

In addition, the New York Times tracked the number of obituaries published by several scholarly institutions: the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Harbin Institute of Technology, and Peking University Health Science Center. All these show massive upticks in December of 2022, around the time China ended its zero-Covid policy.

Since none of the series shows an uptick before then, it is plausible that neither Beijing nor Harbin saw a major outbreak for the first three years of the pandemic.

Now, we already knew it was possible to contain the virus using a combination of lockdowns and border controls: Australia and New Zealand managed it until February/March of 2022. But China’s feat is altogether more impressive. Australia and New Zealand are both islands in the South Pacific, which had a head start on everyone else. China is the world’s largest country (by population), with 14 land borders. And it’s where the pandemic began!

Since China’s lockdown stopped Covid in its tracks, does this mean that lockdowns in Europe and America also had a large impact (even if they didn’t halt the virus completely)? I don’t think so. In fact, I still think their impact was small at best.

To begin with, China’s lockdown was far stricter. In Britain, we were still allowed to visit pharmacies and supermarkets, while ‘key workers’ went to work every day on public transport. In China, people were sometimes locked in their homes for weeks at a time – with food and medicines delivered by Government workers, or even drones. And those suspected of having the virus were sent to makeshift ‘quarantine camps’. (This also happened in Australia.)

Here’s what zero-Covid-advocate Jeremy Hunt said in July of 2020:

My sister lives in Beijing. And she flew back to Beijing in the middle of lockdown. And just to give you an idea of the contrast: she was escorted from the airport in Beijing to her home by Ministry of Health officials, and then put into her home for two weeks quarantine. The door was sealed, and she had a police car sitting outside her house periodically.

What’s more, there’s good reason to believe the effect of lockdown is not linear. In other words, there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between the strictness of lockdown and the number of deaths prevented; it either works (as in Australia, New Zealand, China and few other places) or it doesn’t.

Once the virus is sufficiently prevalent, people can easily pass it to one another at ‘concentration points’ like pharmacies and supermarkets. And once it gets into hospitals and care homes, the death rate becomes largely independent of the prevalence in the wider community.

If there was a one-to-one relationship between strictness and deaths prevented, we’d expect to see much higher death rates in those places that eschewed lockdown – like Sweden, Japan and South Dakota. But that’s just not what the data show. In fact, Sweden and Japan are two of best performing countries.

Here’s how I’d interpret the evidence: when prevalence was relatively low, countries had a shot at containing Covid, so long as there were strict border controls in place. But once prevalence reached a critical level, there was little they could have done beyond ‘focused protection’ of the vulnerable – which is arguably what they should have done all along.