Tag: Lockdowns

A huge crowd has descended on central London today to make their feelings known to the Government about the endless restrictions we have been living under for over 15 months.

A new study from leading U.S. think tank National Bureau of Economic Research has shown (once again) that lockdown policies produced no discernible reduction of the pandemic death toll. If anything, they increased it.

It’s now more than a year since the first lockdown began, and the Government still hasn’t published a cost-benefit analysis. The evidence we do have suggests the costs almost certainly outweighed the benefits.

Imperial's REACT study reconstructs the epidemic curve in England from the symptom onset dates of people with antibodies. It shows that infections always declined before lockdown and sometimes increased under it.

During the pandemic, governments have relied heavily on epidemiological models. These models were often based on untenable assumptions. A new paper argues that we should have relied more on historical comparisons.

The Prime Minister has said there may be a "rough winter" ahead. But since by the Government's own admission lockdowns appear to be the cause of the pressures on the NHS, the cycle of lockdowns will never end.

In my Spectator column I have tried to answer the question of why the global elite are such enthusiasts for the heavy-handed, statist approach to managing the coronavirus crisis and opponents of less draconian alternatives

Leader of the House of Commons and member of Boris Johnson's Government Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that the Government must stop taking charge of people's lives "purely to prevent them seeing the doctor".

Researchers examined the impact of localised lockdowns in Chile. They found that that a three-to-four month lockdown would reduce economic activity by roughly the same amount as one year of the 2009 Great Recession.

German researchers looked at changes in the R number over time, and found they had "no direct connection" with lockdown measures. Significantly, infections were already declining when lockdowns were imposed last March.