Lockdowns Are Pointless — The Evidence
By: Jos Evans
Tags: Government, Crisis, Covid 19, Lockdown, Economics

Why lockdowns are not just futile but actively harmful

Possibly the one good thing about COVID is the amount of data that is published in real-time, globally. I have been working with the https://ourworldindata.org/policy-responses-covid dataset which provides a wealth of data from around the world on not just test numbers, case numbers, and deaths but also data such as hospital beds per thousand and diabetes data. It is comprehensive. It also has something called a ‘Stringency Index’, which is created and published by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

The Stringency Index measures the severity of government measures in a country in response to the pandemic, as per the description ‘OxCGRT collects publicly available information on 17 indicators of government responses. Eight of the policy indicators (C1-C8) record information on containment and closure policies, such as school closures and restrictions in movement’.

Misery 2020

Now, my working assumption when approaching this data was that there should be clear evidence of the efficacy of lockdowns —

Since they seem to be the standard response of governments around the world, they must work, right?

Surely all the economic hardship and misery, as evidenced by the above spike in unemployment in the US, was worth it?

— and so I set about analysing the data, expecting to find a clear relationship between severity of lockdown and a reduction in mortality.

This chart shows the change in the stringency index for 210 countries around the world. Apologies for the mess of spaghetti, but it’s fairly easy to see that there has been a variety in terms of response severity and timing of responses.

Here is the average Stringency Index per country over the whole pandemic, where it is more obvious that some countries have been a lot more laissez-faire about lockdowns than others. I was happy to see this variety, since it meant we should get clear results from the data analysis. Countries with a higher average stringency index should show better results, right?

Wrong.

This chart plots the mean Stringency Index per country against the overall deaths per million. There appears to be no relationship to speak of. Results look pretty random.

It then occurred to me that I may be looking at this data the wrong way round — maybe the countries that had the most deaths went into stricter lockdown in response to the deaths, rather than trying to prevent them in the first place. In that case though, there should be clear evidence of a reduction in deaths after an increase in the Stringency Index, right? So I decided to plot the rate of change in new deaths against the strength of the Stringency Index.

I initially worked with two subsets of countries; the first group was those countries which had locked down hard and locked down early (100% Stringency Index before 1st May 2020), and the second group was the countries that never got above a 75% Stringency Index. I called the groups ‘Stringent’ and ‘Laissez Faire’.

Astonishing! The Laissez Faire countries (blue in the chart above) saw problems with daily fatalities early on, and the Stringent group did not, as we expected. However, the Stringent group is now suffering broadly the same level of fatilities in their 2nd waves, whereas the Laissez Faire group are not having a second wave at all. The hard line here is the mean daily deaths for each group, and the shaded region is the range of outcomes in the group. It is clear from this chart that the lockdowns merely delayed the inevitable for the Stringent group.

Given this remarkable result I wanted to test the same theory globally, rather than in selective groups, since there were only 10 countries in the Stringent group and 34 in the Laissez Faire group.

In order to do this I separated all countries into 2 groups. The Stringent group this time was those countries with an average Stringency Index above 60, and the Laissez Faire group those countries with an average below.

It is clear as day — in both cases the Laissez Faire (red in this chart) groups saw a short, early shock in daily deaths, followed by periods of calm. The Stringent groups both saw eventual rises to comparable levels, but experienced similar numbers of deaths -just over a longer period of time. This gives a lot of credibility to the herd immunity theory.

Conclusion

Since clearly lockdowns have no impact on COVID, but devastate society, we should be calling on governments around the world to stop these calamitous policies. It is fascinating in fact to see the WHO now doing a complete U-Turn and indeed telling governments to stop lock downs . Lock downs are an appalingly irresponsible experiment doing untold damage to present and future generations and need to be reversed and stopped immediately. Governments around the world — WAKE UP!

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P.S. Since there is a lot of misinformation about the true danger of COVID, The CDC has changed the IFR values of Covid-19 into age-specific estimates, which are now very low at 0.003% for 0–19 years, 0.02% for 20–49 years, 0.5% for 50–69 years, and 5.4% for 70+ years. Excellent article here for further reading.

Some further reading also on the complete inefficacy of masks, for those interested, thanks to @Rapatauxx for sharing (many more on his profile);

1. Aiello 2010 (RCT, N=1437, Community Setting) “Neither face mask use and hand hygiene nor face mask use alone was associated with a significant reduction in the rate of ILI (transmission).”

2. Alfelali 2019 (RCT, N=7,687, Community Setting) “Facemask use does not prevent clinical or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims.”

3. Cowling 2009 (RCT, N=1201, Household Setting) “Hand hygiene with or without facemasks seemed to reduce influenza transmission, but the differences compared with the control group were not significant.”