Johns Hopkins: Lockdowns Have Done Little to Reduce Deaths but Devastated Economies

[Sensualswitch10]

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills.

The study, titled “A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality,” said lockdowns in Europe and the U.S. reduced COVID-19 deaths by 0.2 percent.

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote in the report, issued Monday.

The study concluded that lockdowns “are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”

https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/healt...ed-lockdowns-did-little-to-limit-covid-deaths

 

[milagros317]

I am not surprised.

 

[TMF Jeff]

I want to point out that this is not a peer-reviewed study. And the only analysis of it that I could find, disputes it very strongly. You really have to be careful sharing this sort of thing.

To clarify - this is a study by three ECONOMISTS using a purposefully curated collection of other studies. It's not a medical analysis, and it's not comprehensive.

Here's a series of interviews with some medical and data experts, that explains some of its flaws.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/...-krieger-school-of-arts-and-sciences-website/

I've pulled some quotes that I think are relevant. Italics are me commenting on the quote.


Prof Neil Ferguson, Director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Jameel Institute, Imperial College London:

“A second and more important issue is that the statistical methods used to estimate the impact of NPIs using observational data need to be appropriate. Such interventions are intended to reduce contact rates between individuals in a population, so their primary impact, if effective, is on transmission rates. Impacts on hospitalisation and mortality are delayed, in some cases by several weeks. In addition, such measures were generally introduced (or intensified) during periods where governments saw rapidly growing hospitalisations and deaths. Hence mortality immediately following the introduction of lockdowns is generally substantially higher than before. Neither is lockdown a single event as some of the studies feeding into this meta-analysis assume; the duration of the intervention needs to be accounted for when assessing its impact."

“Disentangling the precise impact of individual NPIs remains extremely challenging, not least because the most socially and economically disruptive measures (closing all non-essential businesses, stay at home orders) were generally used in combination and as last resorts on top of longer-term measures such as mask wearing."


In other words, a lot of people start testing positive for Covid so a govt orders a lockdown. Two weeks later a bunch of people die from Covid, and this study concludes that the lockdown was ineffective.

But the lockdown was done BECAUSE people were transmitting the virus at an increased rate. And accounting for that fact would be an extremely complicated challenge from a data analysis standpoint. It would take teams of professionals using reams of information to collate that kind of otherwise unconnected information and make something useful of it. Which is not what this report has done at all.



Dr Seth Flaxman, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

“Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.

“In this case, a trio of economists have undertaken a meta-analysis of many previous studies. So far so good. But they systematically excluded from consideration any study based on the science of disease transmission, meaning that the only studies looked at in the analysis are studies using the methods of economics. "

These do not include key facts about disease transmission such as: later lockdowns are less effective than earlier lockdowns, because many people are already infected; lockdowns do not immediately save lives, because there’s a lag from infection to death, so to see the effect of lockdowns on Covid deaths we need to wait about two or three weeks. (This was all known in March 2020 – we discussed it in a paper released that month, and later published in Nature. Our paper is excluded from consideration in this meta-analysis.)"

"It’s as if we wanted to know whether smoking causes cancer and so we asked a bunch of new smokers: did you have cancer the day before you started smoking? And what about the day after? If we did this, obviously we’d incorrectly conclude smoking is unrelated to cancer, but we’d be ignoring basic science."

In other words, they appear to have specifically excluded studies from their meta report that were based on disease transmission science. And as with the person before him, he points out that the time lag between someone getting sick, and someone dying, is not included in the report. To repeat that point - They appear to be assuming that if someone got Covid before the lockdown, the lockdown should somehow prevent them from dying.


Prof Samir Bhatt, Professor of Statistics and Public Health, Imperial College London:

“I find this paper has flaws and needs to be interpreted very carefully. Two years in, it seems still to focus on the first wave of SARS-COV2 and in a very limited number of countries. The most inconsistent aspect is the reinterpreting of what a lockdown is. The authors define lockdown as “as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention”. This would make a mask wearing policy a lockdown. For a meta-analysis using a definition that is at odds with the dictionary definition (a state of isolation or restricted access instituted as a security measure) is strange.

In other words, for a supposedly scientific study, it's very loose with its use of the term lockdown. Either they're going for some kind of point that doesn't really have anything to do with a lockdown, or being economists not doctors, they didn't actually understand the distinction between a genuine lockdown, and a mask mandate.

But again, even if they did understand that, they appear to think that imposing a mask mandate should make people who are already sick miraculously become healthy.

-------------

This is a very questionable study, and I really wish you'd at the very least pointed that out when sharing it here. And I'm not sure sharing it was really the right thing to do, unless you can find something to contradict the problems with it that I was able to identify.

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

No kidding? Anyone could have seen that they did more harm than good. Peer reviewed is just one person getting others to validate what they wrote, it doesn't mean it's correct or reflects the reality of the situation.

 

[Wolf]

No kidding? Anyone could have seen that they did more harm than good. Peer reviewed is just one person getting others to validate what they wrote, it doesn't mean it's correct or reflects the reality of the situation.

Peer review of studies is actually a very important way to differentiate between solid science and agenda-driven BS. For example, one of the authors posted this to Twitter https://twitter.com/steve_hanke/status/1488195381020307463

Comparing lockdowns to the Holocaust is hardly "unbiased".

 

[TMF Jeff]

Peer review of studies is actually a very important way to differentiate between solid science and agenda-driven BS. For example, one of the authors posted this to Twitter https://twitter.com/steve_hanke/status/1488195381020307463

Comparing lockdowns to the Holocaust is hardly "unbiased".

Ya, that's pretty revealing of an agenda in the creation of this "study."

The author of the study thinks lockdowns are like Nazi Germany, and then coincidentally created a deeply flawed report that concludes that lockdowns were useless.

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

Peer review of studies is actually a very important way to differentiate between solid science and agenda-driven BS. For example, one of the authors posted this to Twitter https://twitter.com/steve_hanke/status/1488195381020307463

Comparing lockdowns to the Holocaust is hardly "unbiased".

This whole thing has been agenda driven BS. The problem is when scientific articles, research come out that go against the narrative put forth by Fauci and the media, brainwashed people will find any reason to try and discredit it and saying "It'S NoT PeEr ReVieWeD" is just one way rather than looking at evidence to the contrary, people just bury their heads. As for the Twitter post, Twitter is a cesspool but I don't think they were comparing it to the Holocaust. It's more likely they are comparing the blatant dictatorial actions taken by the government the fact that the artist put the Canadian PM in a German Nazi Uniform is probably because it's easily recognized as being a symbol of dictatorship, that's just my take on it for all I know he could think the two are comparable which they aren't.

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

(comment removed because it's unsupported and I believe it to be untrue - Jeff)

 

[Nedward]

What a confusing mess

 

[Wolf]

This whole thing has been agenda driven BS. The problem is when scientific articles, research come out that go against the narrative put forth by Fauci and the media, brainwashed people will find any reason to try and discredit it and saying "It'S NoT PeEr ReVieWeD" is just one way rather than looking at evidence to the contrary, people just bury their heads. As for the Twitter post, Twitter is a cesspool but I don't think they were comparing it to the Holocaust. It's more likely they are comparing the blatant dictatorial actions taken by the government the fact that the artist put the Canadian PM in a German Nazi Uniform is probably because it's easily recognized as being a symbol of dictatorship, that's just my take on it for all I know he could think the two are comparable which they aren't.

They're comparing Trudeau's actions to Hitler's, which is ludicrous in itself, as well as blatantly anti-Semitic (by minimizing the Holocaust as somehow equivalent to masks and lockdowns). Trying to say that's somehow not what they're doing is just disingenuous.

 

[TMF Jeff]

This whole thing has been agenda driven BS. The problem is when scientific articles, research come out that go against the narrative put forth by Fauci and the media, brainwashed people will find any reason to try and discredit it and saying "It'S NoT PeEr ReVieWeD" is just one way rather than looking at evidence to the contrary, people just bury their heads. As for the Twitter post, Twitter is a cesspool but I don't think they were comparing it to the Holocaust. It's more likely they are comparing the blatant dictatorial actions taken by the government the fact that the artist put the Canadian PM in a German Nazi Uniform is probably because it's easily recognized as being a symbol of dictatorship, that's just my take on it for all I know he could think the two are comparable which they aren't.

There's a lot more to what I posted than just pointing out that it's not peer reviewed, and I think it's pretty lame for you to reduce my post to that and then mock it.

I posted very specific observations about the methodology of that report and its findings, that point out specifically and exactly why it appears to be bullshit.

And your argument that it represents people being brainwashed is juvenile. As one of the reviewers of the article pointed out, ordering people to stay home during periods of high disease transmission is BASIC science. It's literally beyond question that when people intermingling is causing a disease or virus to spread at a very high rate, then telling people not to do that will reduce the level of transmission.

The people who wrote this report are economists, not doctors, and their report is nonsense because they, like you, went into this with the intention of proving something they think they already know is true.

And you throwing around a bunch of unjustifiable accusations and sarcasm does exactly zero to contradict that. Your personal opinion that a lockdown is worthless counts for literally nothing against decades of established science, to say nothing of the simple logic of it.

You have a narrative you're trying to cling to against all evidence and common sense. And if it were less important than a global pandemic, I honestly wouldn't care.

But this is very important and you're not welcome to come here and say untrue things about this situation.

Anything else you say on this topic needs to be supported by evidence that can withstand legitimate criticism, not just you plugging your fingers in your ears and going "Nyah nyah nyah!"

I'm talking about links to legitimate sources that back up your point of view, not just a link to some crackpot website that makes a stupid claim based on a misunderstanding of something someone said, who themselves didn't know what they were talking about.

Because I know that if I hold you to that standard, you won't be participating in this thread, because there are no such sources - because what you believe about this pandemic is all incorrect.

Sorry, but there it is.

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

There's a lot more to what I posted than just pointing out that it's not peer reviewed, and I think it's pretty lame for you to reduce my post to that and then mock it.

I posted very specific observations about the methodology of that report and its findings, that point out specifically and exactly why it appears to be bullshit.

And your argument that it represents people being brainwashed is juvenile. As one of the reviewers of the article pointed out, ordering people to stay home during periods of high disease transmission is BASIC science. It's literally beyond question that when people intermingling is causing a disease or virus to spread at a very high rate, then telling people not to do that will reduce the level of transmission.

The people who wrote this report are economists, not doctors, and their report is nonsense because they, like you, went into this with the intention of proving something they think they already know is true.

And you throwing around a bunch of unjustifiable accusations and sarcasm does exactly zero to contradict that. Your personal opinion that a lockdown is worthless counts for literally nothing against decades of established science, to say nothing of the simple logic of it.

You have a narrative you're trying to cling to against all evidence and common sense. And if it were less important than a global pandemic, I honestly wouldn't care.

But this is very important and you're not welcome to come here and say untrue things about this situation.

Anything else you say on this topic needs to be supported by evidence that can withstand legitimate criticism, not just you plugging your fingers in your nears and going "Nyah nyah nyah!"

I'm talking about links to legitimate sources that back up your point of view, not just a link to some crackpot website that makes a stupid claim based on a misunderstanding of something someone said, who themselves didn't know what they were talking about.

Because I know that if I hold you to that standard, you won't be participating in this thread, because there are no such sources - because what you believe about this pandemic is all incorrect.

Sorry, but there it is.

https://thefatemperor.com/published...ckdown-weak-efficacy-and-lockdown-huge-harms/
But I'm sure this is considered in your warped mind not good enough, nothing ever will be.

You can believe what you want but the whole idea of locking down entire nations like what was done has no established science, if you want to talk about selective quarantine then that's different than what was done which should have been done to begin with. You are the perfect example of the type of person who will not question anything the government or media tells you, you just believe it. There is plenty of evidence that is contrary to what you are saying, you just refuse to look at it and accept it so you do these mental gymnastics, like you did with your post, to convince yourself you are right and that maybe you haven't been bullshitted.

Let's just agree to disagree, you want to think I'm wrong that's fine, I won't lose sleep. But the fact you remove a comment because you disagree shows how small of a person you really are, pathetic really.

 

[Nedward]

The fat emperor?

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/healt...ed-lockdowns-did-little-to-limit-covid-deaths

Apparently Johns Hopkins isn't credible

 

[Wolf]

Apparently Johns Hopkins isn't credible

Johns Hopkins University is, in fact a credible institution, which is why they're not promoting this BS study from an Economist with an agenda, who's gone on Tucker Carlson to promote it.

 

[Nedward]

since we are allowing personal podcast and twitter handles then :

https://mobile.twitter.com/jocami_ca/status/1307572931766165504

Ivor Cummins aka FatEmperor is named so for promoting low carb/high fat diets. How one makes the leap from podcaster dietician to COVID expert is curious; especially since a look through his tweets will show you how often he contradicts himself.

 

[Sensualswitch10]

I want to point out that this is not a peer-reviewed study. And the only analysis of it that I could find, disputes it very strongly. You really have to be careful sharing this sort of thing.

To clarify - this is a study by three ECONOMISTS using a purposefully curated collection of other studies. It's not a medical analysis, and it's not comprehensive.

I can't argue that the study hasn't yet been peer reviewed, it is a working paper. Hopefully this thread will still be around after it is. The authors offer a lengthy explanation as to why many studies weren't included in their analysis. The reason wasn't, as some disengenously claimed, because those studies didn't fit the conclusion they were seeking.

I'm not sure why questioning the wisdom of lockdowns is something I "really have to be careful sharing". I think that A) the people on this forum are pretty smart and B) further lockdowns are extremely unlikely.

I've bracketed quotes that I entered with ~~~ to differentiate from Jeff's quotes.

~~~Of 18,590 studies identified during our
database searches, 1,048 remained after a title-based screening. Then, 931 studies were excluded,
because they either did not measure the effect of lockdowns on mortality or did not use an
empirical approach.
1. Does the study measure the effect of lockdowns on mortality?
2. Does the study use an empirical ex post difference-in-difference approach~~~

I won't go into excessive detail, but the authors basically excluded studies that relied on modeling rather than empirical data or didn't focus on what was being studied. Using large print for emphasis, because what was studied was very specific.:

The study examined the relationship between NPIs and mortality. It did not address impact on case numbers or hospitalizations. It also specifically defined NPIs.

"“NPI” to describe any government mandate which directly restrict peoples’ possibilities. Our definition does not include governmental recommendations, governmental information campaigns, access to mass testing, voluntary social distancing, etc., but do include mandated interventions such as closing schools or businesses, mandated face masks etc. We define lockdown as any policy consisting of at least one NPI as described above"

Here's a series of interviews with some medical and data experts, that explains some of its flaws.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/...-krieger-school-of-arts-and-sciences-website/

I've pulled some quotes that I think are relevant. Italics are me commenting on the quote.


Prof Neil Ferguson, Director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, Jameel Institute, Imperial College London:

“A second and more important issue is that the statistical methods used to estimate the impact of NPIs using observational data need to be appropriate. Such interventions are intended to reduce contact rates between individuals in a population, so their primary impact, if effective, is on transmission rates. Impacts on hospitalisation and mortality are delayed, in some cases by several weeks. In addition, such measures were generally introduced (or intensified) during periods where governments saw rapidly growing hospitalisations and deaths. Hence mortality immediately following the introduction of lockdowns is generally substantially higher than before. Neither is lockdown a single event as some of the studies feeding into this meta-analysis assume; the duration of the intervention needs to be accounted for when assessing its impact."

“Disentangling the precise impact of individual NPIs remains extremely challenging, not least because the most socially and economically disruptive measures (closing all non-essential businesses, stay at home orders) were generally used in combination and as last resorts on top of longer-term measures such as mask wearing."


In other words, a lot of people start testing positive for Covid so a govt orders a lockdown. Two weeks later a bunch of people die from Covid, and this study concludes that the lockdown was ineffective.

But the lockdown was done BECAUSE people were transmitting the virus at an increased rate. And accounting for that fact would be an extremely complicated challenge from a data analysis standpoint. It would take teams of professionals using reams of information to collate that kind of otherwise unconnected information and make something useful of it. Which is not what this report has done at all.

Neil Ferguson? The disgraced guy who absolutely butchered the predicted initial death tolls in the US and UK that drove us to the lockdowns in the first place? I don't consider him reliable or unbiased. Ironically, the authors specifically called out Ferguson in their paper. Ya think he's going to offer a positive take?

From the study:

~~~there was no clear negative
correlation between the degree of lockdown and fatalities in the spring of 2020 (see Figure 2). Given the large effects predicted by simulation studies such as Ferguson et al. (2020), we would have expected to at least observe a simple negative correlation between COVID-19 mortality and the degree to which lockdowns were imposed~~~

In other words, if lockdowns work, one would expect more severe lockdowns to decrease mortality more significantly than less restrictive ones. Apparently, this was not the case.

Dr Seth Flaxman, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

“Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.

“In this case, a trio of economists have undertaken a meta-analysis of many previous studies. So far so good. But they systematically excluded from consideration any study based on the science of disease transmission, meaning that the only studies looked at in the analysis are studies using the methods of economics. "

These do not include key facts about disease transmission such as: later lockdowns are less effective than earlier lockdowns, because many people are already infected; lockdowns do not immediately save lives, because there’s a lag from infection to death, so to see the effect of lockdowns on Covid deaths we need to wait about two or three weeks. (This was all known in March 2020 – we discussed it in a paper released that month, and later published in Nature. Our paper is excluded from consideration in this meta-analysis.)"

"It’s as if we wanted to know whether smoking causes cancer and so we asked a bunch of new smokers: did you have cancer the day before you started smoking? And what about the day after? If we did this, obviously we’d incorrectly conclude smoking is unrelated to cancer, but we’d be ignoring basic science."

In other words, they appear to have specifically excluded studies from their meta report that were based on disease transmission science. And as with the person before him, he points out that the time lag between someone getting sick, and someone dying, is not included in the report. To repeat that point - They appear to be assuming that if someone got Covid before the lockdown, the lockdown should somehow prevent them from dying.

^The above is quite rich. The person you quoted appears to be ripping the study authors as "a trio of economists". His personal medical expertise? Dr Seth Flaxman, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science
If economists are good at anything, it's data analysis. They are examining a very specific correlation, and ASSOCIATE professor of computer science Flaxman's glib response does not impress me one bit.

Prof Samir Bhatt, Professor of Statistics and Public Health, Imperial College London:

“I find this paper has flaws and needs to be interpreted very carefully. Two years in, it seems still to focus on the first wave of SARS-COV2 and in a very limited number of countries. The most inconsistent aspect is the reinterpreting of what a lockdown is. The authors define lockdown as “as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention”. This would make a mask wearing policy a lockdown. For a meta-analysis using a definition that is at odds with the dictionary definition (a state of isolation or restricted access instituted as a security measure) is strange.

In other words, for a supposedly scientific study, it's very loose with its use of the term lockdown. Either they're going for some kind of point that doesn't really have anything to do with a lockdown, or being economists not doctors, they didn't actually understand the distinction between a genuine lockdown, and a mask mandate.

But again, even if they did understand that, they appear to think that imposing a mask mandate should make people who are already sick miraculously become healthy.

This guy (another non medical person) also from the Imperial College of London (who's initial model predicting covid deaths was quite far off from reality as I recall) is also off base. He whines about the way the researches define NPI and WRONGLY claims NPI only means the dictionary definition of lockdown.

-------------

This is a very questionable study, and I really wish you'd at the very least pointed that out when sharing it here. And I'm not sure sharing it was really the right thing to do, unless you can find something to contradict the problems with it that I was able to identify.

You can claim the study is very questionable if you want to, but I disagree with your assessment. The "experts" who's opinions you cited were no more medical experts than the economists they criticised. And Neil Ferguson is a disgraced fraud.

 

[TMF Jeff]

I think you raised some fair points there. I don't agree with most of them, and I'll say why. But I really don't want to get into a back and forth argument about these things, because I think they turn ugly very quickly. Even if you and I don't argue, other people can start fighting about it. If this thread does end up getting deleted it will be because that got out of control, not because of your posts.

I'll explain my own point of view on your response. And if you want to respond to that, by all means do so of course. But I'm probably not going to continue to respond at that point because I feel like we'll both have had our say about this.

------

First, the reason I think you have to be careful about putting this sort of thing out there is that there's a lot of misinformation about Covid being spread, and at the risk of being melodramatic, lives are literally on the line. On the TMF the stakes are extremely low, because even now this thread only has a couple of hundred views and many of those are repeat clicks. So it's not like this is a hub of some kind.

But in a more general sense, I see a lot of people saying things that seem to discourage people from taking this situation seriously, and I think they're being very irresponsible because the death toll from Covid is shockingly high.

I'm not going to name names, because I think that will probably trigger a spin-off debate about certain public figures and I don't want to see this thread descend into that.

But in my little corner of the Internet, I feel that the right thing to do is to be responsible about what information I allow to spread. Maybe I'm taking myself too seriously, or giving the forum too much credit (even the little credit I'm giving it) but it's how I feel, and I have to act based on that.

------

So, on the subject of the three people interviewed and their credibility -

* My understanding of Neil Ferguson's situation is that his data was found, after outside groups repeated his studies, to be valid. Looking into it now, I see that there are definitely some questionable predictions in his past, though.

But on the other hand, his model predicted that there would be 100,00 cases of Covid per day in England, and right now they're at 84,000.

The other criticism of his that I was able to locate was about the software he used in his modelling, but that after review it was found to be a sloppy mess of code that was nonetheless reliable and valid.

* Seth Flaxman is specifically a computer scientist involved in data modelling. They didn't pull his name out of a hat, his expertise is relevant because he's talking about how they structured their model.

And he's not criticizing them for being economists, he specifically says "so far so good," and acknowledges that they should be qualified to process the study the data they want to study. But you haven't acknowledged or contradicted his points. I think they seem valid, and within his area of expertise.

And they fit the seemingly obvious narrative, which is that an economist who equates lockdowns to fascism somehow went on to produce a report that claims lockdowns are ineffective.

Which seems to contradict the seemingly very basic logic of - people transmit diseases by interacting with each other. Therefore limiting the interactions, will restrict the level of transmission.

The logic of that seems so fundamental and basic to me that I almost can't believe it's even under question. And as one of the alleged-experts pointed out, any study that claims to prove the opposite is immediately suspect based on that alone.


Moving on -

* I don't know much about Samir Bhatt, except to say that he's a professor of statistics and public health, which like Flaxman, seems like exactly what this report is dealing with. He seems to me, based on the very little I can determine about him, to be qualified to read and understand and comment on this report. And his points seem valid to me.

------

I think your point about Ferguson has some credibility, although I disagree with it. But your points about the other two don't seem particularly weighty to me.

Ultimately, after going over your points and reading into the reasons behind them, I don't see any reason to change my mind about this - the report is highly questionable, comes from a suspect source, and reaches an unjustified conclusion.

------

So like I said, if you want to respond to this you're obviously more than welcome to. But unless there's something dramatically new and informative, I'm probably going to be content with the points I've already made, because I think arguing back and forth about it is too much negativity and doesn't actually accomplish anything.

Thanks for being reasonable about this and being willing to talk about it without having to resort to insults or attacks.

 

[Jericho716]

All posters contributing disinformation should just be banned. The sooner these voices are gone (since they have nothing factual to contribute), the better.

 

[Wolf]

All posters contributing disinformation should just be banned. The sooner these voices are gone (since they have nothing factual to contribute), the better.

1. That's a bad idea.
2. This is a heavily skewed non-peer reviewed study, not disinformation; even so, I don't think the mods have time or inclination to have to judge that kind of thing.

 

[Comfort Eagle]

I can see this "being true" in the sense that the lockdowns were way too late, and by the time anyone got around to closing anything the virus had spread too much, but not that the concept of keeping high traffic areas being closed were useless in general.

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

All posters contributing disinformation should just be banned. The sooner these voices are gone (since they have nothing factual to contribute), the better.

And who gets to determine what is or isn't "disinformation" Just because a person disagrees with something doesn't make it "disinformation"

 

[MeatyBreastedDullness]

I can see this "being true" in the sense that the lockdowns were way too late, and by the time anyone got around to closing anything the virus had spread too much, but not that the concept of keeping high traffic areas being closed were useless in general.

Many people advocated for selective quarantine which would have been a much better idea.

 

[MrMacphisto]

I have a better rationale. Regardless of whether or not lockdowns can work to stop the spread, they are undoubtedly unconstitutional and oppressive. Any society that wants to call itself free and respective of personal freedoms should not allow the government to force this nonsense on the public.

Granted, COVID revealed that very few countries can truly call themselves free. Most states succumbed to fear and authoritarianism and still probably won't learn from studies like this one. People are such sheep.

 

[shytickler]

I really hate when people try to spread misinformation. My feelings are the same as Jeff's. This stuff has to be countered. People are dying.

Here are the facts that I've been able to put together from multiple critiques of the metareview.

1. This meta review is not “from Johns Hopkins”. One of the authors, Steve Hanke, is a professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins. The other two are Lars Jonung, a professor emeritus at Lund University in Sweden, and Jonas Herby, who is an economist at the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen.

2. Steve Hanke is a member of the Cato Institute. This is a libertarian think tank. It is decidedly political. If you work for the Cato Institute, you’re not necessarily wrong, but you are coming to the issue with a strong libertarian ideology already.

3. Not a study. This is a working paper. It has not been peer reviewed. A fundamental part of research is peer review. They have gone around that process to get their opinion out into the media.

4. Of the 34 studies included in the review, 12 of them are other working papers. 14 are from economists. However, most of the actual research on this subject has been done by medical researchers.

5. All papers with modelled counterfactuals are excluded. Because this is the most common method used in infectious disease assessments, this has the practical impact of excluding most epidemiological research. The authors exclude many of the most rigorous studies, including those that are the entire basis for their meta-analysis in the first place.

6. The authors claim that they only include studies using a difference in difference approach. However, two of the studies, Chisadza et al. and Alderman & Hajoto, do not use difference in difference.

7. The 0.2% top line number in the news is based on only seven studies, listed in Table 3. This is a very small number of studies for a meta review.

8. Table 3 cites as supporting evidence seven papers that use a metric called the Oxford Stringency Index. However, the authors do not include the medRxiv paper by Thomas Hale et al. from July 6 2020, which produced the Oxford Stringency Index, on which all of these seven papers are based, and which actually estimated a massive reduction in deaths due to lockdown.

9. Their model weights papers by their standard error, which ends up giving one paper, by Chisadza et al 2021, 91.8% of all the weight. So to summarize, the -0.2% top line estimate of this paper is 91.8% based on this one paper, and 8.2% weighting is given to all other known studies in the entire universe.

10. The authors of the Chisadza et al. paper have publicly disagreed with this metareview, and accused the metareview authors of having a predetermined conclusion when writing the paper. “They already had their hypothesis. They think that lockdown had no effect on mortality, and that’s what they set out to show in their papers.”

11. Additionally, the authors of the Chisadza paper actually find “statistically significant non-linear associations on the number of deaths”. In other words, the effect of NPIs on preventing covid deaths does not increase in a simple linear way. This implies that less strict interventions can appear to have a weak effect on preventing covid deaths, but as the stringency of the intervention increases, the reduction in covid deaths decreases dramatically. The meta study by Hanke ignored this and just extracted a linear term.

12. In Table 5, of seven papers, most of the weighting is given to one paper by Aparicio and Grossbard 2021. It claims that this paper shows that lockdowns increase deaths by 2.6%. However, Professor Grossbard said that “the sign of the coefficient can not be meaningfully interpreted”. Meaning that, whether Hanke et al.’s model shows that lockdowns increase deaths (positive coefficient) or rather decrease deaths (negative coefficient), is impossible to interpret, given Hanke et al.’s flawed methods.

13. Another paper in Table 5 by Spiegel and Tookes 2021 found "strong evidence consistent with the idea” that mask mandates and business closures *reduced* future fatality growth. However, Hanke et al. disagree with Spiegel and Tookes about the results of their own paper, and claim that Spiegel and Tookes actually show that these interventions *increase* fatalities by 13.1%.

14. In sum: The authors have taken a number of papers, most of which found that restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions had a benefit on mortality, and derive some mathematical estimate from the regression coefficients, indicating less benefit than the papers suggest. The actual numbers produced in the review are largely uninterpretable.


Sources for my information:

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, Postdoctoral epidemiologist at University of Wollongong.
https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1489744749942620162

Andreas Backhaus, Affiliate Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels.
https://twitter.com/AndreasShrugged/status/1488993038915489794

Bruce Y. Lee, Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucel...ineffective-against-covid-19/?sh=565aa8a1225b

Peter Hansen, Professor of Economics at Chapel Hill.
https://twitter.com/ProfPHansen/status/1489366511756058626

Mathias Heltberg, Postdoctoral Biophysics researcher at Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
https://videnskab.dk/krop-sundhed/s...e-that-lockdowns-only-reduced-covid-deaths-by