Posted on 03/12/2021 6:30:43 AM PST by Kaslin
There is no evidence shutdowns did anything but deepen the economic suffering, increase suicides, and prevent lifesaving medical tests and treatments.
The government response to COVID-19 has mostly been a failure. Theatric, yes—see New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Emmy. Symbolic, yes. But there is no evidence shutdowns did anything but deepen the economic suffering, increase suicides, and prevent lifesaving medical tests and treatments.
With the exception of former President Trump’s effort to speed research, approval, and rollout of a COVID vaccine through Operation Warp Speed, and efforts to discourage the spread of the virus through border restrictions (now abandoned by President Biden), what policies can objectively be shown to have worked?
Last May, in The Federalist I examined state-level unemployment through April, using job losses as a proxy for the severity of government-imposed shutdowns, finding these even then suggested lockdowns had no effect on the course of “a virus released by what appears to be sloppy lab procedures in Wuhan, China.” I also found a statistical connection between a state’s reliance on mass transit and a higher fatality rate.
One year on, has anything changed? What does the data say? Does anything suggest that the shutdowns were worth it?
The change in private employment among the states from January 2020 to December 2020, the latest month for which data is available, can be used as a proxy for the severity of government edicts to slow the spread of the virus. It represents closed restaurants and family-owned businesses, destroyed lives and life’s savings.
In theory, this pain should have been rewarded with a lower COVID fatality rate. That’s what we were told as we obediently stayed at home. Yet the data shows no benefit earned by the states that inflicted the largest destruction on their job base, judging by the fatality rates from COVID. Graphically, it looks like this.
Another constant feature of the corporate media’s COVID-19 coverage was the claim red states were killing their people. Again, the data after a year shows no correlation between a state’s level of freedom, as measured by the Fraser Institute in their annual Economic Freedom of North America survey, and COVID fatalities.
However, there is a modest correlation between economic freedom and the strength of the job market over the past year, although it is important to note that the correlation between freedom on the state level and job creation has been a long-term trend, one that COVID-19 did not change.
Digging deeper into the data, a regression analysis seeking correlations to per capita COVID-19 fatalities at the state level to five variables—use of mass transit, change in private-sector employment, economic freedom, share of the population 65 and older, and the percentage of adults with obesity in 2020—finds only a weak connection (adjusted R square of 0.19). Only two variables are significant in this correlation: the share of mass transit use (P-value of 0.001) and prevalence of obesity (P-value of 0.009).
This would suggest that the virus takes its course regardless of the severity of shutdowns. That’s not to say that any government action is futile. For instance, the Trump administration’s effort to speed development of an effective vaccine appears likely to save a significant number of people—assuming the vaccines retain their effectiveness as the virus mutates.
If the preceding macroeconomic analysis isn’t convincing, there are also peer-reviewed studies that find the same. For instance, Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, et al. publishing in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, concluded, “we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs (nonpharmaceutical interventions)” such as mandatory stay‐at‐home orders and business closures.
Thus, with no statistically consistent difference in virus fatality outcomes between Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York’s 11.9 percent drop in private-sector jobs, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California’s 8.3 percent loss of jobs, Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas decline of 3.7 percent, and Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Florida drop of 5.1 percent, it makes sense to encourage opening the economy while protecting the most vulnerable populations.
Lastly, as a crowning example of our politicians’ proclivity to reward failure, it is illuminating to see that more than 90 percent of the $1.9 trillion Biden stimulus is not directly related to COVID-19. Some $350 billion of the behemoth spending bill bails out the same state and local governments that inflicted the greatest damage on their own economies, realizing no measurable gain in public health.
As the Foundation for Economic Education notes, “Biden’s bill spends more than twice as much lining the pockets of bankrupt blue states than it does actually addressing public health.” But then, spending, not public health, is the purpose of the bill.
Read later.
I would like to point out that statistical analyis is a branch of SCIENCE. So when the left says we need to “follow the science” ask them if we should follow the statistical analysis.
“Did The Shutdowns Save Lives? A Year Later, Statistical Analysis Suggests Not”
Well, according to the “experts”, we were supposed to have had millions and millions dying. So I guess they did. /S
Well statistical analysis sai Trump won by a lot too. So there’s that......
With religious fervor built on abject fear and irrationality, these Covid Cowards consider science to be valid only if it matches precisely the tenets of their secular religion and is blessed by the Covid Cult leaders which are limited to eqomaniacal politicians, power-obsessed unelected bureaucrats and celebrity-driven "experts".
What difference, at this point, does it make?
(Famous quote)
Anyway, who really cares, because we can start having backyard barbeques with a few family members and friends on the 4th of July (and he didn’t say it, but expect they’ll remind us later) as long as we all double-mask!
Pretty clever, but extremely ambitious.
Think of it. Someone used a single device (COVID-19) to collapse all the paradigms of the dominant but very different cultures around the world AT A SINGLE TIME.
Has any reliable authority published results that the various measures taken, shutdowns, masks, etc. had any real affect on the number of deaths FROM the China virus?
Note I said from the virus. If you had a heart attack and died and later it was discovered you also had China virus, you died WITH the virus, not FROM the virus.
Mix in the potential to bring misery to the populace in an election year, the intoxicating potential for power-hungry rulers to further control millions of lives, and the chance to realize the dream of upending the system during upheaval like Bolsheviks overthrowing the Provisional Government, and free people were f*cked.
I don’t know about lives saved but it made a lot of money for the jerks that support the hype.
Kinda what some of us have been sayin’ all along...
The original purpose of the shutdown was NOT to save lives, it was to prevent overloading our medical system with too many simultaneous cases requiring hospitalization.
Somewhere along the line it turned into “wear a mask or you’re killing Grandma.”
I told my friends when the "two weeks to flatten the curve" came and went, that the wearing of masks, social distancing, business shutdowns and lockdowns in homes, was going to cause the destruction of the economy, people's livelihoods and cause untold number of problems that didn't already exist.
But it wasn't just me. Anyone who is a seasoned, experienced citizen in life with an intellect higher than a turnip could have come to the same conclusions. Travel around that proverbial block a few times and you start thinking for yourself and learning from your experiences and failures.
Why couldn't anyone see that this was mass hysteria gone wild? See that this was an epic failure happening right before our eyes? That none of what was proposed and mandated was going to solve the problem?
It is my belief that the younger generations have been so thoroughly indoctrinated by their schooling (translation: by the Left), that they don't have the experience or critical thinking skills to see the forest for the trees.
It reminded me of the climate change scheme. Create a problem where none exited before. Create an illusion in people's minds that to fix the problem we, as a society, have to destroy what we have, in order to save ourselves. It doesn't make any sense. But many people fall for it, especially for those who rely on big government for the decisions in their lives.
As time went on, the responses to the virus became just like the responses to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The government has to control things so we can live risk free in a world fraught with risk.
Just like climate change, where the Green New Deal scammers want us to empty our wallets for them now, in order to prevent the temperature of the earth from rising 1 or 2 degrees a 100 years from today when no one can prove them right or wrong.
The virus scammers, led people to believe that if the gave up their freedoms, jobs, livelihoods and lives now, they could save the planet for our children by eliminating this terrible virus that wasn't ever going to go away no matter what we did. An exercise in futility.
It was the long con and the democRATS and globalists play that scam very well. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me again and again and I deserve to be conned.
Once we learned that COVID-19 mainly impacts the elderly with other problems we should have COMPLETELY changed our policies to the opposite of what we have done.
All we have accomplished is dragging this thing out for the elderly while simultaneously destroying the lives of business owners and the education of our children. We SHOULD have been striving for herd immunity asap so our elderly can get back to living their last years.
Would some have died? Yes. Have some died due to the consequences of lockdowns? Yes. Somebody explain and justify how this virus reaches some threshold to “shut down the world” when other deadly viruses don’t? We thought this might be “Ebola on steroids” and that people would be dropping dead in the street. It didn’t happen. There’s ZERO justification for these authoritarian and tyrannical policies THAT AREN’T LAW and VIOLATE our SACRED Constitutional rights.
So the solution was actually the DeSantis Model.
1) Protect seniors, the elderly and infirm, nursing homes etc.
2) have others take some common sense steps to wear masks or social distance.
3) Keep the schools and economy and businesses generally open.
4) Get the vaccinations to those at risk.
Yay, Idaho!!
In the North Idaho Panhandle region, Mask Mandates were in effect, but cancelled early and were never strongly enforced. Masks were extremely contentious. People wore masks into the big box stores, but masks on people on the streets were not that common and you rarely saw a person solo in a car wearing a mask. Restaurants stayed open but with some reduced capacity. Schools shut down. But life generally went on close to normal.
We had one Arizona woman visit Coeur d’Alene last summer and she wrote a letter to the local paper saying was absolutely apoplectic about the carefree attitude of people, how WE were endangering HER life (she was the visitor), blah, blah, blah. She wrote how she and her husband had driven up the coast of California, Oregon and Washington and BY FAR Idaho was the worst state they had visited and wouldn’t return. All of us were saying “Yeah! Keep out!”
But look at which state had the HIGHEST growth rate in the country during the entire shutdown year! We GREW our economy and didn’t shrink it like 48 other states did. That is remarkable.
The covid response in 2020 was the same as the spanish flu response in 1918. The response didn’t work in 1918 and it didn’t work in 2020. Of course the 2020 debacle wasn’t really about covid at all.
Bookmarked. “For the Science.”
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