Posted on 06/21/2021 5:04:11 PM PDT by george76
A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.
ife under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality.
In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline.
The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key.
The results aren’t pretty.
“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.
The lockdowns simply didn’t work.
“We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier, and in which SIP policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement SIP policies,” the authors explain.
And their finding is no outlier. A number of other credible studies have similarly concluded that lockdowns were ineffective at slowing the spread of COVID-19. Plus, other research now shows that most COVID-19 spread occurred at home, not out in the world, making stay-at-home orders all the more absurd in hindsight.
Of course, there is tremendous resistance to acknowledging the fact that the sacrifice we all, to varying extents, endured evidently accomplished nothing—and may have even left us worse off. But we must acknowledge and grapple with this painful truth to ward off similar mistakes in the future.
The takeaway here is not just that stay-at-home orders are an ineffective public policy. It’s that politicians will always claim they can solve our problems if just given enough centralized power. But we must not fall for their rhetoric and focus only on the seen, tangible benefits of government action—like potentially slowing the spread of COVID-19. We must also consider the unseen and unexpected second-order effects and consequences.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
— H. L. Mencken
Covid wasn’t imaginary, but it was super hyped up, as were the power-grabbing means of “fighting” it adopted by Democrat exemplified by Cuomo, Newsome, Whitmer, et al. This shows they were completely ineffective.
We used to know this. Knew that you cannot stop the spread of a virus. Knew that lockdowns do more harm than good. Knew that a “trial” was not something that involved half the freaking planet.
It is amazing how much the world forgot when covid started.
I think their lockdown backfired them a bit with their telling businesses to close as I spent more time traveling around to find what I needed.
Thank God I didn’t participate
Plus fewer stores with shortened hours meant more people were sharing air indoors than under “normal” conditions.
Unless the big box stores had state of the art UV HVAC filtration this was calculated to INCREASE the spread.
Cuomo was stunned to find out that (at some point) 60% of the new cases were people who were home bound.
After that, Fauci came up with some brainstorms...open the windows, put better filters in your heating/cooling system.
Never did he suggest you go for a 10 minute daily walk cuz the sun's rays will kill the bug.
Let's face it. We are/were his lab rats.
CDC says no more Lysol, clorox, alcohol wipes as sterilizing your house and everything you might touch is a waste of time to kill this Covid bug. It's not how it's transmitted says CDC.
Turned us all into a bunch of neurotics.
Not “all” of us...
The powers that be do not care about any of this. They got rid of Trump and stole an election. That’s all that matters. Our lives are meaningless to the people who rule.
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