Posted on 06/14/2022 7:20:30 AM PDT by Heartlander
Did the Covid lockdowns save lives? Statistics can help answer the question.
In April, free-market economists Phil Kerpen, Stephen Moore, and Casey B. Mulligan published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19.” Their report considered three variables for all 50 states and Washington, D.C.: health outcomes (measured by adjusted mortality), economic performance throughout the pandemic (measured by unemployment and GDP), and the pandemic effect on education (measured by the percentage of cumulative in-person instruction). The authors investigated the relationships among the three variables using simple linear regression, a tool to summarize and study relationships between two continuous variables. This method yields a correlation coefficient that rates both the strength and the direction of the relationship between the two variables.
The results: locked-down economies did not have better health outcomes, open schools were slightly negatively correlated with health outcomes, and the lockdown of schools and economies were highly correlated.
Since the underlying data are available, I ran my own analysis, and the results were largely the same. Indeed, the relationship between health outcomes and economic effects was statistically insignificant. So, too, was the relationship between health outcomes and open schools. Thus, one cannot conclude that economic lockdowns or school closures were associated with saving lives during the pandemic. A significant relationship existed between states that locked down the economy and closed schools, which means that governments that were willing to lock down businesses also sent students home. Ultimately, whether a state or district locked down the economy or closed down schools hardly predicted the health of those that live there.
In short, lockdowns hurt the economy, impeded education, and harmed the development of children. Empirical evidence shows these policies to have been unwise. The next time government officials seek to destroy life and livelihood in the name of safety, we should bear these findings in mind.
The lockdown was probably zero-sum when it came to “saving” lives. Those who were likely to contract COVID-19 Wuhan virus, and die as a consequence, was perhaps more than offset by the number who could not get to medical attention for other conditions during the periods of the lockdown, and for the inevitable uptick in suicides or homicides from an extended bout with “cabin fever”.
But the police power of an authoritarian government was surely demonstrated once again.
Yelp data shows 60% of business closures due to the coronavirus pandemic are now permanent
That’s 97,966 dreams gone. Even more jobs, gone. Our next FedEx, Amazon, Home Depot, Tesla, etc., gone.
But the “experts” said we had to do it.
Why did you think Trump was so eager to reopen the economy? Why do you think he wanted everyone back in church by Easter 2020? And why did so many people hate him for wanting to keep business open? Why did people want to stay in the house for two years and suck off the government teat?
Now our economy is dead man walking.
Must be the easiest paper these guys ever wrote.
I don’t need to crunch any numbers to know that my state and my country may never recover from the damage done by the COVID shut down.
The governors that shut down their states and used STAZI tactics to keep the businesses closed should be strung up from a street light like Mussolini
A new and great book addresses our world wide Covid panic B$, explains the B$ and has some suggestions.
https://rumble.com/embed/ucfsd.v1496tb/
Available at Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.
The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next! By: Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster,
How to make sense of the astonishing upheaval of Spring 2020 and following? Normal life – in which expected rights and freedoms were taken for granted – came to be replaced by a new society as managed by a medical/ruling elite that promised but failed to deliver virus mitigation, all in the name of public health. Meanwhile, we’ve lost so much of what we once had: travel freedoms, privacy, a democratic presumption of equality, commercial freedoms, and even the access to information portals. Something has gone very wrong.
To make sense of it all, the Brownstone Institute is pleased to announce the publication of The Great Covid Panic: What Happened, Why, and What To Do Next, by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker. Combining rigorous scholarship with evocative and accessible prose, the book covers all the issues central to the pandemic and the disastrous policy response, a narrative as comprehensive as it is intellectually devastating.
In short, this is THE book the world needs right now.
In the Great Panic of early 2020, nearly every government in the world restricted the movement of its population, disrupted the education of its children, suspended normal individual liberties, hijacked its healthcare system, and in other ways increased its direct control of people’s lives. Attempts to control the new coronavirus in most countries made the number of deaths from both the virus and other health problems rise. Some countries and regions snapped out of the madness in early 2021 or even before. Yet other governments, still in 2021, were ever more fanatically obsessed with control.
Why did 2020 become, so suddenly and so forcefully, a year of global panic over a virus that for most people is barely more dangerous than a standard-issue flu virus?
This book reveals how the madness started, what kept it going, and how it might end. This is also a book about stories and experiences, some real and some fictionalized to protect identities. Join Jane the complier, James the decider, and Jasmine the doubter, the three core protagonists of the narrative part of the book.
Their experiences illustrate what happened to individuals and through them to whole societies, telling us — if we care to listen — how to avoid a repeat. This literary presentation is mixed with detailed reports of the actual data and deep research that has generally been obscured in the midst of media madness and obfuscation by public-health authority.
https://rumble.com/embed/ucfsd.v1496tb/
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