Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Really !


About a week ago I came upon a piece titled, “Are Lockdowns Effective?” What follows is the first paragraph of that essay:

“I suppose that the obvious answer to this question depends on what one is measuring. If one is measuring the number of and the spread of the Wuhan virus infections, then I guess the answer has to be ‘yes.’ After all if people are locked down in their homes, and are not out living their usual lives in the community, then logic would dictate that these individuals are not exposed to others, then therefore there would be less chance of them becoming infected . . . at least for a while.”

The author sounds knowledgeable and informed, and I was going along with his shtick until a read an interesting piece on 9/2/20 in the Wall Street Journal. The title of this article was: “The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns,” and it was written by Donald Luskin, the chief investment officer of TrendMacro, an analytic firm. (So far Mr. Luskin may be better credentialed than the author of that first piece.) His firm compared the timing and the intensity of lockdowns in each state as well as in Washington, D.C. It gathered its data not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but by observing what people actually did as measured by highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute. (Sounds much more scientific than in the first piece from a week ago.)

The surprising results of this highly scientific study were as follows:

-Lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus.

-The states with the harshest lockdowns had the heaviest caseloads.

-When everything was analyzed such as population density, age, ethnicity,    prevalence of nursing homes, general health, or temperature the only factor  that seemed to make a demonstrable difference was the intensity of mass-transit use.

-There was a tendency for states that opened up the most to have the lightest   caseloads.

Really !

In summary:

The surprise conclusions were that lockdowns probably didn’t help contain the spread of the virus, and opening up didn’t hurt. “This defies common sense.” . . . “In theory a quarantine should help control the spread of an infectious disease, evidently not so in practice.”

“ . . . heavy lockdowns were no more effective than light ones, and opening up a lot was no more harmful than opening up a little.”

Really!

FYI: Sweden and the U.S. (#11 & #10) both have 577 deaths per million population per worldometers.info. Sweden never went into full lockdown. Is this another piece of hard to data that appears to negate the benefit of lockdowns?

Wow, these findings seem to go against a certain presidential candidate who says that if cases go up, he will institute total lockdowns . . . “I will follow the science.” 

Really! 

Is this an apparent oxymoron spoken by a moron? 

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