This report is going to set the cat among the canaries…
Abstract
This systematic review and meta-analysis are designed to determine whether there is empirical evidence to support the belief that “lockdowns” reduce COVID-19 mortality. Lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). NPIs are any government mandate that directly restrict peoples’ possibilities, such as policies that limit internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel. This study employed a systematic search and screening procedure in which 18,590 studies are identified that could potentially address the belief posed. After three levels of screening, 34 studies ultimately qualified. Of those 34 eligible studies, 24 qualified for inclusion in the meta-analysis. They were separated into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-place-order (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies. An analysis of each of these three groups support the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality.
While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.
At 61 pages including appendices and references, it’s dense, to put it mildly. But it is also extremely telling from the lack of effect and the economic damage done world-wide.
When you add this to the latest information coming out about the real beginnings of Covid, and the major players (including Fauci’s) backchannel emails and conversations, it is, IMHO, a pretty damning pattern of behavior by a LOT of people in power…
You can download a copy from the page, HERE.
On the contrary, I suspect it will be widely ignored or censored, just like every other study and bit of research that contradicted the narrative. It looks like a solid work. I applaud the willingness of its authors to publish. That doesn’t mean the likes of CNN or NBC will allow it to see airtime, or that social media won’t censor links to it or splash disinformation warnings up.
Yeah, this sort of research is usually shucked off by the progs as “not settled science”. Unlike men becoming pregnant and having babies (settled science).
I agree with TheOtherSean, this paper will be studiously ignored except to cite as misquote when being used as disinformation.
Academia finally catches up to common sense, and only 18+ months after it was obvious.
Watch for the authors to be cast into the outer darkness.
And those percentages in the abstract are of the 0.x% of overall deaths from COVID-19. How many other non-COVID deaths were caused by the lockdowns?
NONE of the MSM with the exception of Fox are covering it at all. Not a mention anywhere!!!
In fact, when I checked The Bongino Report earlier, it linked to an article on Fox News which comments on that very fact.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/johns-hopkins-university-study-lockdowns-media-blackout
Just speaking here as a former, long-time ago (1987) PhD student:
This paper is going to be remembered forever.
There is SO MUCH contained here related to the research (and publication) process, things that are ESSENTIAL for the serious academic researcher to comprehend.
For example, the paper makes it clear that early intervention was MUCH more effective than late intervention; then, they EXCLUDE all of those studies which examine differences between early and late interventions, as “interrupted time series designs.” They have a point in their argument that such factors as change in seasons may be involved, but a meta-analysis really SHOULD be meta, and this excludes some really significant studies. Much better: include them, and provide footnotes to explain things.
Furthermore: nepotism, anybody? The article published by “Studies in Applied Economics,” and the third author is Steve H Hanke, who is the DIRECTOR of that publication. This is not intended to deny anything said in the paper. But, if you want academic respect, you don’t publish in your own journal, and you don’t systematically EXCLUDE research that might be irksome.
TOS- Yep!
Pat- Interesting point, I missed that.
Economics is a weird discipline.
‘Effect of government policy’ is not the class of problem where economics has issues due to nobody thinking of problems within the class. If anything, economics focuses too much on ‘effect of government policy’.
Naysayers for the covid lockdown have been asserting that lockdown choices are made by central controllers, and are causing damage that results from the inability of central bodies to control in ways that aren’t destructive. This specific type of damage is something we would expect to be invisible in an ‘effects of government policy’ analysis.
We would expect economic analysis to show clear signs of negative lockdown impact when the lockdown was obviously stupid, and everyone was being coerced not to say so.
But, economics is a weird debating club for mathematical models, without the rules that engineering has for rejecting certain flavors of obvious nonsense. So, if ‘everyone is being coerced’, we would expect economists to be included in everyone. Which would make the ‘is this paper significant’ debate a matter of technicalities, which we non-economists may lose if we try to fight.
The paper sounds like it fits my preconceptions.
It doesn’t feel like it is something I can use to persuade others.
Bob- You do have a point. But from my obviously NOT PhD level of comprehension of it, it does make sense.
Oh, it obviously sounds like it makes sense.
The whole situation could be considered as an engineering problem, in particular, masking. I’ve begun to wonder if it counts as the greatest engineering disaster of our time.
I would expect economists to turn up a significant amount of cost, that is not actually exceeded by the alleged benefit.
I saved a copy, in case of people deciding to take it down. I’m not expecting real use of it before the political situation changes.
This study was most certainly not government funded. That beig the case, it is probably accurate and honest.
Bob- Yeah, I did the same thing.
WSF- Sigh…probably.
Oh please.
As if, when I want medical information, I look to a report from economists.
Anybody who’d do that would get medical advice from their bank teller.
We’ll skip going deeply into the point, for those with memories shorter than their wedding tackle, that the lockdowns weren’t supposed to “decrease COVID mortality”, any more than parachutes prevent plane crashes.
They were instituted to spread out the proliferation over time, and keep from overwhelming hospitals, as had been observed in China, Italy, etc.
And the cities and states at most risk but that chose to do anything but lockdown, in some cases leaving their subways running 24/7/365 without cleaning them, and putting infected elderly people in the same convo hospitals with uninfected and immuno-compromised folks managed to achieve the highest death rates in the U.S. (NYFS and NJ), bar none, and put their hospitals in the exact crisis that was to be avoided. (Nawlins, Atlanta, and NYFC, call your office).
This “study” is simply so much @$$-gas, from people who don’t know what they’re doing, and extrapolating from what they don’t know.
It’s pure undiluted bullsh,. er…rose fertilizer with a report cover on it, and a press agent with Confirmation Bias on speed dial. Which has everyone more salivatingly eager to pile onto it than a swarm of flies on a fresh horse plop.
And five minutes ago, the same people were crapping all over Johns-Hopkins’ COVID numbers.
It’s a real pity Michael Crichton died before he could describe the Gell-Mann Retardation Effect as the next step beyond Amnesia.
Schizophrenia much?
I’ll also match paychecks that the number of people cock-a-doodle-dooing over the imaginary conclusions haven’t read so much as a single page of this “study”.
Normally, when something like this thing comes along, you light a candle, and jiggle the handle after you flush; you don’t put it up on the refrigerator.
The broader picture /is/ a combination of life sciences with money observations.
I might, in fact, consult a bank teller if I thought that someone billing me might be defrauding me.
The requirement for you to have any basis in telling us to trust expertise, is that the ‘expertise’ must in fact be expert. If a ‘expert’ is more incompetent than a layman, they are not expert. Economics is in fact potentially relevant to outside assessment of whether the public health specialists have defrauded us.
China and Italy, like the US, cannot be trusted as a source of numbers, because too many people in a position to profit from screwing with the numbers.
‘Spreading out over time’ was always an illusion, the calibration was against current bed capacity, which was more staff limited, not physical infrastructure limited.
We would have had more nursing home deaths purely from the increased isolation from outside oversight.
The significant increases in deaths, as best as we can tell, had nothing to do with being over capacity. Those appear to be deliberate malice by public health officials, trying to artificially inflate the death rates.
It was a cold, we had it the fall before. We can’t tell that the lockdown did anything preventative, because we are feeding fraudulent or unreliable numbers into the medical effects modeling.
There is no reason to trust economists in assessing medical effects, but there is also no reason to trust anyone else.
Maybe the economists can assess economic damage, and if sufficient pointless economic damage occurred, maybe you compare it against hypotheticals of 30 million dead, 3 million dead, 300,000, 30,000, 3,000, etc. Except that economics do not actually know how to compare economic numbers with those hypotheticals, they don’t know enough about how significant internal mass murders impact economic metrics.
There is no information about this that isn’t hot garbage. The best information source is a hobbyist ‘intelligence assessment’. Right now, we have a very active information warfare environment. We /have/ to win that information war, and some subsequent dispute, before we can give the pools of ‘experts’ the cleaning necessary for being able to trust /anything/ that that they say.
The only utility that this can have is as a tool in that information war. Like anything else that can be said about covid. Now, I personally do not see any utility in this for me as an information war weapon. The folks that I can persuade, are already persuaded without it. Since I haven’t read the thing, and don’t have the skills to properly read it as an academic paper, I don’t have confidence in using it for any argument. To the extent that anyone listens to me at all, they do so because I am careful in what I argue.
Bob, you’ve done yeoman work in knocking down the strawmen you built, but they have nothing to do with either reality on the ground, or the multitudinous problems with this piece of page-bound horsecrap.
You’re consulting your bank teller about the best way to do an appendectomy, btw.
Don’t forget to check the “expertise” on offer in that paper: Economists are less accurate than weathermen, so by definition, nearly anything they say is probably wrong.
“Spreading out over time” is no such illusion, and staff shortages have been a thing in healthcare since, oh, at least 1970. You could look it up. The reality is you can’t put more people into hospitals than hospitals can actually and adequately care for, without killing more of them. Just like when you overload any lifeboat. [e.g. If you fill the lifeboats from Titanic to capacity, you can save 1,178 people, max. If you put everyone on the Titanic into the lifeboats, you kill all of them.] Pretending this is an illusion is sophistry.
Nobody was arguing the increases in deaths had anything to do with being over capacity, nor did anyone tell you otherwise. Score yourself one straw-man confirmed kill.
“We would have had more nursing home deaths…“. Codswallop. Nursing home deaths surged to the hundreds and thousands. Just like they never do. Even Stevie Wonder could see that. That’s another straw-man consigned to oblivion.
“We can’t tell that the lockdowns…”
More codswallop. WHAT lockdowns?? The ones where NYFC ran the subways every day for months until they’d achieved the highest death toll in the US, bar none?
The one entire states never did at all?
The ones where people had a Mardi Gras, and raves, and wore masks over their chins, if at all?
The ones where all the food stores remained open non-stop, helpfully concentrating people into them as the only places open?
Define “lockdown”, define “work”, find something that could conceivably meet one value with the other, and tell the class where any such thing was ever tried, let alone where it worked. I’ll wait right here while you look for that unicorn.
I note with little surprise that when you try to draw well water with a fish net, the results seldom “work” for anyone.
I bagged and tagged the people you think had “a cold”, by the dozens, personally. Like I’ve done never annually in over a quarter century in healthcare. You’re frankly talking out of your underpants there, and there’s no nice way to put that. Your rhetoric has an actual body count.
“There is no information about this that isn’t hot garbage.” More sophistry. Pleading agnosticism is a cop-out for intellectual laziness covering for self-interest, as in most endeavors. We certainly don’t know everything, and we’ve undeniably been lied to consistently by any number of folks, but the sum total of actual verifiable knowledge on the topic is not “nothing”.
There is no utility for this “study” whatsoever, save fertilizer. It’s a perfect example of the blind and stupid leading the gullible and ignorant. But it proves Confirmation Bias is an actual thing, yet again, as sure as a cow pasture draws flies, and for the exact same reason.
And whatever level of circumspection you use, you should probably exercise a bit more. You’re telling us more about your own limits than you are the limits of what is actually known, or knowable, and confusing the two is a dangerous practice all around.
If these earnest idiots at JH had simply catalogued the damage to the economy, they might have done some useful service, by staying somewhere far closer to the center of any potential expertise they may yet possess. As it is, they look like a bunch of monkeys trying to fornicate a football. And I apologize in advance if under-describing their actual antics offends monkeys.