Everybody has stopped talking about whether Covid lock-downs are effective or not (thanks christ) but the question has never really been answered. People just moved on to the next controversy.

Most people eventually agreed “probably yes”, therefore governments should be allowed to do them in the future.

Because the answer is not yes or no. The answer is “a bit, but sometimes they work better than other times”.

If anybody tells you “yes” lockdowns are effective, that is a lie. Nobody knows to what extent they are effective, yet.

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I’m trying to find a study which can tell us things like

• By what percentage do lockdowns reduce covid infections in the following two weeks?

• How much impact does closing schools have?

• Are they only effective in big cities, or is there any value for rural areas too?

• Is most of the reduction just from closing metros? Or from closing offices? Or something else?

All of this can be extracted from historical data, without doing any experiments.

The crucial thing is to have a control. A study needs to prove a causation between the remedy and the recovery. But there are ways to do that that statisticians know all about. It’s not enough to say that “I had a flu then I took a medicine then I got better so the medicine is effective”.

This article has a small section “Many epidemics, with a single peak” which is interesting. It shows a clever technique which could be used to measure this stuff. But I’m sure there are cleverer and better techniques too.

Has any work been done on this, that anyone has found? It seems to me like the information we most need right now and in the coming decades, to guide policy - to design types of lockdowns which will be least damaging and most effective. But as far as I can find, it’s not being considered at all.