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.
I’m trying to find a study which can tell us things like
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By what percentage do lockdowns reduce covid infections in the following two weeks?
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How much impact does closing schools have?
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Are they only effective in big cities, or is there any value for rural areas too?
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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.
It’s definitely being studied, there is a lot of data on this so it’ll be a while before more broad studies come out.
We can see quite clearly without any major inquiry that firebreak lockdowns are extremely effective as anticipated. This is evidenced by countries like China and Australia effectively eradicating the virus while maintaining international trade. This subject will be very difficult because ‘lockdown’ can mean so many different things. To some it means that you can’t go out to dinner, to others it means that you can’t leave your house at all.
I’ll just dump all the literature I know about at the bottom of my post. I’m on mobile so unfortunately I can’t make it look pretty.
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/abstract.asp?index=6976
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249732
Thanks. None of those are exactly what I was looking for, which means they probably use ideas I haven’t thought of. Will make some good reading.
So far I’ve only skimmed them, and it looks like none of them give a quantifiable impact of a specific lockdown measure, for a specific population. Something like “for a dense city, requiring a mask in cafés reduces deaths by 40%, but closing cafés reduces deaths by 40.01%”. Something that could really inform policy.
Especially this one looks like it describes a very good way of thinking about the issue.
The fact that you never read a story about the number of cases exploding during a lockdown should already tell you all. And there are definitively enough people willing to talk about nothing else than that.
And that’s enough evidence for most people. But IMO it shouldn’t be. It is possible to quantify how effective a lock down was. It’s not enough to just say “looks like it worked cos cases dropped”. You news to be able to say " it reduced case rates by XX percent." Otherwise the justification is a bit unconvincing.
And we should demand that authorities justify lock downs properly, before we allow them to impose any more of them.
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This guy is always great. But he writes a lot - I just wish I had time to read more of his.
It’s true that people try to simplify things - do we need more lockdown vs less? are lockdowns good vs bad? are you for vs against lockdowns? But the right question is - how can we design effective lockdowns?
Nobody is studying this (very effectively) because we have no proper data on what makes an effective lockdown … or even on how covid is transmitted. It’s IMO a real Emperor’s clothes moment for Science.
some parents tried to take their kids out of public school in early March, before the official lockdowns. … kids who missed school due to COVID fears wouldn’t be allowed to make up the work later and might fail their classes. Then later on, the government closed all schools
Very good point. Too-rigid goevernment rules make society fragile. If there is a mask mandate ( or a vaccine mandate or whatever) then 100% of people all do this one thing … what if masks cause some unforeseen problem? It’s a disaster. But if people are free to make their own judgements, everybody follows slightly different policy … then an unforeseen problem with one policy is not a disaster.
Like that one school which is experimenting with ozone machines. They have the freedom to do that, and it might yield intersting results. If there was a policy that all schools had to do exactly the same thing WRT ozone machines, we lose that chance for creativity and discovery.
21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life
I don’t understand this. Does it mean I spend 1 month lockdown for an extra 5% chance in a game of roulette? Does it mean I choose between 21months lockdown or death? I don’t know if it’s too harsh - I think he needs to express it better, like probability of death vs months lockdown.
It’s a good point about timing - that earlier lockdowns are not always better - you have to get the timing right.
And the point about looking at countries. North italy might have very different contageon characteristics from the south - but so might east vs west london - the people on the circle line might need different policy from people on the 12 bus route. It’s useless (or worse than) to look at country-level statistics. If you don’t remember Bayes theorem and Simpson’s paradox, your statistics are lies.
And finally, voluntary behaviour could be responsible for most of the effect attributed to lockdowns - also good point.