Title : SURPRISING NEW DATA ANALYSIS FINDS THAT LOCKDOWNS WERE NOT CORRELATED WITH THE REDUCTION OF COVID-19
link : SURPRISING NEW DATA ANALYSIS FINDS THAT LOCKDOWNS WERE NOT CORRELATED WITH THE REDUCTION OF COVID-19
SURPRISING NEW DATA ANALYSIS FINDS THAT LOCKDOWNS WERE NOT CORRELATED WITH THE REDUCTION OF COVID-19
SURPRISING NEW DATA ANALYSIS FINDS THAT LOCKDOWNS WERE NOT CORRELATED WITH THE REDUCTION OF COVID-19
by Kevin Ryan
A new statistical analysis has found that the state shutdowns are not correlated with the reduction of COVID-19… and may have actually made the spread worse.
The counter-intuitive result was uncovered by data analysis company TrendMacro. The firm compared COVID cases in each state with how much residents actually stayed home, as measured by the University of Maryland Transportation Institute’s “Social Distancing Index.” The Social Distancing Index uses anonymized cellphone tracking data from millions of phones to track where people are and where they go.
It turns out that lockdowns correlated with an increase in cases of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger COVID outbreaks. Indeed the five places where people stayed locked down the most—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey, and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.
One possible explanation—that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks—was not borne out by the data.
“The surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health, or temperature,” TrendMacro CIO Donald Luskin explained.
And the same findings persisted when states began to open back up. States that opened up the most (i.e. where people actually left their houses the most and returned to their normal lives as measured by cell phone location data) had fewer COVID cases than those where people stayed locked down. The paper warned that the public conceptions over which states opened first and most are incorrect. “The so-called ‘Sunbelt second wave’—Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas—are by no means the most opened up,” Luskin explained, “headlines notwithstanding.”
“The lesson is not that lockdowns made the spread of Covid-19 worse—although the raw evidence might suggest that—but that lockdowns probably didn’t help, and opening up didn’t hurt.”
This is not the only study that has come to this conclusion. In July, the Lancet published research that found similar results looking across countries rather than U.S. states. It found that “a longer time prior to implementation of any lockdown was associated with a lower number of detected cases.”
Some have speculated that locking people in together set up the perfect conditions for spreading the disease, which requires close contact for a prolonged period of time to spread.
Indeed it may be that the positive aspect of staying home—not seeing as many outside people—is offset by the negative aspect—being in close quarters.
Whatever the reason for the counter-intuitive findings, more researchers are coming to the conclusion that the growing number of unintended negative consequences from the stay-at-home orders outweigh the increasingly hard-to-find benefits.
“Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well-documented long-term public-health consequences beyond Covid, imposing them appears to have been a large policy error.”
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