Other experts, meanwhile, point to what they see as major flaws in the report. Many conservatives have seized on the paper to argue that lockdowns never worked and to criticize governments that implemented them. Reaction to the paper’s release has been mixed. Hanke, founder and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. The authors of the study are Jonas Herby, a special adviser at the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark Lars Jonung, PhD, a professor of economics at Lund University in Sweden and Steve H. Shelter-in-place orders reduced the public’s access to safe spaces, such as parks, and isolated infected people in homes where their families were at higher risk of being infected themselves. The authors also said lockdowns may have unintended consequences. When a pandemic rages, people believe in social distancing regardless of what the government mandates,” they wrote. “People respond to dangers outside their door. Many people would have practiced safety measures even if governments had not ordered lockdowns once the pandemic began, the authors said. “These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.” “They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy,” they wrote. They said lockdowns had a “devastating” effect on the economy and society, at least during the first wave of the pandemic. Mask mandates were not factored in because they found only one study on universal mask mandates done at that time. The study says closing nonessential businesses appears to have had some positive effect and cut mortality rates 10.6%, probably because bars were closed. The authors define lockdowns as “compulsory nonpharmaceutical interventions … that restrict internal movement, close schools and businesses, and ban international travel.” They didn’t consider government recommendations, information campaigns, mass testing, or vaccine measures. They looked at mortality rates but didn’t consider how lockdowns might have affected the number of infections or virus-related hospitalizations. They also didn’t use studies that forecast deaths. In the new paper, published in the journal Studies in Applied Economics, the authors looked at data from 34 other studies published by July 1, 2020, during the early part of the global pandemic. One published in July 2020 in the British journal BMJ, for example, found that lockdowns helped reduce the number of COVID-19 cases.Īnd a May 2020 study out of Columbia University found nearly that 36,000 American lives would have been spared if strict social distancing measures had been enacted across the country just 1 week earlier than they were. The findings, which have not been peer reviewed, conflict with previous studies that found lockdowns worked. 2%, and shelter-in-placed orders reduced deaths by 2.9%, the study says. Lockdowns in the United States and Europe reduced COVID-related deaths by only. 4, 2022 - An analysis from a trio of economists says pandemic lockdowns during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic did little to reduce the number of COVID-related deaths.
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