How Much Credit Should Lockdowns Get for Reducing COVID-19 Transmission?

1. The same scary increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths that motivated politicians to impose lockdowns also motivated people throughout the country to take precautions.
2. "If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak," the paper reports.
3. Do you know what else happened "in association with social distancing and other control measures"? People eventually started moving around more, even while they were still subject to lockdowns.
4. Again assuming that coercive policies are driving reductions in movement and transmission, they model the results of lifting lockdowns, which they assume will have to be reimposed when cases and deaths surge.
5. As Scott Shackford has noted with regard to GPS data, the fact that people in largely rural states travel farther to pick up groceries or fill their gas tanks does not mean they are bad at social distancing.
6. Don't worry, we'll have enough data in a few weeks to know what to do, wait, what? They conflated all the data and it is worthless? Really? The Centers for Disease Control, whose entire existence is predicated on tracking data related to illness accurately? So now there is no data judge the public health experts models or to determine if the preliminary recommendations were sound advice.
7. "Data show," the Times reports, that "lockdown delays cost at least 36,000 lives." Researchers at Columbia University "found" that "even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth," the Times says.
8. Already we see a problem with the way the Times has framed the issue, since "the United States" never "impos[ed] social distancing measures," and "the country" never "lock[ed] down cities and limit[ed] social contact." Instead of a single national response to COVID-19, we have seen a wide variety of local and state responses.
9. They mean in nursing homes, correct? NYT and Columbia are acknowledging that the governors who ordered COVID positive patients mixed into the uninfected population in nursing homes are to blame for the worst of the pandemic? Because anything else would not just be a vicious lie, it would be passive acceptance of the deliberate infection of a vulnerable population on the scale of what the U.S. Army did to the Plains Indians with smallpox.
10. Even believing that the lockdown had any effect, which I don't, there is no attempt by Columbia to evaluate the total number of deaths that will ultimately be attributed to Covid-19.
11. There is new data from Minnesota this morning that says a similar policy has caused 81% of their deaths to be in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
12. Let's imagine the NYT headlines if Trump had , in late February, shut down the New York City airports and highways and brought in the army to enforce a 15 day lockdown on NYC and No Jersey? Thousands of those lives would have been saved but it is doubtful NYT, Cuomo, and Murphy would have cheered.
13. Imposing lockdown in February would not have helped even assuming that lockdowns prevent deaths (but in reality it just postpones the inevitable).
14. Among other things, that depends on the effectiveness of more carefully targeted policies aimed at protecting people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 until a vaccine can be deployed or herd immunity is achieved.
15. It's not June yet, but by now there should be some indication of rising cases and deaths in states that lifted their lockdowns at the end of April, more than three weeks ago.
16. "Researchers found that the biggest risk for negative health outcomes was probably not state regulations, but people's own behavior," the Times reports in a different story published the same day.
17. Americans were learning about the threat posed by the COVID-19 virus, especially to people with serious preexisting medical conditions, and they were reacting accordingly.
18. To estimate "inter-county human movement in six metropolitan areas," the researchers used data from SafeGraph, which tracks foot traffic counts at 5 million "points of interest" across the country, including bars, restaurants, stores, airports, hotels, and shopping malls.

https://reason.com/2020/05/22/how-much-credit-should-lockdowns-get-for-reducing-covid-19-transmission/