Lockdowns Did Not Save Lives

The USA and its 50 state jurisdictions provide a natural experiment to test whether excess all-cause deaths can be directly attributed to implementing the social and economic structural large-scale changes induced by ordering general-population lockdowns. We find that the regulatory imposition and enforcement of statewide shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders conclusively correlates with larger health-status-corrected, per capita mortality by state.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic based on a reported outbreak in Wuhan, China of COVID-19 (hereafter COVID), the respiratory illness purportedly caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus

• In the US, a national emergency was declared on March 13, 2020
• This declaration resulted in a heterogeneous set of responses from health authorities and government officials in various states.
• Most states issued shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders in March and April of 2020.

Data and Methodology

• The goal is to assess the efficacy of lockdowns in saving lives during the COVID era by comparing the total number of deaths from all causes in pairs of states: one state with a lockdown and a state without a lockdown that shares a border with the lockdown state.
• Lockdown states were identified by examining administrative and executive orders issued during March-April 2020 by state governments in response to the pandemic declarations of the WHO and of federal and state governments
• We assigned a "stringency score to each executive order based on the language of the lockdown order for the citizens of the state
• Ordered/mandated: 3
• Directed: 2
• Suggested/encouraged: 1 no order: 0
• There were seven states that had scores of 0 because they did not issue stay-at-home orders
• Three states with scores of 1 because the governments only suggested or encouraged citizens to stay at home, but did not require them to do so, nor provided means of enforcement

Results

• Our analysis of R values for three time periods during which lockdowns are expected to have an effect shows that the ACM data from the past two years is inconsistent with the hypothesis that lockdowns saved lives.
• On the other hand, our results are consistent with the conclusion of Rancourt et al. (2021) that the excess deaths in the COVID period in the USA are caused by the government and medical measures, and responses to the declared pandemic.

Conclusion

• The use of lockdowns to "quarantine" the general population of the United States in order to control the spread of an infectious disease is without precedent in the nation's history
• During previous pandemics, only the sick and infirm were quarantined while the rest of the population continued more or less as normal
• This "focused protection" approach was recommended by medical professionals in the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, demonstrating that alternatives to lockdowns existed and were well understood within the medical community
• As recently as 2019, the World Health Organization advocated a similar approach in its recommendations for mitigating the risks of an influenza pandemic while making no mention of lockdown measures
• Lockdowns should not be used during future disease outbreaks
• Our finding that all-cause mortality increased in states with lockdowns is consistent with the conclusions of Agrawal et al. (2021) who found statistically significant increases in excess mortality due to shelter-in-place orders

https://brownstone.org/articles/lockdowns-did-not-save-lives/