5 ms·

Peer-reviewed study suggests that lockdowns have little effect on Covid spread

37 points by bananapear 6y ago

sbinthree 6y ago
There are actually five studies now on this, all show that it has <10% positive effect on spread of covid, and no delta in excess deaths it just changes causes from covid-19 to deaths of despair.
- bananapear 6y ago
  This also claims that the more restrictive measures actually increased the spread: In none of the 8 countries and in none out of the 16 comparisons (against Sweden or South Korea) were the effects of mrNPIs significantly negative (beneficial). The point estimates were positive (point in the direction of mrNPIs resulting in increased daily growth in cases) in 12 out of 16 comparisons (significantly positive in 3 of the 12, in Spain and in England compared with Sweden). The only country where the point estimates of the effects of mrNPIs were negative in both comparisons was Iran (-0.07 [95CI -0.21 - 0.07] compared with Sweden; -0.02 [95CI -0.28 - 0.25] compared with South Korea). Certainly in the UK back in March/April a large number of deaths are likely attributable to sick older people being placed back into care homes from hospital to free up capacity
  - Retric 6y ago
    What I see missing from this and several other types of analysis is lockdowns aren’t supposed to be instantly effective. A single infected individual will expose potentially many people in their household. That’s known and accepted, the goal is to stop the spread between groups. Effectively you need to compare infection growth rates 1 month into a lockdown not 1 day. Unfortunately, US covid data is also really unreliable as the percentage of people diagnosed clearly isn’t constant over the course of the pandemic. Most obviously dips in daily infections and deaths over Thanksgiving and Christmas are clearly artifacts in data collection. Looking at for example the weekly all-cause deaths in the U.S. shows large spikes corresponding to the 3 waves, but those peaks don’t map to the reported daily COVID deaths. Similarly the rates of COVID hospitalization and deaths don’t map between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan... PS: It’s easy to count the number of positive test results, much harder to accurately estimate total infections over time.
- hhanesand 6y ago
  Links to these studies?
gameswithgo 6y ago
is this saying the lockdown rules have no effect, or that people actually locking down has no effect? ive certainly noticed in austin that while many people are taking more precautions the actual rules are mostly ignored.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  That's my question. The article actually says a lot the measures work, the results for the most restrictive measures is "mixed". I suspect that is as you say: some places actually follow those rules and they work, other places ignore them and they (unsurprisingly) fail. Edit, case in point, teachers have had enough of constant U-turns and cancelled and reactivated and re cancelled initiatives: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-poll-suggests-most-teachers-have-no-confidence-in-the-government-after-education-u-turns-12183844 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-poll-suggests-most-teach...
injidup 6y ago
Sounds like cherry picked data. Australia managed to eradicate the virus through very very strict lockdown, though there has recently been again an uptick in cases. And in Austria the number of intensive care beds given over to covid 19 was over 90% in some counties and after the latest lockdowns this dropped significantly.
- sdeep27 6y ago
  Counters cherry picked data with cherry picked data.
  - intev 6y ago
    That is exactly you counter cherry picked data. If someone cherry picks data, you show it's cherry picked data by showing your own cherry picked data. I'm not sure you have a point here.
- bananapear 6y ago
  How much of the Aus/NZ success is due to seasonality? Respiratory diseases usually peak in winter. Does it ever get as cold as Northern Europe?
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    The virus did not go away in summer in the EU, while it has been essentially eradicated in NZ and Australia.
  - injidup 6y ago
    In Austria there was an almost immediate drop in cases after the latest lockdown was implemented. In the middle of winter
DangerousPie 6y ago
Page isn't loading so I can't comment on the article but there have been a bunch of papers in well-renowned journals showing the opposite. Eg. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.28.20116129v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.28.20116129v... So I would be pretty sceptical about this unless a wide range of experts find this has merit. "Peer-reviewed" does not mean much if it's some third-tier journal or the "peers" were biased.
- jepedillo 6y ago
  They state that NPIs do have an actual effect. They're saying that strong lockdowns don't have the desired effect net of less strict rules.
DangerousPie 6y ago
FYI the senior author, John Ioannidis, has been making a lot of wild claims about covid prevalence, infectiousness and fatality rates since the pandemic started, and so far most (all?) have turned out to be wrong.
LatteLazy 6y ago
From the article: >Implementing any NPIs [Non Pharmaceutical Interventions eg lockdown] was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries There ARE very mixed results from the More Restrictive NPIs ("mrNPI"s). I suspect that's because places like the UK (where I am) have pretended to implimented mrNPIs while actually encouraging people to go back to BAU. We're under super double extra serious lockdown here. In practise that means everything is the same as it was in any of the lockdown but some schools are closed for some pupils. I went out and bought jewellery today (an essential good apparently). After that, I went to the supermarket where even the staff had no masks on. But our numbers will be pooled with countries where lockdown means more than pubs only doing takeaway...
- sdenton4 6y ago
  Looking at the effects per country of the mrNPIs, there's a lot of variation per country. You could probably conclude that more restrictive measures don't work as well in countries with large right wing populist movements whoop don't follow the rules...
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    Agreed. I find the dishonesty the most annoying. My current right wing popularise government lacks the bravery to be honest and say "fuck it". So they're pretending to do things. Then immediately breaking the rules themselves very publically. People get the message: "this is serious, wink wink, nudge nudge"
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    While it fits in nicely with a narrative, I think that's actually a pretty big logical leap. In particular, in the US, which arguably has a right wing populist movement, it is liberal urban areas seem to have been some of the hardest hit. This is probably explainable by correlations between political leanings and population density, but that's beside the point: Is there real evidence for the claim you are making, or does it just fit in conveniently with your worldview and narrative?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
takk309 6y ago
It would be interesting to reproduce this analysis for first and second waves within the same countries. I could see a few issues with that type of comparison, like the most at risk already having been infected, but those details could be teased out.
zmk_ 6y ago
Maybe I'm blind but I given a diagonal read I couldn't find the sample size. Most of the restrictions were being introduced in the spring and at the same time. This probably leads to some issues: little cross-sectional information to identify the effects of all the different types of lockdowns; limited testing means that we do not know how many cases were there and we only knew of the most severe ones.
tsimionescu 6y ago
Given only one data point - Sweden's horrible track record compared to its Nordic neighbors, which led to it embarrassingly having to apologize for its lack of lockdowns - it's already far easier to believe that article has chosen bad comparisons rather than that it is right. And looking at the data they used, this seems even more likely: they investigated only England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Almost all of these countries are outliers - in England, the US, Sweden, Iran and the Netherlands, the government spent a long time advocating AGAINST any measures and claiming that they are not necessary, before doing some kind of abrupt turn. South Korea has the worst case spread out of all the east-asian countries, and it is known for the remarkable detail of its contact tracing and testing - probably the best in the world. The data from Iran is also very hard to trust. Germany has relied a lot on its hospitals and chose to implement rather lax lockdowns compared to many smaller countries. Italy, France and Spain are harder to question, but they were the worst hit countries (except Belgium maybe?) on the continental EU, so they may have special factors that I'm not thinking about.
gostsamo 6y ago
I can't get why they would trust data from Iran or even Sweden where it was national policy not to test. In my country we hit 40% positive tests in november with hospitals full and people dying without being hospitalized which necessitated closing of schools, restaurants and malls, and the numbers six weeks later are down to single digit percentages. Good enough for me.
bananapear 6y ago
Why is this flagged?
- the-dude 6y ago
  I was asking myself the same question.
  - bananapear 6y ago
    @dang can it be un-flagged please?

37 points by bananapear 6y ago

There are actually five studies now on this, all show that it has <10% positive effect on spread of covid, and no delta in excess deaths it just changes causes from covid-19 to deaths of despair.

bananapear 6y ago
This also claims that the more restrictive measures actually increased the spread: In none of the 8 countries and in none out of the 16 comparisons (against Sweden or South Korea) were the effects of mrNPIs significantly negative (beneficial). The point estimates were positive (point in the direction of mrNPIs resulting in increased daily growth in cases) in 12 out of 16 comparisons (significantly positive in 3 of the 12, in Spain and in England compared with Sweden). The only country where the point estimates of the effects of mrNPIs were negative in both comparisons was Iran (-0.07 [95CI -0.21 - 0.07] compared with Sweden; -0.02 [95CI -0.28 - 0.25] compared with South Korea). Certainly in the UK back in March/April a large number of deaths are likely attributable to sick older people being placed back into care homes from hospital to free up capacity
- Retric 6y ago
  What I see missing from this and several other types of analysis is lockdowns aren’t supposed to be instantly effective. A single infected individual will expose potentially many people in their household. That’s known and accepted, the goal is to stop the spread between groups. Effectively you need to compare infection growth rates 1 month into a lockdown not 1 day. Unfortunately, US covid data is also really unreliable as the percentage of people diagnosed clearly isn’t constant over the course of the pandemic. Most obviously dips in daily infections and deaths over Thanksgiving and Christmas are clearly artifacts in data collection. Looking at for example the weekly all-cause deaths in the U.S. shows large spikes corresponding to the 3 waves, but those peaks don’t map to the reported daily COVID deaths. Similarly the rates of COVID hospitalization and deaths don’t map between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan... PS: It’s easy to count the number of positive test results, much harder to accurately estimate total infections over time.
hhanesand 6y ago
Links to these studies?

gameswithgo 6y ago

is this saying the lockdown rules have no effect, or that people actually locking down has no effect? ive certainly noticed in austin that while many people are taking more precautions the actual rules are mostly ignored.

LatteLazy 6y ago
That's my question. The article actually says a lot the measures work, the results for the most restrictive measures is "mixed". I suspect that is as you say: some places actually follow those rules and they work, other places ignore them and they (unsurprisingly) fail. Edit, case in point, teachers have had enough of constant U-turns and cancelled and reactivated and re cancelled initiatives: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-poll-suggests-most-teachers-have-no-confidence-in-the-government-after-education-u-turns-12183844 https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-poll-suggests-most-teach...

injidup 6y ago

Sounds like cherry picked data. Australia managed to eradicate the virus through very very strict lockdown, though there has recently been again an uptick in cases. And in Austria the number of intensive care beds given over to covid 19 was over 90% in some counties and after the latest lockdowns this dropped significantly.

sdeep27 6y ago
Counters cherry picked data with cherry picked data.
- intev 6y ago
  That is exactly you counter cherry picked data. If someone cherry picks data, you show it's cherry picked data by showing your own cherry picked data. I'm not sure you have a point here.
bananapear 6y ago
How much of the Aus/NZ success is due to seasonality? Respiratory diseases usually peak in winter. Does it ever get as cold as Northern Europe?
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  The virus did not go away in summer in the EU, while it has been essentially eradicated in NZ and Australia.
- injidup 6y ago
  In Austria there was an almost immediate drop in cases after the latest lockdown was implemented. In the middle of winter

DangerousPie 6y ago

Page isn't loading so I can't comment on the article but there have been a bunch of papers in well-renowned journals showing the opposite. Eg. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.28.20116129v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.28.20116129v... So I would be pretty sceptical about this unless a wide range of experts find this has merit. "Peer-reviewed" does not mean much if it's some third-tier journal or the "peers" were biased.

jepedillo 6y ago
They state that NPIs do have an actual effect. They're saying that strong lockdowns don't have the desired effect net of less strict rules.

DangerousPie 6y ago

FYI the senior author, John Ioannidis, has been making a lot of wild claims about covid prevalence, infectiousness and fatality rates since the pandemic started, and so far most (all?) have turned out to be wrong.

LatteLazy 6y ago

From the article: >Implementing any NPIs [Non Pharmaceutical Interventions eg lockdown] was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries There ARE very mixed results from the More Restrictive NPIs ("mrNPI"s). I suspect that's because places like the UK (where I am) have pretended to implimented mrNPIs while actually encouraging people to go back to BAU. We're under super double extra serious lockdown here. In practise that means everything is the same as it was in any of the lockdown but some schools are closed for some pupils. I went out and bought jewellery today (an essential good apparently). After that, I went to the supermarket where even the staff had no masks on. But our numbers will be pooled with countries where lockdown means more than pubs only doing takeaway...

sdenton4 6y ago
Looking at the effects per country of the mrNPIs, there's a lot of variation per country. You could probably conclude that more restrictive measures don't work as well in countries with large right wing populist movements whoop don't follow the rules...
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Agreed. I find the dishonesty the most annoying. My current right wing popularise government lacks the bravery to be honest and say "fuck it". So they're pretending to do things. Then immediately breaking the rules themselves very publically. People get the message: "this is serious, wink wink, nudge nudge"
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  While it fits in nicely with a narrative, I think that's actually a pretty big logical leap. In particular, in the US, which arguably has a right wing populist movement, it is liberal urban areas seem to have been some of the hardest hit. This is probably explainable by correlations between political leanings and population density, but that's beside the point: Is there real evidence for the claim you are making, or does it just fit in conveniently with your worldview and narrative?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

takk309 6y ago

It would be interesting to reproduce this analysis for first and second waves within the same countries. I could see a few issues with that type of comparison, like the most at risk already having been infected, but those details could be teased out.

zmk_ 6y ago

Maybe I'm blind but I given a diagonal read I couldn't find the sample size. Most of the restrictions were being introduced in the spring and at the same time. This probably leads to some issues: little cross-sectional information to identify the effects of all the different types of lockdowns; limited testing means that we do not know how many cases were there and we only knew of the most severe ones.

tsimionescu 6y ago

Given only one data point - Sweden's horrible track record compared to its Nordic neighbors, which led to it embarrassingly having to apologize for its lack of lockdowns - it's already far easier to believe that article has chosen bad comparisons rather than that it is right. And looking at the data they used, this seems even more likely: they investigated only England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Almost all of these countries are outliers - in England, the US, Sweden, Iran and the Netherlands, the government spent a long time advocating AGAINST any measures and claiming that they are not necessary, before doing some kind of abrupt turn. South Korea has the worst case spread out of all the east-asian countries, and it is known for the remarkable detail of its contact tracing and testing - probably the best in the world. The data from Iran is also very hard to trust. Germany has relied a lot on its hospitals and chose to implement rather lax lockdowns compared to many smaller countries. Italy, France and Spain are harder to question, but they were the worst hit countries (except Belgium maybe?) on the continental EU, so they may have special factors that I'm not thinking about.

gostsamo 6y ago

I can't get why they would trust data from Iran or even Sweden where it was national policy not to test. In my country we hit 40% positive tests in november with hospitals full and people dying without being hospitalized which necessitated closing of schools, restaurants and malls, and the numbers six weeks later are down to single digit percentages. Good enough for me.

bananapear 6y ago

Why is this flagged?

the-dude 6y ago
I was asking myself the same question.
- bananapear 6y ago
  @dang can it be un-flagged please?