Lockdowns had very little effect. People arguing they were responsible for doing anything of significant consequence are arguing based on group affiliation and

Lockdowns had very little effect. People arguing they were responsible for doing anything of significant consequence are arguing based on group affiliation and have not updated their beliefs in light of the actual, empirical evidence. "This paper examines the drivers of the collapse using cellular phone records data on customer visits to more than 2.25 million individual businesses across 110 different industries. ... While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection. Traffic started dropping before the legal orders were in place; was highly tied to the number of COVID deaths in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from larger/busier stores toward smaller/less busy ones in the same industry. States repealing their shutdown orders saw identically modest recoveries--symmetric going down and coming back."