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Ask HN: John Hopkins study says lockdowns are ineffective. What do you think?

14 points by dandare 5y ago

Here is the paper: https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature... Here is a random article: https://www.dailywire.com/news/johns-hopkins-study-lockdowns-had-little-to-no-effect-on-covid-19-mortality-but-had-devastating-effects-on-society https://www.dailywire.com/news/johns-hopkins-study-lockdowns... There is very little coverage in mainstream media, is it because the study is not influential?

2rsf 5y ago
My random sample of two contradicting approaches I know about closely-Israel and Sweden. Israel reacted quickly and severely, forcing hard lockdowns. Sweden reacted slowly, late and with mild restrictions. The results, after adjustment to age, normal mortality rates and maybe removing outliers (Sweden failed to enforce restrictions on elderly care homes) are not that far in terms of mortality and it's too early to judge other effects. The problem I see with the paper, and I haven't read it thoroughly, is that it doesn't suggest and check the alternatives. A policy of soft restrictions works well in a country with polite introverts that trust their government like Sweden but it might not work that well in Mediterranean countries where being physically close to others is the norm. Anyway, it is good that there is academic research around it and that we may be better prepared for the next pandemy.
NonEUCitizen 5y ago
The authors are trained in economics, not in public health, medicine, or chemistry/biology.
- austincheney 5y ago
  The paper does not discuss chemistry or biology. The paper discusses statistics.
newyankee 5y ago
I can confidently say that lockdowns although almost impossible to implement in India did flatten the curve. The surge in hospitalizations during second wave was the real killer. Lockdowns when done with some coordination were more about controlling the response and distributing the cases over more no of days. I always feel that in developed countries with 'space' lockdown should be much more effective but unless you are living off grid it is entirely possible that you will definitely get infected. A lack of lockdown or any attempts at controlling spread is also political suicide in many places.
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
Real lockdowns are effective as we see in China. lockdowns in the west are not.
- A_non_e-moose 5y ago
  What do we need, exactly and realistically, to achieve a real lockdown?
mtberatwork 5y ago
This is a meta-analysis so the conclusions will depend entirely on how they are filtering studies. A bit of their criteria: > We have seen no studies which we believe credibly separate the effect of early lockdown from the effect of early voluntary behavior changes. Instead, the estimates in these studies capture the effects of lockdowns and voluntary behavior changes. As Herby (2021) illustrates, voluntary behavior changes are essential to a society’s response to an pandemic and can account for up to 90% of societies’ total response to the pandemic. Including these studies will greatly overestimate the effect of lockdowns, and, hence, we chose not to include studies focusing on timing of lockdowns in our review. From my perspective, it would seem like "voluntary behavior changes" are a core element of lockdowns, so I am not seeing why they would wish to exclude that from their analysis (other than that it goes against their thesis?). Also, I think the Daily Wire article does a disservice to their readers by glossing over key caveats such as "voluntary behavior changes" effects on the pandemic.
Day1 5y ago
I think this was a universal conclusion early in the pandemic for anyone with a background rigorous in statistics.
- traveler01 5y ago
  I figured out that most of the stuff was being ineffective when they stopped talking about Sweden...
  - VaxWithSex 5y ago
    Whoops: The COVID-19-associated mortality rates per 100,000 person-weeks during the first wave of the pandemic were 0.3 in Norway and 2.9 in Sweden https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34609261/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34609261/
    - logifail 5y ago
      > during the first wave Are there many countries which have only had one wave of Covid? May 2020, Anders Tegnell [Sweden’s state epidemiologist] said Covid was a virus "we're going to have to live with for a very long time"[0] November 2021, he said "Now, we’re two years into this and Sweden doesn’t really stand out. We’re not the best, but we’re definitely not the worst. That’s what I hear now: how much good did all these draconian [measures] do for anybody?"[1] [0] https://www.ft.com/content/a2b4c18c-a5e8-4edc-8047-ade4a82a548d https://www.ft.com/content/a2b4c18c-a5e8-4edc-8047-ade4a82a5... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/0c07de5f-e852-4c23-823b-5f8f7d18ebef https://www.ft.com/content/0c07de5f-e852-4c23-823b-5f8f7d18e...
    - traveler01 5y ago
      And pretty much in the end they have basically same death rates as other countries. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-mortality-idUSKBN2BG1R9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe... Also, Portugal has higher death rates than Sweden. Same population. What can we take from this? Population density in stric geographical zones don't help at all in pandemics, and your country should have a good healthcare system ready to take these kind of pandemic situations. Also, let's see how useless those measures are when you start measuring the weight of the economic disaster that's coming up.
fcurts 5y ago
Some criticism from the scientific community: * Not peer-reviewed * Not published in a journal (but self-published on a personal website) * Questionable filtering excludes high-quality studies * Questionable weighting boosts low-quality studies
Aachen 5y ago
In my circles (Netherlands/Germany) the people that go out all got covid, the people that could stay at home didn't. Not everyone has a choice here, like if you have school-age kids then you're almost guaranteed to get it through them. Not having contact with others is obviously effective in avoiding covid and lowering hospital loads. The question is at what point hospitalization rates are low enough (from vaccinations and prior infections) that we can stop staying at home.
- dwaite 5y ago
  > The question is at what point hospitalization rates are low enough (from vaccinations and prior infections) that we can stop staying at home. The reality is that most of the response policy has been driven by protecting infrastructure rather than directly trying to protect people. The goal of lockdowns as well as other preventive measures is to smooth the curve and keep hospitals, food production, child care, mass transit and goods transportation, etc from collapsing. Once the estimate is that hospitals have a healthy margin of ICU space available with less restrictions, restrictions have often been immediately dropped. Personally instigated restrictions, such as someone choosing to stay at home when here is no mandate, is much more nuanced.
logifail 5y ago
> it would seem like "voluntary behavior changes" are a core element of lockdowns[..] We were sent home by police during our first lockdown. We had gone for a walk with the kids and were enjoying the sun sitting by the side of a local river with absolutely no-one else around. That certainly wasn't a "voluntary behavior change".
Isinlor 5y ago
Lock-downs obviously work/worked in China, Australia, New Zealand etc. From first principles, lock-down will obviously work when you isolate everyone in the society. The less stringent the lock-down the less effect it will have. The real question is not whether they work, but the tradeoffs. Do we want totalitarian style lock-downs?
- Ourgon 5y ago
  How do you define "worked", and how long a period do you use to make that conclusion? Compared to e.g. Sweden the number of deaths from SARS2 per capita is lower in those countries you mention but the damage from locking down is higher. If the damage from locking down exceeds the reduction in deaths from SARS2 locking down is a net negative and as such does not "work". Seeing how as locking down is likely to have longer-term negative consequences it will take a while before the real costs of lockdowns can be calculated. Even the premise of lockdowns "working" is questionable for infections which become endemic and as such will eventually come to all unless an effective vaccine is developed. If a lockdown can keep the bulk of the population free from infection until such a vaccine is realised it can work but the current crop of vaccines clearly does not meet those demands.
  - Isinlor 5y ago
    I don't know what you are arguing against: > The real question is not whether they work, but the tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are hard. Also, objectives when balancing tradeoffs are subjective. But you can suppress the virus for as long as you want if you are willing to accept the tradeoffs.
    - Ourgon 5y ago
      I'm questioning the definition of a "working" lockdown. I consider the trade-offs to be part of the definition of "working" in such a way that, as far as I'm concerned, lockdown does not work for this disease. This would change if the disease were to have a bad outcome for a larger part of the population or if the demography of the affected population was weighted towards younger people (like the "Spanish flu").
detaro 5y ago
existing HN dicussion of said paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167436
nenadst 5y ago
if you look at this tweet https://twitter.com/lonnibesancon/status/1488409297860153345 https://twitter.com/lonnibesancon/status/1488409297860153345 ..." The series in which this is published does not peer-review, and contains all of the last authors' work... ... that major papers are omitted in this "meta-analysis" " So no peer-review, written in a journal that has close ties to one of the authors and omitted major papers that should have been included.
Youden 5y ago
I think Australia and New Zealand are convincing counter-examples. It's not that lockdowns are ineffective, it's that half-arsed partial lockdowns ended before elimination are ineffective. Before I hear the standard "but it's an island" argument: yes, Australia and New Zealand can shut down international travel with relative ease, but so can any sovereign nation. Even countries in Schengen have been managing their own border restrictions. The usual followup argument is "but there's so much trade and cross-border travel, it's impractical to shut it down". There's a counter to that in Australia too: the quarantine of Melbourne from the rest of the state. Travel into and out of Melbourne required a permit while the city was in lockdown and the permit was only granted for a limited set of reasons, like work, delivering goods, or medical care. Imagine quarantining LA from the rest of California, or London from the rest of England. That's what Australia did.
- Mandatum 5y ago
  Yeah and both have now given up on lockdowns as the latest variant is too widespread. They were effective originally - and bought both countries time to vaccinate 80% of 16+ population, and I think if there's ever a new pandemic - this is the initial solution. But after 2ish years, it's time to give up on this.
WalterGR 5y ago
Don’t know about the study, but Wikipedia doesn’t have much good to say about the publisher of the random article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Wire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Wire
fabiofzero 5y ago
I think I will stay away from this comments section and have a stiff drink.

Aachen 5y ago

(Sarcasm) Yes this was always very obvious, that's why we're doing this whole work from home movement, why lockdowns are still used against omicron, etc. The statistics were very available as well, anyone with a brain could figure this out "early in the pandemic".

native_samples 5y ago
Yes, that's correct, your sarcasm is misplaced. It was clear within a month or two that lockdowns weren't working, because when examining all the available data from all countries: 1. Waves peaked and went into decline at the wrong times for lockdowns to have been the cause. 2. There was no correlation between lockdown severity and outcomes. It also became clear that having committed to such a disastrous and stupid policy, public health people couldn't then admit it had failed despite the clarity of the data, so they simply ignored it all, then told everyone it was a great success and we had to keep on doing it. The press fell into line and now, even two years later, we have the problem of people like yourself who assume that if we are doing it, it must therefore work. Oh, how easy life would be if that were so. The reality is lockdowns are still sporadically happening and they're slow to let go of WFH, because public health is an institutionally corrupt and unethical profession at every level. Because you can't do something like lock down a country and then admit it was a bad idea, in a reputation based field, whilst keeping your status and career. Because lying is easier than admitting the truth. Because lots of people like having an excuse to WFH instead of going to an office. Because, because, because. But it's not because they work.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Point 1 is missing the word "only" before "cause" > The press fell into line and now, even two years later, we have the problem of people like yourself who assume You realize this sounds very conspiratorial? The government's ego got in the way, the press is in on it, all the sheeple just swallow it! Anyway no I'm not following much mainstream media, no idea what they say about lockdowns. I didn't hear it being called a success or failure anywhere honestly. I do follow OWID data daily, looking at the various stats like excess deaths, deaths directly attributed to covid, share or positive tests, vaccinations, etc. I mostly make choices based on data, not media coverage (I don't even know what the current official rules in my country are anymore, they're always way behind the facts anyway). Furthermore, elsewhere in this thread I wrote: > In my circles (Netherlands/Germany) the people that go out all got covid, the people that could stay at home didn't. Not everyone has a choice here, like if you have school-age kids then you're almost guaranteed to get it through them. That's what I'm basing this on. Idk if rules from the government help when the only ones following them are the people with a brain who'd have stayed at home anyway. Maybe it does because it creates a legal reason to keep your children at home during the worst of it (namely before we had vaccinations and keeping kids home actually saved lives). > It was clear within a month or two If that's so, what was this based on? Was there a single statistician on this earth that said they had sufficient and reliable data to draw such a conclusion after just one month? Or two? With a confidence high enough to say we might as well go and party rather than keep doing lockdowns, knowing that, if wrong, they'd kill a million people by the time we had enough counter-data? By all means, share a link to such a post/comment if it was so clear to you and yours back then already.