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>>Mass business closures would show up in GDP stats fairly quickly, i.e. be visible by now. Not when the state engages in deficit spending to make up for the l

>>Mass business closures would show up in GDP stats fairly quickly, i.e. be visible by now. Not when the state engages in deficit spending to make up for the lost income. That deficit spending will impact productivity over a very long period of time. >>Regardless, we need to compare to the appropriate counterfactual; you're still listing a bunch of bad things that happened, but implicitly comparing those to some world where the pandemic never happened - but it did happen, so that's not valid; you need to tease out how much of those downsides are due to "lockdowns" specifically. There's just not a lot of clearcut evidence showing lockdowns actually were worse than the alternative - self-imposed lockdowns, or pre-vaccination mass outbreaks. Obviously lockdowns increased sheltering-at-home/social-distancing behavior. If they didn't, there would have been no need to institute them. >>Some countries suffered more; others less; but I can't see a trend (maybe somebody can, but at least a few papers on the topic are clearly biased, which doesn't help). Here's a good meta study on the costs and benefits of lockdowns: https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf The conclusion is that the net effect of lockdowns was enormously negative. >>Furthermore, let's talk about that word "lockdown", which you describe as being rigidly present - well, 0% of the world's countries had rigid lockdowns for the duration of the pandemic. The definition provided in the meta-study linked above is: >>The term “lockdown” is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions. That is, the term will be used to include mandatory state-enforced closing of non-essential business, education, recreation, and spiritual facilities; mask and social distancing orders; stay-in-place orders; and restrictions on private social gatherings. Of course lockdowns exist on a spectrum, from most all-encompassing, to least. >>And even that belies practical complexities - I sure get the impression that most places, for most of the duration of the pandemic did not actually police many covid-restriction-violations very harshly. Of course, this is all very complex, but from what I've seen, the evidence suggests that the harm from non-pharmaceutical interventions that limited the right to free association and movement did massively more harm than good, even ignoring the harm to civil liberties. >>It's perfectly plausible that a country had excellent policy, including harsh lockdowns, real lock-down related damages, and high death rates - all at once! Because the alternative might have been much worse; and _that's_ hard to measure; we can't do randomized controlled trials on entire countries. Of course, and that is why being careful with which countries are being compared is important in trying to tease apart the effects of lockdown interventions specifically, as this analysis does: https://swprs.org/judgment-day-sweden-vindicated/ https://swprs.org/judgment-day-sweden-vindicated/

emn13 5y ago
The report you link is not a meta-analysis (at least not one I recognize). Also, meta-analysis is a freaking minefield: garbage in, garbage out rules the day - i.e. the quality of any conclusions is limited by how honestly and competently it was performed, and even then, errors in the underlying papers can cause significant undetected problems - and worst of all, because a meta-analysis is a big blender, it makes it harder to find real problems distorting the conclusions; there's just more to slog through. If you're really scrupulous and there's no other way, I get that it's a nice way to eke out a bit more statistical margin, but it's such a easily misused tool - if the topic is at all controversial, I personally wouldn't trust em for pretty much anything. But hey, this report doesn't seem to be such an analysis. That lockdown report makes exactly the same kind of errors your earlier reasoning did (i.e. attribute costs to lockdowns, rather than the pandemic, and ignoring possible benefits); I think the author is biased and decided not to follow the evidence, but rather to collect whatever arguments he can to arrive at his forgone conclusion. Notably, he spends lots of time trying to argue that the benefits of lockdowns were actually due to voluntary social distancing, but fails to do the same for the costs. The article smells like motivated reasoning - and given a topic that's so utterly impossible to study in isolation of course you can always find legions of reasonable sounding arguments either way. Also, the author is fairly blase in dismissing epidemiologists, which he is notably not - probably because expert opinion doesn't agree with him. And of course - if you define away the benefits to zero and assign all the costs to this account - hey, then the cost/benefit looks bad. But the devil in is the details, an that report makes no case as to why his particular way of accounting is any better than anybody else's. I meant to leave it at that, but that paper is so bad, I can't help myself: Like, what's up with Table 2: that's a classic case is intentionally confusing correlation and causation (and it's so egregious the paper's author tries to come up with some flimsy excuse for it) - countries that have worse outbreaks will choose to have greater stringency, but of course he literally makes the argument that because this is true, lockdowns don't work. Say what? What a hack. If the author were honestly trying to tease out subtle causes and effects rather than merely ranting along his preconceived lines, he would never have included BS like that as part of his argument. And if you google the guy - he's clearly been willing to lie with statistics before, including in a court case about same-sex marriages. This paper: same old, same old.

emn13 5y ago

The report you link is not a meta-analysis (at least not one I recognize). Also, meta-analysis is a freaking minefield: garbage in, garbage out rules the day - i.e. the quality of any conclusions is limited by how honestly and competently it was performed, and even then, errors in the underlying papers can cause significant undetected problems - and worst of all, because a meta-analysis is a big blender, it makes it harder to find real problems distorting the conclusions; there's just more to slog through. If you're really scrupulous and there's no other way, I get that it's a nice way to eke out a bit more statistical margin, but it's such a easily misused tool - if the topic is at all controversial, I personally wouldn't trust em for pretty much anything. But hey, this report doesn't seem to be such an analysis. That lockdown report makes exactly the same kind of errors your earlier reasoning did (i.e. attribute costs to lockdowns, rather than the pandemic, and ignoring possible benefits); I think the author is biased and decided not to follow the evidence, but rather to collect whatever arguments he can to arrive at his forgone conclusion. Notably, he spends lots of time trying to argue that the benefits of lockdowns were actually due to voluntary social distancing, but fails to do the same for the costs. The article smells like motivated reasoning - and given a topic that's so utterly impossible to study in isolation of course you can always find legions of reasonable sounding arguments either way. Also, the author is fairly blase in dismissing epidemiologists, which he is notably not - probably because expert opinion doesn't agree with him. And of course - if you define away the benefits to zero and assign all the costs to this account - hey, then the cost/benefit looks bad. But the devil in is the details, an that report makes no case as to why his particular way of accounting is any better than anybody else's. I meant to leave it at that, but that paper is so bad, I can't help myself: Like, what's up with Table 2: that's a classic case is intentionally confusing correlation and causation (and it's so egregious the paper's author tries to come up with some flimsy excuse for it) - countries that have worse outbreaks will choose to have greater stringency, but of course he literally makes the argument that because this is true, lockdowns don't work. Say what? What a hack. If the author were honestly trying to tease out subtle causes and effects rather than merely ranting along his preconceived lines, he would never have included BS like that as part of his argument. And if you google the guy - he's clearly been willing to lie with statistics before, including in a court case about same-sex marriages. This paper: same old, same old.