Johns Hopkins Study Finds Lockdowns Do Not Save Lives

A study published recently by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics has concluded that lockdowns have little or no effect on COVID-19 mortality.

The researchers defined “lockdown” rather broadly, as “any government mandate which directly restricts people’s possibilities.” This definition includes mask mandates as well as shelter-in-place orders and school and business closures.

The authors included only studies based on real data, as opposed to mathematical modeling. They restricted their analysis to cross-jurisdictional studies, excluding interrupted-time-series studies, which look at mortality rates before and after a given mandated non-pharmaceutical intervention is imposed. Such studies ignore the role of potential confounders such as seasonal variation in infectivity rates.

After examining 18,950 studies which potentially addressed the effect of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality rates, they found thirty-four which met their eligibility criteria. The researchers stated that all-cause excess mortality would have been a better endpoint than COVID-19 mortality, since lockdowns may have the effect of increasing mortality rates due to other causes such as overdoses and accidental injuries. Unfortunately, only one of the thirty-four studies that met their eligibility criteria looked at all-cause excess deaths

The analysis showed that the effect of lockdowns on COVID-19 mortality is negligible, on the order of one in five hundred. This estimate stands in stark contrast to the reduction in COVID-19 death rates as high as 98.6 percent promised in the early stages of the pandemic by British researcher Neil Ferguson. Professor Ferguson was forced out of his position from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after he was found to be meeting with his married lover while he himself was recovering from the covid – in blatant violation of lockdown rules inspired in a large measure by his own predictions.

The authors also evaluated the studies the analyzed by four measures of quality: 1) Peer-reviewed versus working papers, 2) Long time period versus short time period, 3) Papers authored by social scientists versus other types of experts, and 4) No early effect on mortality versus early effect. That last measured was used on the grounds that it takes about three weeks from COVID-19 infection to death, and therefore effects on mortality that manifested sooner than fourteen days after lockdowns were imposed likely were due to confounding factors, rather than the lockdown measures themselves. They found that the highest quality studies showed the smallest reduction in mortality.

Why are lockdown measures so ineffectual? The researchers suggested several different explanations. People will voluntarily change their behavior when they are told there is a public health emergency, and coercive measures may add little to the effect of voluntary behavior changes. Lockdowns affect only a fraction of potentially infectious contacts and cannot be enforce compliance with such measures as hand-washing, coughing etiquette, physical distancing in social situations, and the like. Any benefits that lockdowns do provide may be self-limiting: as cases or fatalities drop, people may tend to let their guard down and engage in more risky behaviors. Finally, some lockdown measures may actually be self-defeating: forcing people to stay at home may cause uninfected persons to isolate with infected household members, and consequently to be exposed to a higher viral load.

The authors concluded:

The evidence fails to confirm that lockdowns have a significant effect in reducing COVID-19 mortality. The effect is little to none.

On the other hand, the deleterious effects of lockdowns are well-established, and include reduced economic activity, rising inequality, business shutdowns, job losses, reduced schooling, political unrest, and increased domestic violence. The long-term effects of muzzling children and raising them in a fear-sodden atmosphere have barely begun to be assessed.