Staying at Home Does Not Save Lives
Originally published on Medium 26 March 2021
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, one nation after another has adopted restrictions on basic liberties — including the right to move freely, to attend school or houses of worship, and to operate a lawful business — unparalleled in the peacetime history of any nation in the last hundred years. Now a study by a team of Brazilian researchers has effectively demolished the case for social restriction as a weapon in the fight against Covid-19.
The study, published in the March 5 issue of Nature, utilized an aggregated anonymized dataset collected by Google LLC via its Location History app, and utilized “Time spent in residence” (referred to by the authors as “staying at home”) as a surrogate for adherence to stay-at-home policies.
The researchers looked at data from fifty-one countries on four continents as well as three major international cities — New York, Tokyo, and Berlin — and compared the difference between two given jurisdictions in number of deaths per million population and the difference in the staying-at-home values, for weeks nine through thirty-four of the coronavirus pandemic. The global analysis yielded a total of 3,741 pairwise comparisons, of which sixty-three, or 1.6%, were statistically significant. The remaining 3,678 comparisons yielded no significant association between staying at home and covid mortality.
In plain English, covid deaths are not reduced by staying at home.
This is a staggering finding, one that deserves to be publicized as widely as possible. While the benefits of social restriction are basically non-existent, the harms are multitudinous and indisputable. Unemployment, bankruptcies, and rent delinquency all have soared, as have youth depression, anxiety, and suicide. In the United States, three million children have dropped off the radar — they’re not attending school, not even virtually, and nobody seems to know what has happened to them.
The devastation is international. In the UK, government borrowing hit a record high in February as the public sector struggled to cope with both the pandemic and the economic cost of the lockdown. Today’s children will still be paying off these debts decades from now. Disruption of childhood health and nutritional programs have killed 228,000 children in Southeast Asia. All the while, the fortunes of billionaires grow ever more tumescent, as government experts promise that masking and social restrictions will be with us for years to come.
Why is this allowed to go on? A recent report prepared by the UK’s Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART) invoked the “Sunken Cost” fallacy to explain all this:
World War 1 is the classic example. By Christmas 1914 it was obvious to all that the war was a catastrophe, but to admit this was to admit that all the lives had been lost pointlessly. And no country would confess that.
Indeed. But recent mass demonstrations in London, Germany, Italy, and indeed all over Europe hold out hope that the human spirit will not be confined indefinitely.