4 ms·

Johns Hopkins study says ill-founded lockdowns did little to limit Covid deaths

30 points by kerneloftruth 5y ago

jliptzin 5y ago
Wasn’t the point of lockdowns to not cause a rush to the hospital all at once?
- b0sk 5y ago
  That was pretty much the case! Also except for some time in 2020, there was no lockdown in US. The only thing that varied depending on the community transmission were the indoor mask mandates (and nothing of that sort in red states). Seems like a strawman.
  - neverminder 5y ago
    Lockdowns in Europe however were pretty brutal, lasting for months at times. I regularly had to wait up to half an hour in line for groceries here in UK, because home deliveries were obliterated by demand.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    If you have kids you've probably experienced some sort of forced quarantine based on incidental exposure. I would call that a targeted lockdown of sorts. It's interesting that it completely screws over the generations ostensibly most responsible for the future of the country. But we are all replaceable I suppose.
- Dwelve 5y ago
  Did that happen in all countries that didn't do a lockdown?
pkilgore 5y ago
A political scientist and two economists walk into a room and setup that headline. Sounds like this one needs some critical examination from expert sources before it's taken for anything.
- dayofthedaleks 5y ago
  At least these guys are consistent. Herby in 2020: [0] My results show that a large share of the excess mortality in Sweden in April 2020 may be partially explained by a vulnerable, elderly population due to very mild flu seasons in 18/19 and 19/20 as well as very few deaths during the 2019 summer compared to earlier years and compared to other Nordic countries. My results illustrate – and I cannot stress this enough – that plain coincidences may be important when understanding the COVID-19-death toll in a country compared to national lockdown policies. Note: Funding: I work for a libertarian think tank in Denmark. The funding is mostly undisclosed - even for employees - except for a few charitable foundations. Conflict of Interest: None. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3702595 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3702595
exotree 5y ago
This is very frustrating. We know that it was not meant to reduce deaths. The lockdowns were, and are, meant to spread out the deaths that we knew were going to happen. The goal was, and is, to avoid acutely overwhelming our hospital systems so people with emergency ailments like a heart attack could still get immediate care.
- hattmall 5y ago
  That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely. There were lots of estimates all over the place that said X amount of deaths in 6 months with lockdowns, and X amount with out, and things like staying home 2 weeks vs 3 weeks will save X many lives. It's my understanding that there are STILL places with some sort of lockdown going on. The effect of lockdowns is particularly difficult to quantify though because the results seem to have been mostly the same in my area which had no lockdowns / restrictions / masking after May 1 2020 and some other places which have had all manner of restrictions and some people are even still wearing masks nearly two years later. There are really so many variables and variable outcomes. It's really kind of a dream scenario for a data scientist because I don't know that there has ever been such a large push to make statistical information available. Their needs to be some sort of gauge / metric to quantify the level of restrictions and also look at the externalities of those.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - BaseballPhysics 5y ago
    > That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely What did you think "bend the curve" meant, exactly? But that was the mantra when these measures were instituted.
- ukie 5y ago
- gojomo 5y ago
  That wasn’t the only justification! The hope was also that by preventing such ‘overwhelming’, net lives would be saved – whether just by keeping those other non-COVID medical services available, or also by delaying COVID cases to later when knowledge or capacity would allow better treatment. If you believe this meta-analysis, even that capacity-sparing aspect showed very little effect on total deaths.
ukie 5y ago
dboreham 5y ago
As far as I remember, the majority of lock-downs were imposed only _after_ the local medical system was becoming overwhelmed, and in a direct response to that happening.
boringg 5y ago
Sounds like one hell of a clickbait title of scientific lit to me: "A LITERATURE REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWNS ON COVID-19 MORTALITY" FYI written by a bunch of economists.
- jriot 5y ago
  Economists study the impacts of policy decisions.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
  - boringg 5y ago
    I have no qualm with that - though they don't necessary think of all the issues and are measuring only one outcome. Economists sometimes focus on the box they can contain and aren't actually measuring all the externalities due to the challenge of it. 1. If we didn't lockdown - hospital system would have likely collapsed - more deaths illness in the system and secondary effects. 2. The rate of spread would have been faster and probably we would have seen variants get more traction. 3. Lockdowns bought us time to get vaccinations developed, manufactured and distributed and taking off some of the burden on our health care system for which we are only still paying the costs of (burn out for employees, delayed procedures etc). These guys clearly have an agenda .. one of them works at the Cato Institute. The also released this under the brand of John Hopkins knowing full well it would get attention for its Health reputation but its John Hopkins economics. Slimy.
    - jriot 5y ago
      1. Should we measure the impact of lockdowns on other types of deaths or adverse effects? Suicide, drug overdose, alcohol, the effects on children social learning? There will be adverse tertiary effects of lockdowns that we won't be able to measure for a few years. 2. The rate spread could have been much faster, leading us to Omicron, a mild variant with little impact. 3. Lockdowns brought economic/financial hardship on many people. Stimulus efforts provided little for those whose livelihood was impacted by government decisions. Your focus is on the healthcare system, but the economy is an extensively complex system that has been significantly impacted. Sure the report was released out of John Hopkins, but the authors knew it would reach a larger audience than released under the Cato Institute. These studies and findings are to enable discussion about future policy decisions.
pmarreck 5y ago
Let me know when someone has a rebuttal
- slowhand09 5y ago
  I'm pulling my music from Spotify. Good enough?
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    Ha! Actual intelligent discourse takes too much time, let me just take a virtue-signalling action and call it a day
- fer 5y ago
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34813628/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34813628/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34161818/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34161818/ Also the meta-study submitted is certainly creative in their understanding of the studies. For exmaple: > Using the OxCGRT and the World Bank datasets, our regression analysis reveals that containment policies have a significant direct effect in reducing the fatality rate of COVID-19 pandemic. Becomes: >A stricter lockdown (1 stringency point) reduces deaths by 0,1% after 4 weeks. After 8 weeks the effect is insignificant. (the 0,1% comes from nowhere on the paper)
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    sigh... Thank you for this.
glial 5y ago
The current spike in cases could be seen as a control scenario for what would have happened without lockdowns (remember "flatten the curve"?). For the Alpha variant, the case-fatality rate for the original variant was about 1%. In the US, the latest numbers are 424k/day. So we can suppose that if numbers were as high then, we'd have seen about 4.2k deaths/day, compared to the actual spring 2020 peak of ~2500. And that doesn't consider the probable knock-on effects on our medical system, since the hospitalization rate would have likely been much higher.
- smaryjerry 5y ago
  That case fatality rate was initially so high because there was no testing available and testing was saved for the most severe cases. If you tried to get a test you couldn’t, they wouldn’t give you a test at all unless you had confirmed contact with another person with a positive case, who also couldn’t get testing.
  - glial 5y ago
    Very true, though people were also unvaccinated so it's difficult to disentangle. Do you know what the case fatality rate is for unvaccinated folks with delta & omicron? I looked but was unable to find a good source.
bradgranath 5y ago
More ill-FOLLOWED, than ill-founded.

30 points by kerneloftruth 5y ago

jliptzin 5y ago

Wasn’t the point of lockdowns to not cause a rush to the hospital all at once?

b0sk 5y ago
That was pretty much the case! Also except for some time in 2020, there was no lockdown in US. The only thing that varied depending on the community transmission were the indoor mask mandates (and nothing of that sort in red states). Seems like a strawman.
- neverminder 5y ago
  Lockdowns in Europe however were pretty brutal, lasting for months at times. I regularly had to wait up to half an hour in line for groceries here in UK, because home deliveries were obliterated by demand.
- peteradio 5y ago
  If you have kids you've probably experienced some sort of forced quarantine based on incidental exposure. I would call that a targeted lockdown of sorts. It's interesting that it completely screws over the generations ostensibly most responsible for the future of the country. But we are all replaceable I suppose.
Dwelve 5y ago
Did that happen in all countries that didn't do a lockdown?

pkilgore 5y ago

A political scientist and two economists walk into a room and setup that headline. Sounds like this one needs some critical examination from expert sources before it's taken for anything.

dayofthedaleks 5y ago
At least these guys are consistent. Herby in 2020: [0] My results show that a large share of the excess mortality in Sweden in April 2020 may be partially explained by a vulnerable, elderly population due to very mild flu seasons in 18/19 and 19/20 as well as very few deaths during the 2019 summer compared to earlier years and compared to other Nordic countries. My results illustrate – and I cannot stress this enough – that plain coincidences may be important when understanding the COVID-19-death toll in a country compared to national lockdown policies. Note: Funding: I work for a libertarian think tank in Denmark. The funding is mostly undisclosed - even for employees - except for a few charitable foundations. Conflict of Interest: None. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3702595 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3702595

exotree 5y ago

This is very frustrating. We know that it was not meant to reduce deaths. The lockdowns were, and are, meant to spread out the deaths that we knew were going to happen. The goal was, and is, to avoid acutely overwhelming our hospital systems so people with emergency ailments like a heart attack could still get immediate care.

hattmall 5y ago
That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely. There were lots of estimates all over the place that said X amount of deaths in 6 months with lockdowns, and X amount with out, and things like staying home 2 weeks vs 3 weeks will save X many lives. It's my understanding that there are STILL places with some sort of lockdown going on. The effect of lockdowns is particularly difficult to quantify though because the results seem to have been mostly the same in my area which had no lockdowns / restrictions / masking after May 1 2020 and some other places which have had all manner of restrictions and some people are even still wearing masks nearly two years later. There are really so many variables and variable outcomes. It's really kind of a dream scenario for a data scientist because I don't know that there has ever been such a large push to make statistical information available. Their needs to be some sort of gauge / metric to quantify the level of restrictions and also look at the externalities of those.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BaseballPhysics 5y ago
  > That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely What did you think "bend the curve" meant, exactly? But that was the mantra when these measures were instituted.
ukie 5y ago
gojomo 5y ago
That wasn’t the only justification! The hope was also that by preventing such ‘overwhelming’, net lives would be saved – whether just by keeping those other non-COVID medical services available, or also by delaying COVID cases to later when knowledge or capacity would allow better treatment. If you believe this meta-analysis, even that capacity-sparing aspect showed very little effect on total deaths.

ukie 5y ago

dboreham 5y ago

As far as I remember, the majority of lock-downs were imposed only _after_ the local medical system was becoming overwhelmed, and in a direct response to that happening.

boringg 5y ago

Sounds like one hell of a clickbait title of scientific lit to me: "A LITERATURE REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWNS ON COVID-19 MORTALITY" FYI written by a bunch of economists.

jriot 5y ago
Economists study the impacts of policy decisions.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
- boringg 5y ago
  I have no qualm with that - though they don't necessary think of all the issues and are measuring only one outcome. Economists sometimes focus on the box they can contain and aren't actually measuring all the externalities due to the challenge of it. 1. If we didn't lockdown - hospital system would have likely collapsed - more deaths illness in the system and secondary effects. 2. The rate of spread would have been faster and probably we would have seen variants get more traction. 3. Lockdowns bought us time to get vaccinations developed, manufactured and distributed and taking off some of the burden on our health care system for which we are only still paying the costs of (burn out for employees, delayed procedures etc). These guys clearly have an agenda .. one of them works at the Cato Institute. The also released this under the brand of John Hopkins knowing full well it would get attention for its Health reputation but its John Hopkins economics. Slimy.
  - jriot 5y ago
    1. Should we measure the impact of lockdowns on other types of deaths or adverse effects? Suicide, drug overdose, alcohol, the effects on children social learning? There will be adverse tertiary effects of lockdowns that we won't be able to measure for a few years. 2. The rate spread could have been much faster, leading us to Omicron, a mild variant with little impact. 3. Lockdowns brought economic/financial hardship on many people. Stimulus efforts provided little for those whose livelihood was impacted by government decisions. Your focus is on the healthcare system, but the economy is an extensively complex system that has been significantly impacted. Sure the report was released out of John Hopkins, but the authors knew it would reach a larger audience than released under the Cato Institute. These studies and findings are to enable discussion about future policy decisions.

pmarreck 5y ago

Let me know when someone has a rebuttal

slowhand09 5y ago
I'm pulling my music from Spotify. Good enough?
- pmarreck 5y ago
  Ha! Actual intelligent discourse takes too much time, let me just take a virtue-signalling action and call it a day
fer 5y ago
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34813628/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34813628/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34161818/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34161818/ Also the meta-study submitted is certainly creative in their understanding of the studies. For exmaple: > Using the OxCGRT and the World Bank datasets, our regression analysis reveals that containment policies have a significant direct effect in reducing the fatality rate of COVID-19 pandemic. Becomes: >A stricter lockdown (1 stringency point) reduces deaths by 0,1% after 4 weeks. After 8 weeks the effect is insignificant. (the 0,1% comes from nowhere on the paper)
- pmarreck 5y ago
  sigh... Thank you for this.

glial 5y ago

The current spike in cases could be seen as a control scenario for what would have happened without lockdowns (remember "flatten the curve"?). For the Alpha variant, the case-fatality rate for the original variant was about 1%. In the US, the latest numbers are 424k/day. So we can suppose that if numbers were as high then, we'd have seen about 4.2k deaths/day, compared to the actual spring 2020 peak of ~2500. And that doesn't consider the probable knock-on effects on our medical system, since the hospitalization rate would have likely been much higher.

smaryjerry 5y ago
That case fatality rate was initially so high because there was no testing available and testing was saved for the most severe cases. If you tried to get a test you couldn’t, they wouldn’t give you a test at all unless you had confirmed contact with another person with a positive case, who also couldn’t get testing.
- glial 5y ago
  Very true, though people were also unvaccinated so it's difficult to disentangle. Do you know what the case fatality rate is for unvaccinated folks with delta & omicron? I looked but was unable to find a good source.

bradgranath 5y ago

More ill-FOLLOWED, than ill-founded.