Lockdowns or shelter-in-place (SIP) mandates did little to prevent "excess deaths." That is the conclusion that economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation came to following a study evaluating the net impact of SIP mandates on "excess death" data from the U.S. and 43 countries worldwide.
The researchers analyzed excess deaths or excess mortality by observing the number of deaths versus an expected number of deaths shown by statistical models.
"We use an event study framework to quantify changes in the number of excess deaths after the implementation of a SIP policy," the researchers wrote in a working paper published at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), as reported by the Epoch Times. "We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases."
After a thorough investigation into data from the United States and all 43 countries in the study, the researchers came to the conclusion that they "[failed] to find that SIP policies saved lives. To the contrary, we find a positive association between SIP policies and excess deaths."
The researchers said that they did not find lowered excess deaths in countries and U.S. states that implemented lockdowns or shelter-in-place policies earlier, which made such mandates longer to operate. They added that they "failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of SIP policies based on pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates."
The economists said that while there was evidence that showed shelter-in-place policies helped slow the spread of COVID early in the pandemic, more recent studies revealed that people changed their behavior according to the changing "dynamics of the outbreak" and not the policies of the government. Such recent studies showed that people "changed behavior in response to the severity of the pandemic and the enactment of SIP policy implementation lagged this individual behavior change," the researchers wrote.
Last week, The Conversation reported that "lockdowns are hard to evaluate" and that "it's impossible to definitively measure the effects of lockdowns" even if one launches a cost-benefit analysis on shelter-in-place policies. The report argued that communities that were subjected to "more intensive lockdown" were actually the ones who were "likely to be more vulnerable to the spread of disease, or with less access to medical care."
The report added communities with more intergenerational households did implement stricter lockdowns and shelter-in-place policies, but were also "also more likely to suffer high levels of virus transmission and death."
In Canada, some leaders are also against lockdowns, with retired Lieutenant Colonel and former head of Emergency Management Alberta David Redman telling the Lethbridge Herald that non-pharmaceutical intervention or NPIs, which are also known as lockdowns and shelter-in-place policies was not recommended for the COVID pandemic because it is a "moderate pandemic, not severe." Such lockdowns, he believes, should only be recommended "as a last resort in a severe pandemic only."
"When the disease becomes a pandemic - the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions has very low, if any impact on the spread of the disease," Redman argued.
