I enjoyed reading Christopher Snowdon’s critique of lockdown sceptics (“Rise of the Coronavirus Cranks”). Chris is a lively and entertaining writer and he does a great line in withering scorn (“There is no shortage of stupidity on Twitter, but this is something different, something almost transcendent”). He posed some tough questions for people like me—I’ve been editing a website called Lockdown Sceptics since April of last year—and he identified some key weaknesses in the anti-lockdown case. Having said that, I won’t bother responding to his detailed criticisms of Ivor Cummins and Michael Yeadon because I don’t think the case against the lockdown policy stands or falls on whether their analysis is correct.
We can quibble about the reliability of industrial-scale PCR testing, whether the “second wave” in Europe and America has been ameliorated by naturally acquired immunity and whether deaths due to other diseases have being wrongly classified as deaths due to novel coronavirus. But that is largely beside the point. Sceptics could concede all of Snowdon’s points—acknowledge that the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 is every bit as grave as the most hard-line lockdowners say it is—without endangering the central limb of our argument. Our contention is that the whole panoply of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that governments around the world have used to try and control the pandemic—closing schools and gyms, shutting non-essential shops, banning household mixing, restricting travel, telling people they can’t leave their homes without a reasonable excuse, etc.—have been largely ineffective.
Sure, there are some peer-reviewed studies published in reputable journals seeming to show that these measures reduce COVID-19 infections, hospital admissions, and deaths. (See here, for instance.) But most of these rely on epidemiological models that make unfalsifiable claims about how many people would have died if governments had just sat on their hands—and some of these models have been widely criticised. The evidence that lockdowns don’t work, by contrast, is not based on conjecture but on observing the effects of lockdowns in different countries. (You can review 30 of these studies here.) What these data seem to show is that the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in each country rises and falls—and then rises and falls again, although less steeply as the virus moves towards endemic equilibrium—according to a similar pattern regardless of what NPIs governments impose.
The factors that affect a population’s vulnerability to the disease are things like distance from the equator, previous exposure to other coronaviruses, and genetics, not how nimble or smart their political leaders are. (Although the timely introduction of port-of-entry controls for visitors from China may have contributed to the low COVID mortality in some Asian and Oceanic countries.) If lockdowns work, you’d expect to see an inverse correlation between the severity of the NPIs a country puts in place and the number of COVID deaths per capita, but you don’t. On the contrary, deaths per million were actually lower in those US states that didn’t shut down than in those that did—at least in the first seven-and-a-half months of last year. Trying to explain away these inconvenient facts by factoring in any number of variables—average age, hours of sunlight, population density—doesn’t seem to help. There’s no signal in that noise.
Incidentally, Snowdon’s claim that the first British lockdown reduced COVID infections is easy to debunk. You just look at when deaths peaked in England and Wales—April 8th—go back three weeks, which is the estimated time from infection to death among the roughly one in 400 infected people who succumb to the disease, and you get to March 19th, indicating infections peaked five days before the lockdown was imposed. Even Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, acknowledged that the reproduction rate was falling before the first hammer came down.
By contrast, the evidence that the policy responses to the pandemic have caused—and will cause—catastrophic harm is pretty strong. Shutting schools causes significant harm to all children, but particularly to the least well-off. Telling people they’re not allowed to socialise—no restaurants, bars, or café, no festivals or sporting events—has contributed to a mental health crisis that has seen “deaths of despair” spike up. Closing non-essential businesses and ordering everyone to stay at home has caused jaw-dropping economic contractions—the UK economy shrunk by 20.8 percent in Q2 of 2020—that have sent unemployment soaring and triggered a global economic recession that the World Bank estimates pushed between 88–115 million people into extreme poverty last year, with the total expected to rise as high as 150 million in 2021. Governments across the world have mothballed huge swathes of their economies in a largely futile attempt to mitigate the impact of the virus, burdening future generations with unmanageable national debts.
The counter-argument is that the economic damage, and the associated impact on public health, was inevitable—it’s a “pandemic effect” not a “lockdown effect.” Another unfalsifiable claim—or is it? Happily for lockdown sceptics, we have a “control” in the form of Sweden, the lone holdout against the groupthink that swept through the leaders of Western Europe in February and March of last year. The Swedish government didn’t impose a lockdown, yet its deaths per million in 2020 (from all causes) were bang on the European average, which is another inconvenient fact if you think lockdowns are a silver bullet. And while Sweden’s gross domestic product shrank by an estimated 2.9 percent last year, the eurozone’s shrank by 7.3 percent according to the European Central Bank.
Historically, we’ve almost never quarantined entire populations of healthy people to mitigate the impact of virus outbreaks—this approach was copied by other governments after the Chinese Communist authorities did it in Wuhan last year—which means we can compare the economic impact of SARS-CoV-2 with the H2N2 pandemic of 1957–58 and the H3N2 pandemic of 1968–69. There are no uncontested figures about how many people died in those pandemics, but various sources estimate that the second of these—Hong Kong flu—killed between one and four million people globally. The world’s population in 68–69 was roughly half what it is now, so the equivalent death toll today would be between two and eight million. Yet it caused barely a ripple in the global economy. True, there was a mild economic recession in the US in 1969–70, probably unrelated, but GDP only fell by 0.6 percent.
So have the sceptics misdiagnosed the cause of the worst global recession since the Second World War? It doesn’t look that way, although disentangling the “pandemic effect” from the “lockdown effect” is not straightforward. No doubt the pandemic would have had a negative impact on the global economy ceteris paribus, but it has surely been exacerbated by the lockdowns.