Building a narrative around lockdowns being more harmful than beneficial is simplistic at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. The lockdown is a powerful weapon, and for that reason, it should be used wisely (but it should be used when needed!). We seem to forget sometimes that some countries have indeed provided valuable examples on how to succeed at curbing the pandemics and the lockdowns have been one of the main tools they employed, but not the only one.
A very important point is that judging lockdowns in isolation is wrong. The reason why some countries have managed to successfully stop the spreading is not because of the lockdowns alone, but because multiple interventions taking place simultaneously.
Take the example of Australia. The lockdown in Melbourne lasted longer than in most places, but in the meantime, the borders were closed for most people, except for those Australians coming back to the country that had to go through mandatory quarantines in specifically designated hotels. Australia has also been very effective at contact tracing but that is something that works very well only if you have few cases (and what is the prerequisite to have few cases?). In Europe or in US is not that the lockdowns did not work (they work very well at doing what they have to do, stopping momentarily the spreading of the virus), it is simply that other measures were not taken simultaneously or they simply failed at implementing them.
Lockdowns are more harmful than beneficial with the few exceptions of those countries like New Zealand that successfully kept the virus out. For any country where the virus is already endemic, the damage done by lockdowns was immense, and the benefits relatively limited. Remember that the counterfactual is not ‘do nothing’. It’s ‘enact some more reasonable set of restrictions’.
Prof Douglas Allen of SFU just did a really good takedown of bad arguments in favour of lockdown. In his most unrealistic extreme scenario intended to steelman the pro-lockdown case, he finds that lockdowns cost 3.6x more than their benefits, at the opposite end of the spectrum, they might have cost as much as 282x more than their benefits. (His figures for Canada, but the argument should generalise to any developed country.)
This image is a good example of how distorted pro-lockdown arguments are. It’s taken from Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model used to argue for lockdown. Pro-lockdown cost-benefit analyses generally compare the blue line below (full lockdown) with the black line (do nothing) for an estimate of 120 lives saved per 100,000 people. It would be far more reasonable to compare that blue line to the brown line below (assumes case isolation and household quarantine but not lockdown measures) which immediately halves your assumed benefit for lockdown measures. Then remember that the Imperial College model is grossly overstated and assumes no public behaviour change in the absence of a lockdown. You get the picture.
>Estimates of the IFR have continued to fall over the year. The latest meta-study by Ioannidis (March 2021) estimates the average global IFR at 0.15%.
That’s completely off, and so obviously and indefensibly so that it discredits the entire thing, IMO. Maybe there are economic arguments that suggest that alternatives to lockdown could be better, but it would be irresponsible to update on that based on arguments made by a person who cites Ioannidis’s IFR estimates favorably. Ioannidis is a crackpot when it comes to Covid. It’s ironic that you write “This image is a good example of how distorted pro-lockdown arguments are.”
Also, from the anti-lockdown side I’ve always wanted to know how to justify letting hospitals get so overwhelmed that people will die of appendicitis – basic health care collapses for at least 2 weeks. Do we really want that if it’s avoidable? How would anyone feel as a doctor, nurse, caretaker, etc. if the government expects you to do triage under insane conditions when it’s totally avoidable? The anti-lockdown side has to engage with that argument. If you say the IFR is low enough that hospitals wouldn’t get overwhelmed without lockdowns, that’s simply not true and you’re engaging in wishful thinking or ideologically clouded thinking. I’m open to arguments that we should have a breakdown of civilization for 2+ weeks (and probably several times) if [edit] “more hidden” consequences are extremely catastrophic otherwise, but then one has to be honest about the costs of a no-lockdown policy.
Edit to add: It’s a strawman that policymakers compare lockdown to “do nothing.” And by now, even the people who initially got it wrong have understood that there are control systems, that many people will stop taking risks as they read about hospitals being overwhelmed. However, there’s a 2-week lag from infections to the peak of hospital overwhelm and if the government isn’t strict enough, you overshoot things really quickly. It can happen extremely fast. You cannot assume that people will always time their behavior the correct way to anticipate hospital overstrain that’s 2 weeks ahead. That’s what government is for.
Your arguments about health care systems collapsing in the absence of lockdowns are highly emotive but not factual. The experience from Sweden, from Serbia, from the US states which didn’t do second lockdowns, is that the health care systems didn’t collapse. You are arguing from the unexamined assumption that no lockdown means failed health care system and your assumption is empirically, provably false. Please update your views accordingly.
Now you’re moving goalposts. Of course you can find places that didn’t need lockdowns. I thought your position was that lockdowns were almost never/nowhere worth it. If your position is just “some locations didn’t need lockdown (e.g., the ones where governments decided not to do it)” – that’s extremely different. Whether lockdowns make sense is to be assessed case-by-case, because the virus (and new variants of concern) affected different locations differently.
In your other comment, you attribute a claim to me that I haven’t made (“you have provided zero support for your own claim that lockdowns do more good than harm”). All I did was saying that I’m already skeptical since you were making the opposite claim with extremely poor and flawed arguments; I didn’t sayI confidently disagreed with your conclusion. Pointing out the favorable mention of Ioannnidis’s 0.15% IFR estimate isn’t “nitpicking of your evidence.” It’s damning that you rely on a source that does this – it’s off by a factor of three to seven. After more than a year of the pandemic, you simply cannot be off about the IFR by this much without looking quite poorly. If someone (the person you were citing/recommending) writes an entire report on how bad lockdowns are but thinks the virus is at least three times less deadly than it actually is, this person seems incompetent and I cannot trust their reasoning enough to buy into the conclusion.
I see a lot of nit-picking of my evidence, but you have provided zero support for your own claim that lockdowns do more good than harm. I challenge you to come up with a published cost-benefit analysis that proves the same.
What would a good cost-benefit analysis include? There are a lot of harms caused by lockdowns. Some of them are difficult to quantify (eg my last point), but I think it’s reasonable to demand a cost-benefit analysis takes into account at least three of the following six harms (which are far from an exhaustive list):
Increased poverty is directly correlated to lower life expectancy, so we should measure the lost years of life from increased poverty. This is a very long-term effect, which will be doing harm for years to come.
Unemployment and financial problems are both ‘scarring’ (it takes a long time to dig yourself out) and both cause mental health effects. We should include the long-term mental health cost of increased unemployment and individual financial problems.
Where lockdowns include school closures, the long-term effect on children’s development and socialisation is extreme. We should include estimates of the lifetime impact on children, which will include shorter life expectancy. (Yes, shorter educations are correlated to future life expectancy.)
Additional mental health effects directly attributable to the lockdown including elevated rates of depression, stress and anxiety. Proper acknowledgement that some of these effects (eg increased alcoholism) have long-term effects which should be accounted for.
Lockdown sucks for everyone, even if still employed, not in school, and not suffering a formal mental health condition. We should acknowledge that this is a widespread disutility and deserves to be considered.
Lockdowns have set a deeply disturbing precedent that governments can remove almost all civil liberties when they declare there’s an emergency. This directly harms democracy and raises the risk of future loss of freedoms. (Yes this one is the hardest to quantify, but it’s important and I would like to see more people acknowledge it.)
An ideal cost-benefit analysis would acknowledge that benefits from lockdowns in terms of lives saved are uncertain and include a range of estimates, but if you find one that properly considers at least 3 of the above 6 points, I’ll accept it even if it has a point estimate for benefits. (Those using the initial Imperial College models should be at the top end of the range because the Imperial College figures are too high for all the reasons I’ve already said.) However, since you’ve said that “It’s a strawman that policymakers compare lockdown to “do nothing.”″ then I do expect your superior cost benefit analysis will compare lockdown to more reasonable restrictions, rather than a do nothing option.
So there it is. I challenge you: bring evidence or go home.
PS: If I seem to be beating the drum of long-term effects too hard, it’s because I’m still angry at the UK government’s (belated, poor-quality) excuse for a cost-benefit analysis which, among its many other failures, looked only at harm done over the next five years.
Thanks for the link. I have read the first part of the study. I tell you the things that make me suspicious about it:
First, it starts with a very broad definition of lockdown: “is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions”. Then, it proceeds to redefine the lockdowns of countries such as New Zealand as something else, “isolation”. To me, the thing that comes to my mind when we talk about a lockdown is that you forbid people to leave their houses for an X number of days. Correct me here if I am mistaken, I am not an English native speaker.
Convenient ignore that China has been one of those successful countries dealing with the Covid (not a single mention to it in the full document). I see that many times. New Zealand is used always as an example by people sceptical of lockdowns, for the reason that it comes with a built-in justification: it is an island. Well, China is much more densely populated than the US and they also succeeded, and it is not an island. Would have been capable of replicating the success without enforcing lockdowns? Why is China not discussed more in general?
Wrong use of counterfactuals. Those counterfactuals nicely generated do they really present realistic counterfactuals? Take for instance the blue line. It suggests that by taking some social distancing measures the number simply go down in a matter of ~3 months and then everything is over. That’s far from true. As soon as there is a single case out of control (and this is what countries like NZ, Australia or China understood very well), the pandemic is not under control, you go back right to the beginning. If you do apply strict lockdowns early you can aim to effectively eliminate the virus (but as I said before, you need to enforce mandatory quarantines and keep a very high level of testing and contact tracing). Is this counterfactual considered?
Building a narrative around lockdowns being more harmful than beneficial is simplistic at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. The lockdown is a powerful weapon, and for that reason, it should be used wisely (but it should be used when needed!). We seem to forget sometimes that some countries have indeed provided valuable examples on how to succeed at curbing the pandemics and the lockdowns have been one of the main tools they employed, but not the only one.
A very important point is that judging lockdowns in isolation is wrong. The reason why some countries have managed to successfully stop the spreading is not because of the lockdowns alone, but because multiple interventions taking place simultaneously.
Take the example of Australia. The lockdown in Melbourne lasted longer than in most places, but in the meantime, the borders were closed for most people, except for those Australians coming back to the country that had to go through mandatory quarantines in specifically designated hotels. Australia has also been very effective at contact tracing but that is something that works very well only if you have few cases (and what is the prerequisite to have few cases?). In Europe or in US is not that the lockdowns did not work (they work very well at doing what they have to do, stopping momentarily the spreading of the virus), it is simply that other measures were not taken simultaneously or they simply failed at implementing them.
Lockdowns are more harmful than beneficial with the few exceptions of those countries like New Zealand that successfully kept the virus out. For any country where the virus is already endemic, the damage done by lockdowns was immense, and the benefits relatively limited. Remember that the counterfactual is not ‘do nothing’. It’s ‘enact some more reasonable set of restrictions’.
Prof Douglas Allen of SFU just did a really good takedown of bad arguments in favour of lockdown. In his most unrealistic extreme scenario intended to steelman the pro-lockdown case, he finds that lockdowns cost 3.6x more than their benefits, at the opposite end of the spectrum, they might have cost as much as 282x more than their benefits. (His figures for Canada, but the argument should generalise to any developed country.)
This image is a good example of how distorted pro-lockdown arguments are. It’s taken from Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model used to argue for lockdown. Pro-lockdown cost-benefit analyses generally compare the blue line below (full lockdown) with the black line (do nothing) for an estimate of 120 lives saved per 100,000 people. It would be far more reasonable to compare that blue line to the brown line below (assumes case isolation and household quarantine but not lockdown measures) which immediately halves your assumed benefit for lockdown measures. Then remember that the Imperial College model is grossly overstated and assumes no public behaviour change in the absence of a lockdown. You get the picture.
I really do encourage you to read the whole study: http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf
The report you’re linking to contains this:
>Estimates of the IFR have continued to fall over the year. The latest meta-study by Ioannidis (March 2021) estimates the average global IFR at 0.15%.
That’s completely off, and so obviously and indefensibly so that it discredits the entire thing, IMO. Maybe there are economic arguments that suggest that alternatives to lockdown could be better, but it would be irresponsible to update on that based on arguments made by a person who cites Ioannidis’s IFR estimates favorably. Ioannidis is a crackpot when it comes to Covid. It’s ironic that you write “This image is a good example of how distorted pro-lockdown arguments are.”
I have looked into IFR estimates quite a lot when I was following Covid and I won a large forecasting tournament (and got 3rd in the year-long version): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xwG5MGWsMosBo6u4A/lukas_gloor-s-shortform?commentId=ZNgmZ7qvbQpy394kG
Also, from the anti-lockdown side I’ve always wanted to know how to justify letting hospitals get so overwhelmed that people will die of appendicitis – basic health care collapses for at least 2 weeks. Do we really want that if it’s avoidable? How would anyone feel as a doctor, nurse, caretaker, etc. if the government expects you to do triage under insane conditions when it’s totally avoidable? The anti-lockdown side has to engage with that argument. If you say the IFR is low enough that hospitals wouldn’t get overwhelmed without lockdowns, that’s simply not true and you’re engaging in wishful thinking or ideologically clouded thinking. I’m open to arguments that we should have a breakdown of civilization for 2+ weeks (and probably several times) if [edit] “more hidden” consequences are extremely catastrophic otherwise, but then one has to be honest about the costs of a no-lockdown policy.
Edit to add: It’s a strawman that policymakers compare lockdown to “do nothing.” And by now, even the people who initially got it wrong have understood that there are control systems, that many people will stop taking risks as they read about hospitals being overwhelmed. However, there’s a 2-week lag from infections to the peak of hospital overwhelm and if the government isn’t strict enough, you overshoot things really quickly. It can happen extremely fast. You cannot assume that people will always time their behavior the correct way to anticipate hospital overstrain that’s 2 weeks ahead. That’s what government is for.
Your arguments about health care systems collapsing in the absence of lockdowns are highly emotive but not factual. The experience from Sweden, from Serbia, from the US states which didn’t do second lockdowns, is that the health care systems didn’t collapse. You are arguing from the unexamined assumption that no lockdown means failed health care system and your assumption is empirically, provably false. Please update your views accordingly.
Now you’re moving goalposts. Of course you can find places that didn’t need lockdowns. I thought your position was that lockdowns were almost never/nowhere worth it. If your position is just “some locations didn’t need lockdown (e.g., the ones where governments decided not to do it)” – that’s extremely different. Whether lockdowns make sense is to be assessed case-by-case, because the virus (and new variants of concern) affected different locations differently.
In your other comment, you attribute a claim to me that I haven’t made (“you have provided zero support for your own claim that lockdowns do more good than harm”). All I did was saying that I’m already skeptical since you were making the opposite claim with extremely poor and flawed arguments; I didn’t say I confidently disagreed with your conclusion. Pointing out the favorable mention of Ioannnidis’s 0.15% IFR estimate isn’t “nitpicking of your evidence.” It’s damning that you rely on a source that does this – it’s off by a factor of three to seven. After more than a year of the pandemic, you simply cannot be off about the IFR by this much without looking quite poorly. If someone (the person you were citing/recommending) writes an entire report on how bad lockdowns are but thinks the virus is at least three times less deadly than it actually is, this person seems incompetent and I cannot trust their reasoning enough to buy into the conclusion.
I will drop out of this discussion now.
I see a lot of nit-picking of my evidence, but you have provided zero support for your own claim that lockdowns do more good than harm. I challenge you to come up with a published cost-benefit analysis that proves the same.
What would a good cost-benefit analysis include? There are a lot of harms caused by lockdowns. Some of them are difficult to quantify (eg my last point), but I think it’s reasonable to demand a cost-benefit analysis takes into account at least three of the following six harms (which are far from an exhaustive list):
Increased poverty is directly correlated to lower life expectancy, so we should measure the lost years of life from increased poverty. This is a very long-term effect, which will be doing harm for years to come.
Unemployment and financial problems are both ‘scarring’ (it takes a long time to dig yourself out) and both cause mental health effects. We should include the long-term mental health cost of increased unemployment and individual financial problems.
Where lockdowns include school closures, the long-term effect on children’s development and socialisation is extreme. We should include estimates of the lifetime impact on children, which will include shorter life expectancy. (Yes, shorter educations are correlated to future life expectancy.)
Additional mental health effects directly attributable to the lockdown including elevated rates of depression, stress and anxiety. Proper acknowledgement that some of these effects (eg increased alcoholism) have long-term effects which should be accounted for.
Lockdown sucks for everyone, even if still employed, not in school, and not suffering a formal mental health condition. We should acknowledge that this is a widespread disutility and deserves to be considered.
Lockdowns have set a deeply disturbing precedent that governments can remove almost all civil liberties when they declare there’s an emergency. This directly harms democracy and raises the risk of future loss of freedoms. (Yes this one is the hardest to quantify, but it’s important and I would like to see more people acknowledge it.)
An ideal cost-benefit analysis would acknowledge that benefits from lockdowns in terms of lives saved are uncertain and include a range of estimates, but if you find one that properly considers at least 3 of the above 6 points, I’ll accept it even if it has a point estimate for benefits. (Those using the initial Imperial College models should be at the top end of the range because the Imperial College figures are too high for all the reasons I’ve already said.) However, since you’ve said that “It’s a strawman that policymakers compare lockdown to “do nothing.”″ then I do expect your superior cost benefit analysis will compare lockdown to more reasonable restrictions, rather than a do nothing option.
So there it is. I challenge you: bring evidence or go home.
PS: If I seem to be beating the drum of long-term effects too hard, it’s because I’m still angry at the UK government’s (belated, poor-quality) excuse for a cost-benefit analysis which, among its many other failures, looked only at harm done over the next five years.
Thanks for the link. I have read the first part of the study. I tell you the things that make me suspicious about it:
First, it starts with a very broad definition of lockdown: “is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions”. Then, it proceeds to redefine the lockdowns of countries such as New Zealand as something else, “isolation”. To me, the thing that comes to my mind when we talk about a lockdown is that you forbid people to leave their houses for an X number of days. Correct me here if I am mistaken, I am not an English native speaker.
Convenient ignore that China has been one of those successful countries dealing with the Covid (not a single mention to it in the full document). I see that many times. New Zealand is used always as an example by people sceptical of lockdowns, for the reason that it comes with a built-in justification: it is an island. Well, China is much more densely populated than the US and they also succeeded, and it is not an island. Would have been capable of replicating the success without enforcing lockdowns? Why is China not discussed more in general?
Wrong use of counterfactuals. Those counterfactuals nicely generated do they really present realistic counterfactuals? Take for instance the blue line. It suggests that by taking some social distancing measures the number simply go down in a matter of ~3 months and then everything is over. That’s far from true. As soon as there is a single case out of control (and this is what countries like NZ, Australia or China understood very well), the pandemic is not under control, you go back right to the beginning. If you do apply strict lockdowns early you can aim to effectively eliminate the virus (but as I said before, you need to enforce mandatory quarantines and keep a very high level of testing and contact tracing). Is this counterfactual considered?