John Hopkins study says lockdowns are ineffective. What do you think?

This is a meta-analysis so the conclusions will depend entirely on how they are filtering studies. A bit of their criteria:

> We have seen no studies which we believe credibly separate the effect of early lockdown from the effect of early voluntary behavior changes. Instead, the estimates in these studies capture the effects of lockdowns and voluntary behavior changes. As Herby (2021) illustrates, voluntary behavior changes are essential to a society’s response to an pandemic and can account for up to 90% of societies’ total response to the pandemic. Including these studies will greatly overestimate the effect of lockdowns, and, hence, we chose not to include studies focusing on timing of lockdowns in our review.

From my perspective, it would seem like "voluntary behavior changes" are a core element of lockdowns, so I am not seeing why they would wish to exclude that from their analysis (other than that it goes against their thesis?). Also, I think the Daily Wire article does a disservice to their readers by glossing over key caveats such as "voluntary behavior changes" effects on the pandemic.

In my circles (Netherlands/Germany) the people that go out all got covid, the people that could stay at home didn't. Not everyone has a choice here, like if you have school-age kids then you're almost guaranteed to get it through them.

Not having contact with others is obviously effective in avoiding covid and lowering hospital loads. The question is at what point hospitalization rates are low enough (from vaccinations and prior infections) that we can stop staying at home.

Lock-downs obviously work/worked in China, Australia, New Zealand etc.

From first principles, lock-down will obviously work when you isolate everyone in the society.

The less stringent the lock-down the less effect it will have.

The real question is not whether they work, but the tradeoffs.

Do we want totalitarian style lock-downs?

My random sample of two contradicting approaches I know about closely-Israel and Sweden.

Israel reacted quickly and severely, forcing hard lockdowns. Sweden reacted slowly, late and with mild restrictions. The results, after adjustment to age, normal mortality rates and maybe removing outliers (Sweden failed to enforce restrictions on elderly care homes) are not that far in terms of mortality and it's too early to judge other effects.

The problem I see with the paper, and I haven't read it thoroughly, is that it doesn't suggest and check the alternatives. A policy of soft restrictions works well in a country with polite introverts that trust their government like Sweden but it might not work that well in Mediterranean countries where being physically close to others is the norm.

Anyway, it is good that there is academic research around it and that we may be better prepared for the next pandemy.

Some criticism from the scientific community:

* Not peer-reviewed

* Not published in a journal (but self-published on a personal website)

* Questionable filtering excludes high-quality studies

* Questionable weighting boosts low-quality studies

I think Australia and New Zealand are convincing counter-examples.

It's not that lockdowns are ineffective, it's that half-arsed partial lockdowns ended before elimination are ineffective.

Before I hear the standard "but it's an island" argument: yes, Australia and New Zealand can shut down international travel with relative ease, but so can any sovereign nation. Even countries in Schengen have been managing their own border restrictions.

The usual followup argument is "but there's so much trade and cross-border travel, it's impractical to shut it down". There's a counter to that in Australia too: the quarantine of Melbourne from the rest of the state. Travel into and out of Melbourne required a permit while the city was in lockdown and the permit was only granted for a limited set of reasons, like work, delivering goods, or medical care. Imagine quarantining LA from the rest of California, or London from the rest of England. That's what Australia did.

I can confidently say that lockdowns although almost impossible to implement in India did flatten the curve. The surge in hospitalizations during second wave was the real killer. Lockdowns when done with some coordination were more about controlling the response and distributing the cases over more no of days.

I always feel that in developed countries with 'space' lockdown should be much more effective but unless you are living off grid it is entirely possible that you will definitely get infected.

A lack of lockdown or any attempts at controlling spread is also political suicide in many places.

if you look at this tweet

https://twitter.com/lonnibesancon/status/1488409297860153345

..." The series in which this is published does not peer-review, and contains all of the last authors' work... ... that major papers are omitted in this "meta-analysis" "

So no peer-review,

written in a journal that has close ties to one of the authors

and omitted major papers that should have been included.

Don’t know about the study, but Wikipedia doesn’t have much good to say about the publisher of the random article.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Wire

The authors are trained in economics, not in public health, medicine, or chemistry/biology.

existing HN dicussion of said paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167436

I think this was a universal conclusion early in the pandemic for anyone with a background rigorous in statistics.

> it would seem like "voluntary behavior changes" are a core element of lockdowns[..]

We were sent home by police during our first lockdown. We had gone for a walk with the kids and were enjoying the sun sitting by the side of a local river with absolutely no-one else around.

That certainly wasn't a "voluntary behavior change".

I think I will stay away from this comments section and have a stiff drink.

Real lockdowns are effective as we see in China. lockdowns in the west are not.