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Lockdowns Don’t Work - Public Discourse.
Lockdowns don’t work. These other policies—travel restrictions, large-assembly limits, centralized quarantine, mask requirements, and school cancellations—do work. Because COVID is an extremely severe disease that, if left unchecked, will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, it is vitally important that policymakers focus their efforts on policies that do work (masks, central quarantines, travel restrictions, school cancellations, large-assembly limits), and avoid implementing draconian, unpopular policies that don’t work (lockdowns).
At this point, the question I usually get is, “What’s your evidence that lockdowns don’t work?”
It’s a strange question. Why should I have to prove that lockdowns don’t work? The burden of proof is to show that they do work! If you’re going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work. And there, lockdown advocates fail miserably, because they simply don’t have evidence.
The four-day rate of increase in diagnoses from April 17 to April 21 was 1.19. From March 17 through March 21 the rate was 3.5; it dropped below 2 on March 30. The lockdown seems to me the most plausible explanation for this.
ReplyDelete(In the absence of widespread testing, one can only assume that the testing has remained steadily bad, and that the numbers indicate some sort of trend. But if the testing had improved we should see the numbers go up.)