What You Need to Know About That 'Johns Hopkins' Lockdown Study
— "All of this adds up to a very weird review paper"
A paper being touted as the "Johns Hopkins study" that suggested lockdowns didn't reduce COVID deaths has serious flaws and is being misinterpreted, experts said.
Fox News has charged that there's been a "full-on media blackout" of the paper, but science and medical experts argue the real reason for not covering the paper is because of its limitations.
First, the paper is a "working paper" that hasn't been peer-reviewed. Also, it was published on the website of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in Baltimore.
Study author Steve Hanke, PhD, is the founder of the institute. He is an applied economist, not an epidemiologist, public health expert, or medical doctor. Hanke is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Hanke's co-authors are Jonas Herby, MS, a "specialist consultant" at the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, and Lars Jonung, PhD, professor emeritus of economics at Lund University in Sweden -- a country that famously opted out of lockdowns and only recommended masks in public. Again, neither of Herby nor Jonung are medical or public health experts.
The trio are "highly regarded economists who have also been extremely anti-lockdown since March 2020," tweeted Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, PhD, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia, who posted a thorough critique of the paper.
Its key conclusion was that lockdowns only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2% on average, but several researchers said that number is unreliable.
For starters, experts commenting for the U.K. Science Media Centre warned about the paper's questionable definition of "lockdown." Samir Bhatt, DPhil, a professor of statistics and public health at Imperial College London, said in that statement that the study's "most inconsistent aspect is the reinterpreting of what a lockdown is."
"The authors define lockdown as 'the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention [NPI].' This would make a mask-wearing policy a lockdown," Bhatt stated.
Neil Ferguson, PhD, also of Imperial College London, said in the same statement that by that definition, "the U.K. has been in permanent lockdown since 16th of March 2021, and remains in lockdown -- given it remain compulsory for people with diagnosed COVID-19 to self-isolate for at least 5 days." Ferguson is the director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis and the Jameel Institute at the college.
Questions also have been raised about the quality of the included studies. Of the 34 papers ultimately selected, 12 were "working papers" rather than peer-reviewed science. And 14 studies were conducted by economists rather than public health or medical experts, according to Forbes.
Meyerowitz-Katz highlighted his concerns with the paper's inclusion criteria, as it doesn't include "modelled counterfactuals...the most common method used in infectious disease assessments" which excludes "most epidemiological research from the review," he tweeted.
He added that the "included studies certainly aren't representative of research as a whole on lockdowns -- not even close. Many of the most robust papers on the impact of lockdowns are, by definition, excluded."
"All of this adds up to a very weird review paper," he tweeted. "The authors exclude many of the most rigorous studies, including those that are the entire basis for their meta-analysis in the first place. ... They then take a number of papers, most of which found that restrictive NPIs had a benefit on mortality, and derive some mathematical estimate from the regression coefficients indicating less benefit than the papers suggest."
"All of this together means that the actual numbers produced in the review are largely uninterpretable," he tweeted.
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https://fortune.com/2022/02/04/fully-vaccinated-93-percent-less-likely-covid-death-compared-unvaccinated/
Fully vaccinated people are 93% less likely to die of COVID compared to unvaccinated people
“Smoking causes cancer, the earth is round, and ordering people to stay at home (the correct definition of lockdown) decreases disease transmission,” Seth Flaxman, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. “. None of this is controversial among scientists. A study purporting to prove the opposite is almost certain to be fundamentally flawed.”
Samir Bhatt, a professor of statistics and public health at Imperial College London, senior author on the first ever study comparing the effect of lockdowns, question how the authors of the new study define “lockdown.”
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220204/lockdowns-covid-deaths-study
A June 2020 peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature found that lockdowns prevented tens of millions of infections and saved millions of lives.
"Our estimates show that lockdowns had a really dramatic effect in reducing transmission," Bhatt, who worked on the paper, told NPR shortly after it was published. Bhatt’s team analyzed infection and death rates in 11 European nations and estimated that an additional 3.1 million people in those countries would have died if lockdowns had not been put in place.
Nature also published an early study from the Global Policy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, that analyzed lockdowns in China, South Korea, Iran, France, Italy and the U.S. It found that lockdowns in those countries averted around 62 million cases.
HealthFeedback, a science and fact-checking website, also found evidence in May 2021 that lockdowns saved lives.
The website found that the New York Post misrepresented an analysis by researchers at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy that used WalletHub’s ranking of U.S. states’ lockdowns from May 2020 to October 2020. It assigned a numerical value to the imposed restrictions and the ranking was correlated with the state’s average death rate over time.
According to the Post, the study found "little correlation at all between the strictness of lockdown measures and death rates." But the ranking had several limitations, including that it didn’t account for aspects like population density, use of public transportation, or the close living situations in urban areas, HealthFeedback found.
The analysis ultimately reported that lockdowns were effective in both reducing daily deaths in highly infected states and in preventing new spikes in deaths. "Additionally, this trend implies that states that are more open are susceptible to higher COVID-19 death rates," it said.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/feb/07/what-know-about-study-lockdowns-and-covid-19-death/
More than one thing can be true at the same time. The following are simultaneous truths:
1. Lockdowns decrease transmissions of diseases and save lives.
2. Lockdowns impair many healthful social interactions, which for some people can prove fatal.
3. Lockdowns cause economic damage.
4. Lockdowns fit the political agendas of some politicians and groups.
5. Lockdowns run contrary to the political agendas of some politicians and groups.
Here's the stupidty
A lockdown was imposed
People ignored the lockdown
The disease spread
People shouted that the lockdown didn't work.
However, there is another consideration. Lockdowns work but it depends on the kind of lockdown. Up here in Ontario, for example, our first one was very strict. Then it became a joke. Small groceries stores were closed. Big ones could stay open. Hardware stores were closed. Wal-mart and Costco, with their hardware sections, stayed open. And people began to wonder why being milk at the corner story or a hammer at Home Hardware put you at risk of CoVID while doing the same thing at Wal-mart didn't.
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