Correlation between lockdown and death rates low-zero

 

Deaths per 100,000 by US State, marked up by
Governorship, Blue = Dem, Red = Rep

The above chart from Statista in the US, I've marked up with which Party the governors are. Reason: in the United States almost all the health policies and covid strategies are decided and carried out at State level, under the executive authority of the Governors. That's why it was always silly, or ignorant, or plain duplicitous, to blame Trump and only Trump for his "mishandling" of the virus response, when the response was pretty much all up to the Governors. (Still is).

The chart above, with the latest death figures per 100k people per state shows a pattern that hasn't changed much since the beginning of the pandemic and since I first pointed it out. In broad terms in the US, the Democrat run states were into earlier and stricter lockdowns, which lasted longer, than were Republican run states. 

The results speak for themselves: there's very little link between the two. Overall, one could argue (and I would) that Democrat-run states have done somewhat worse than Republican run states,  though TBF, there's not much in it. All top four worst-performing States, in terms of death rates from Covid,  are Democrat-run. Of the top ten worst states, six are Democrat-run. As I say: not much in it, but most certainly not the case, as the MSM would have us believe, that Republican run states have fared badly, worse than the rest, are killing our grandmothers, and so on and so on.

Of course one could argue, as some Occasional Readers have done, that the Democrat run states are more populous and have higher population density. That's no doubt part of the reason. But then we have states right next to each other which perform differently -- North Carolina (R) has much lower death rates than South Carolina (D), with the North having much laxer covid lockdown than the South. 

Note also the much maligned (in the Mainstream media) Texas and Florida. Both Republican both with very light lockdowns and no mask mandates. I've circled them in Red. They've done better than most, not worse. And yet, if all you listened to was CNN and MSNBC -- or 60 Minutes -- you'd think the governors there were out killing people. 

These figures back up what I've found at the global level, using the Lockdown Stringency Index from Oxford University and death per million figures from Worldometer (links top right). I first did this back in June 2020, and then earlier this year. Both times it showed no correlation (in fact, if anything a negative correlation) between lockdown stringency and death rates. 

There's yet to be PhD's to be done on this. I'm guessing they'll show what I'm claiming here; that there is little to no relationship between lockdown measures taken and the path of the virus. That being the case, if it is, the next time (hopefully after I'm dead...) we have to be far smarter. It's time to revisit the Great Barrington declaration, for a dose of sanity. And make sure we don't go through another episode of global "psychotic delirium", as Bernard-Henri Lévy says.