Not a single one has reported on the Johns Hopkins University study on the effectiveness of lockdowns the one at the screenshot above. Not a single one.
The authors of the study reviewed over 18,000 published papers on the effects of lockdowns (aka “NPI” or Non Pharmaceutical Interventions), which they winnowed down to 34 of the most relevant to their question: Did lockdowns reduce deaths from Covid? They describe in detail their methods of deciding the final 34, at the paper here.
There will be objections to the study’s findings like this:
...lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by about 0.2%...
Objectors will feel: but surely keeping people at home must reduce transmission? Surely? I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it?
The gut feel is “yes”, it must make sense, it must be effective, lockdowns must reduce transmission. It can’t be that we went through all that for nothing?!
The simplistic answer to that is that the virus has had its waves and that these are independent of NPIs. We know, for example, that in the UK the first and most extreme lockdown started after the peak of if infections had been reached and cases were coming down. They continued to come down. In all other cases, as the study shows, the ups and downs of the Covid waves were independent of the lockdowns. Just happened that the lockdowns were implemented at about the same time, usually as the latest wave was peaking.
This basic fact is proven from the case of the 50 states in the United States. About half are run by Republicans the other half by Democrats. Republicans kept restrictions as limited as possible; Democrats as strict as possible. Yet the results in deaths/million were very similar. (Even as the New York Times was massaging the data to suit a narrative....) The US is a perfect experiment in the two approaches: Lockdown or don’t Lockdown. And the latter is clearly the better. EG: Florida and California had similar population numbers. Florida is run by a GOP Governor. California by a Democrat. Florida has no NPI Covid measures; California has many. Strict lockdowns. Deaths per capita, however, are about the same. Even though Florida has many more elderly.
The reason this Johns Hopkins study is not covered, is because it doesn’t support the narrative of the mainly-left media: that the virus was and is an existential crisis which only governments can control. Yes it’s been and remains serious: but government lockdowns is not the way. That doesn’t fit the narrative, so they don’t cover it. Even if it’s the science. Even if not reporting it is a kind of misinformation.
ADDED (15:30 HKT): Talk Radio TV has report by Julia Hartley-Brewer. She talks to Prof David Paton about the Johns Hopkins Study. They make the point that one of the reasons cases had started coming down before the Lockdowns was that people had taken their own measures. People had started distancing, masking, hand washing, etc. anyway, and that the lockdowns came on the top of that and only impacted the economy not deaths/capita. Prof Paton says the government should commit to never re-introducing lockdowns, no matter the next covid spike, the next covid variant.
Another thing: telling people they should avoid outside, and stay inside was exactly the opposite of what we should have been, should be, doing. That, by the way, was clear from the beginning as we had the data from China, which I reported here, way back then.
RELATED: My email of 15 May 2020, looking at correlation between Stringency of Lockdown and Deaths per million
