The Case Against Lockdown: A Reply to Christopher Snowdon
No doubt the pandemic would have had a negative impact on the global economy ceteris paribus, but it has surely been exacerbated by the lockdowns.
I enjoyed reading Christopher Snowdonâs critique of lockdown sceptics (âRise of the Coronavirus Cranksâ). Chris is a lively and entertaining writer and he does a great line in withering scorn (âThere is no shortage of stupidity on Twitter, but this is something different, something almost transcendentâ). He posed some tough questions for people like meâIâve been editing a website called Lockdown Sceptics since April of last yearâand he identified some key weaknesses in the anti-lockdown case. Having said that, I wonât bother responding to his detailed criticisms of Ivor Cummins and Michael Yeadon because I donât think the case against the lockdown policy stands or falls on whether their analysis is correct.
We can quibble about the reliability of industrial-scale PCR testing, whether the âsecond waveâ in Europe and America has been ameliorated by naturally acquired immunity and whether deaths due to other diseases have being wrongly classified as deaths due to novel coronavirus. But that is largely beside the point. Sceptics could concede all of Snowdonâs pointsâacknowledge that the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 is every bit as grave as the most hard-line lockdowners say it isâwithout endangering the central limb of our argument. Our contention is that the whole panoply of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) that governments around the world have used to try and control the pandemicâclosing schools and gyms, shutting non-essential shops, banning household mixing, restricting travel, telling people they canât leave their homes without a reasonable excuse, etc.âhave been largely ineffective.
Sure, there are some peer-reviewed studies published in reputable journals seeming to show that these measures reduce COVID-19 infections, hospital admissions, and deaths. (See here, for instance.) But most of these rely on epidemiological models that make unfalsifiable claims about how many people would have died if governments had just sat on their handsâand some of these models have been widely criticised. The evidence that lockdowns donât work, by contrast, is not based on conjecture but on observing the effects of lockdowns in different countries. (You can review 30 of these studies here.) What these data seem to show is that the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in each country rises and fallsâand then rises and falls again, although less steeply as the virus moves towards endemic equilibriumâaccording to a similar pattern regardless of what NPIs governments impose.
The factors that affect a populationâs vulnerability to the disease are things like distance from the equator, previous exposure to other coronaviruses, and genetics, not how nimble or smart their political leaders are. (Although the timely introduction of port-of-entry controls for visitors from China may have contributed to the low COVID mortality in some Asian and Oceanic countries.) If lockdowns work, youâd expect to see an inverse correlation between the severity of the NPIs a country puts in place and the number of COVID deaths per capita, but you donât. On the contrary, deaths per million were actually lower in those US states that didnât shut down than in those that didâat least in the first seven-and-a-half months of last year. Trying to explain away these inconvenient facts by factoring in any number of variablesâaverage age, hours of sunlight, population densityâdoesnât seem to help. Thereâs no signal in that noise.
Incidentally, Snowdonâs claim that the first British lockdown reduced COVID infections is easy to debunk. You just look at when deaths peaked in England and WalesâApril 8thâgo back three weeks, which is the estimated time from infection to death among the roughly one in 400 infected people who succumb to the disease, and you get to March 19th, indicating infections peaked five days before the lockdown was imposed. Even Chris Whitty, Englandâs Chief Medical Officer, acknowledged that the reproduction rate was falling before the first hammer came down.
By contrast, the evidence that the policy responses to the pandemic have causedâand will causeâcatastrophic harm is pretty strong. Shutting schools causes significant harm to all children, but particularly to the least well-off. Telling people theyâre not allowed to socialiseâno restaurants, bars, or cafĂ©, no festivals or sporting eventsâhas contributed to a mental health crisis that has seen âdeaths of despairâ spike up. Closing non-essential businesses and ordering everyone to stay at home has caused jaw-dropping economic contractionsâthe UK economy shrunk by 20.8 percent in Q2 of 2020âthat have sent unemployment soaring and triggered a global economic recession that the World Bank estimates pushed between 88â115 million people into extreme poverty last year, with the total expected to rise as high as 150 million in 2021. Governments across the world have mothballed huge swathes of their economies in a largely futile attempt to mitigate the impact of the virus, burdening future generations with unmanageable national debts.
The counter-argument is that the economic damage, and the associated impact on public health, was inevitableâitâs a âpandemic effectâ not a âlockdown effect.â Another unfalsifiable claimâor is it? Happily for lockdown sceptics, we have a âcontrolâ in the form of Sweden, the lone holdout against the groupthink that swept through the leaders of Western Europe in February and March of last year. The Swedish government didnât impose a lockdown, yet its deaths per million in 2020 (from all causes) were bang on the European average, which is another inconvenient fact if you think lockdowns are a silver bullet. And while Swedenâs gross domestic product shrank by an estimated 2.9 percent last year, the eurozoneâs shrank by 7.3 percent according to the European Central Bank.
Historically, weâve almost never quarantined entire populations of healthy people to mitigate the impact of virus outbreaksâthis approach was copied by other governments after the Chinese Communist authorities did it in Wuhan last yearâwhich means we can compare the economic impact of SARS-CoV-2 with the H2N2 pandemic of 1957â58 and the H3N2 pandemic of 1968â69. There are no uncontested figures about how many people died in those pandemics, but various sources estimate that the second of theseâHong Kong fluâkilled between one and four million people globally. The worldâs population in 68â69 was roughly half what it is now, so the equivalent death toll today would be between two and eight million. Yet it caused barely a ripple in the global economy. True, there was a mild economic recession in the US in 1969â70, probably unrelated, but GDP only fell by 0.6 percent.
Noah Carl
So have the sceptics misdiagnosed the cause of the worst global recession since the Second World War? It doesnât look that way, although disentangling the âpandemic effectâ from the âlockdown effectâ is not straightforward. No doubt the pandemic would have had a negative impact on the global economy ceteris paribus, but it has surely been exacerbated by the lockdowns.
âThe logic behind lockdowns is difficult to refute,â writes Snowdon. âIf you reduce human interaction, you will reduce the virusâs ability to spread.â Heâs right that lockdowns do seem logical, even if theyâre historically unprecedented. This, I think, is one reason why the scepticsâ points have failed to land. Why havenât lockdowns worked, given that they do reduce human interaction? The biggest weakness of our case is that we have plenty of data showing that forced restrictions on peopleâs movements have little or no impact on infections, but no over-arching hypothesis as to why that is. We can speculate, of course. Could it be because few countries have stopped people going to supermarkets, which means herding them into enclosed spaces where social distancing is hard to maintain? Because lockdowns have meant people spending more time in their homes, where virus particles are less likely to disperse than in the outdoors? Because âkey workersâ are still leaving their homes every weekday, often using public transport? Because masks have led people to behave incautiously, even though the RCT evidence suggests they do little to protect the wearer? Because so much secondary transmission is nosocomial (occurring in hospitals or care homes) and lockdowns have little impact on that? (By July 19th last year, as the first wave of the pandemic began to subside in Europe, 47 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in Scotland had been reported in care homes.)
Itâs probably a combination of all of these, as well as the fact that many of the behavioural changes mandated by lockdowns had already happened by the time they were imposed, with people reacting spontaneously to the pandemicâor, rather, all the scary stories pumped out by the mainstream media. It is worth reminding ourselves that the total number of healthy under-60 year-olds who died of COVID in NHS hospitals in England last year was 388.
One of the more bizarre claims by lockdown proponents in the UK is that the reason our country has the third highest COVID deaths per million in the worldâin spite of three lockdownsâis because sceptics like me have dissuaded people from obeying the rules. That seems unlikely, given that the compliance of Britainâs population with the restrictions has remained high. Surveys indicate that âmajorityâ compliance during the second lockdown was 90 percent or above, which is probably higher than that of neighbouring European countries which are lower down the mortality league table, such as Germany and Holland. Another reason itâs unlikely is that powerful forces have coalesced to suppress sceptical voices, with governments, public health authorities, and media companies all working hard to banish the heretics from the public square.
But even though sceptics lack a convincing hypothesis to explain why lockdowns donât work, I donât think weâre obliged to come up with one. Surely, the onus should be on governments to show that lockdowns work if theyâre going to suspend their citizensâ civil liberties? For me, as a classical liberal, this is the most decisive argument against the draconian controls democratic governments have imposed in the hope of mitigating the impact of the virus. In the UK, one of the most high profile critics of the lockdown policy has been Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice. In a lecture last Autumn, he pointed out that the suspension of our liberties by the British Government âis the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our countryââgreater even than in war time. Not only has our government not persuasively demonstrated that this assault on our civil rights will prevent more harm than it causes, it hasnât even made an attempt to do that.
At the meeting of the most important elected politicians in the UK on March 23rd where the Government announced it was placing the country under a hard lockdown, a lone voice belonging to Jesse Norman MP, a biographer of Edmund Burke, asked whether the Government had done a cost-benefit analysis of the health and economic impact that showed this suspension of our liberties would do more good than harm. âAround the room there were blank looks,â according to a report in the Financial Times.
For any democracy to take such a step without first satisfying itself that it was essential to prevent great harm befalling its citizens is, to my mind, unconscionable. And Iâm surprised that Christopher Snowdon, as a Hayekian liberal, doesnât share that view.
