An opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal argued that the United States locking down amid the coronavirus pandemic didn’t stop its spread.
Donald Luskin is the chief investment officer of TrendMacro, a consulting firm on investment strategies, and wrote this week that the U.S. launched two experiments in March and then April: the lockdown of the economy and the reopening of the country, respectively.
“The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections,” he wrote in an op-ed titled “The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns.”
Luskin argued that lockdowns are not only costly but also pose health risks to citizens beyond the coronavirus.
“TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction,” he wrote. “That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a ‘Social Distancing Index.’”
He found that states with harsher lockdowns actually had the most cases of the virus.
“It turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns — the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts — had the heaviest caseloads.”
Luskin said that the lockdowns actually didn’t help stop the spread of the virus and that reopening the country “didn’t hurt.”
“The lesson is not that lockdowns made the spread of Covid-19 worse — although the raw evidence might suggest that — but that lockdowns probably didn’t help, and opening up didn’t hurt. This defies common sense. In theory, the spread of an infectious disease ought to be controllable by quarantine. Evidently not in practice, though we are aware of no researcher who understands why not,” he said.
He added that he’s not alone in his findings, citing a study from the Lancet, one of the world’s oldest peer-reviewed medical journals, which found, “A longer time prior to implementation of any lockdown was associated with a lower number of detected cases.”
“With the evidence we now possess, even the most risk-averse and single-minded public-health officials should hesitate before demanding the next lockdown and causing the next economic recession,” he concluded.
