Brad Palumbo at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education - h/t Instapundit) confirms what many of us figured out maybe a month into the lockdowns:
We Just Got Even More
Proof that
Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired
A new study finds that lockdown
orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.
Life under lockdown was hard for
all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of
restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19
have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought
by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home
orders may even have increased overall mortality.
In a new
paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND
Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates,
aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The
experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure
that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline.
The authors explain that lockdown
orders may have had lethal
unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug
overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly
delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether
stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths,
not just pandemic outcomes, is key.
The results aren’t pretty.
“We fail to find that
shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report.
Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these
policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been
declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study
finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies
corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.
. . .
Read more here.
Flashback: In July 2020. this blog linked to Heather
Mac Donald’s Imprimis article “Four
Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance”; click here.
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