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A new way to look at lockdown severity and its effects. We have all heard of the Oxford lockdown stringency index described here https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus-government-response-tracker which uses 17 indicators to come up with a lockdown stringency score. What if we looked at cumulative stringency? 1/8
By cumulative stringency I mean the area under the stringency curve. I decided to look at the period from Feb 15 to June 30 2020 and sum the daily stringency scores. The max score for this 137 day period would be 13700 = 137 days * 100 max score. 2/8
As with my prior studies I looked at Western Europe. First the cumulative stringency scores, where Sweden is lowest. No surprise, but note Finland Iceland and even Norway score low. 3/8
Now let’s see if cumulative stringency correlates to fewer deaths. If lockdown was effective at all we would expect some relationship here. But, there is a week correlation in the wrong direction. More lockdown = higher max daily deaths per Million. 4/8
So we try again. This time using total deaths/million for the time period vs cumulative lockdown stringency. Once again, to the extent there is a correlation, it appears more lockdown= more death. 5/8
Finally we look for something that correlates well with cumulative lockdown stringency. And that is GDP growth. No surprise that more lockdown = more economic decline. Which of course has many serious negative effects in health and otherwise. 6/8
So once again we see no indication that lockdown accomplished anything other than destroying economies. Sweden wins again even with its senior care mistakes. 7/8
Why are some governments considering additional lockdowns in the face of minor case increases- when there continues to be zero evidence of lockdown effectiveness? Are they committing economic suicide just to engage in political theater? I say yes. What say you? /end
