The reasoning given for justifying lockdowns by public health officials (& people) is based on the assumption that lockdowns drive down spread/transmission of a virus by reducing people’s mobility, which leads to less contact between people
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Hence, according to this hypothesis, if a population moves around more during a pandemic, viral transmission should increase, leading to higher cases/infections

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Does the data support this reasoning for lockdowns? Let’s compare people’s mobility to number of cases in Canada

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This is the number of cases from January till September. The red dotted line shows when Canada went into lockdown. Data is from Public Health Canada.

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This is people’s mobility in Canada from February to September. As you can clearly see, people’s mobility dropped steeply after lockdowns were introduced, however it started to rise very soon after. Data is from Google Mobility.

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Putting these graphs together you can see that number of cases continue to drop after they peak & at the same time people’s mobility continues to rise without plateauing

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This is direct contradiction to the reasoning that people & public health officials use to justify lockdowns. People’s mobility has no affect on number of cases.

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Interestingly, you can see the exact same relationship for England during the similar timeframe. This analysis was done by @RealJoelSmalley & it inspired me to look at Canadian trends. @ClareCraigPath @FatEmperor

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If your explanation for this inverse relationship between mobility & case number (mid-April to early July) is face masks, they were introduced 7th July, 4 months after cases started to decline & mobility increase. Ironically cases started to right after masks became mandatory

Social distancing during this time period was consistent.

Which then begs the question, what is the point of lockdowns if there is no relationship between people’s mobility & case numbers?

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