DATE IDEAS LONDON LOCKDOWN FREE

DATE IDEAS LONDON LOCKDOWN FREE

Its publisher is the neoliberal thinktank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, credited with coming up with many of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s free market policies. But the latest headline-grabbing version, “Did lockdowns work?” has come out as a book – a “revised and extended” version of the May working paper. In normal circumstances, scientists would wait for the research to be peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal to read the final word from the authors. The orginal paper described any government intervention, such as wearing face coverings, as ‘lockdown’. This time, instead of claiming lockdowns prevented only 0.2% of US and European deaths in the first wave, the figure became 3.2%, a 16-fold increase. The authors dropped some studies they decided were no longer eligible and changed some of their calculations. Version two appeared, again online, in May last year. The response to the paper fuelled a rewrite. As the study said: “We do not look at the effect of voluntary behavioural change.” That would include people choosing to keep themselves safe because there was a pandemic under way. Instead, it compared legally enforced interventions with interventions not required by law. He also corrected a potential misunderstanding: the study did not compare lockdowns with doing nothing. On reading the paper, Adam Kucharski, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, spoke of “half-baked methods”.Īt the time, Dr Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, distanced the school from the work, saying it was not a peer-reviewed scientific study and that “serious questions” had been raised about its methodology.

The implication was that a requirement to wear face coverings alone, or to stay home while infected, would qualify as a lockdown. And it defined “lockdown” as any government policy consisting of at least one nonpharmaceutical intervention (NPI), where NPIs meant measures such as closing schools or businesses, but also more minor things such as mandating face masks. It didn’t seem to take account of the timing of lockdowns. It focused on 34 studies, about a third coming from other economists, but excluded important epidemiological studies. The review raised eyebrows among many experts. The researchers were economists not epidemiologists or public health experts, namely Prof Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and the libertarian thinktank, the Cato Institute Jonas Herby, a consultant at the Centre for Political Studies in Copenhagen, and Lars Jonung, emeritus professor at Lund University in Sweden, a country famed for its looser restrictions on the pandemic. The findings were arresting: the authors concluded that lockdowns prevented only 0.2% of US and European deaths in the first wave of the pandemic.įor all the headlines that followed, the report and its authors drew flak.

In short, it looked for evidence that lockdowns saved lives. Last February, a trio of researchers posted a working paper online that reviewed published work on the impact of Covid lockdowns on mortality rates.

Date ideas london lockdown