Please be aware when reading this that the "Institute of Economic Affairs" is absolutely notorious in the UK for it's partisan and extreme libertarian views(at least in a British context), whether it be on tax cuts, climate change denial, promotion of gambling or the benefits of Brexit.
It is extremely secretive about who it is funded by, to the point of deliberately losing court cases to avoid having to disclose anything.
Even it's address, 55 Tufton Street is notorious as the home of multiple organisations which promote the same viewpoints, but it is by far the best known.
A brief attempt by Prime Minister Liz Truss to embrace it's economic wisdom by implementing massive tax cuts primarily for the wealthy without any decrease in spending almost crashed the UK economy and ended her term in office after a few weeks.
This doesn't mean everything they write is nonsense, but they most definitely will have started with a predefined conclusion and worked backwards to find a way to justify it.
Are British libertarian political views akin to an American ones: tiny government, lack of regulations, social liberalism, and fiscal conservatism?
The American libertarianism brand is tainted by the Koch brothers and their CATO institute, a think-tank that put out false IPCC "addendums" in furtherance of denying climate change and promulgation of junk science to support industrial pollution and deregulation.
As I said, there's no need to completely disregard what they say, but readers outside the UK should be aware that some aspects of how the IEA operates are controversial, and though it presents itself as an institution carrying out empirical research, it is in reality a political lobbying group.
“ COVID-19 lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions,” according to this peer-reviewed new academic study. The draconian policy failed to significantly reduce deaths while imposing substantial social, cultural, and economic costs.”
Wow. I distinctly remember how toxic this place became when anyone even hinted at questioning the lockdowns. …or even just asking for more information.
I hope many are spending some time reflecting on their horrible behavior and rash to judgement but I doubt it.
I remember a lot of sealioning and a lot of users here becoming frustrated at bad faith arguments. Debates were frequently less than civil.
Also note that you are quoting a relatively biased pro-business thinktank who is only looking at mortality and extrapolating success/failure. A complete perspective would need to look at reduction of local hospital system burden as well.
I don’t get it. How can social distancing NOT help during a pandemic?
Quote from the book 1491:
“One reason is that Indians were fresh territory for many plagues, not just one. Smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough—all rained down on the Americas in the century after Columbus. (Cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever came later.) Having little experience with epidemic diseases, Indians had no knowledge of how to combat them. In contrast, Europeans were well versed in the brutal logic of quarantine. They boarded up houses in which plague appeared and fled to the countryside.”
It does help. This is the first sentence of the Introduction (p. 21):
> Social distancing works.
The paper concedes this point, but wants to argue that government mandates are not worth it. The Introduction continues:
> If you keep distance from others, your risk of
being infected with a communicable disease is reduced. However, the fact that social distancing works does not imply that compulsory non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), commonly known as ‘lockdowns’ – policies that restrict internal movement, close schools and businesses, ban international travel and/or other activities – work.
They actually find that many of these activities do work. They just argue that compulsory government intervention saved many fewer lives than the actions were anticipated to save at the time and had other negative effects.
In that case, I'd expect to see more obvious correlation between areas where people were fairly observant of masking rules in public and a lower incidence of disease. AFAIK, that correlation is weak at best in general.
The places high in observence of safety protocols are cities, which are more dense, and they have a decent proportion of Republicans anyway. The different cities you might be able to compare (eg between different states that had different messaging and rules) are in different climates, so that ruins comparison as well.
But if we compare California to Florida/Texas, for example, we can at least say pretty conclusively though that the effect wasn't strong enough to overcome climate differences or whatever other confounding variables might be involved. So while we can't say for sure they aren't effective at all, we can place a limit on how effective they are based on the data, and as far as I'm aware, that points to them being marginal at best. They certainly aren't, in themselves, any kind of panacea for stopping a pandemic--that much has been proven.
Exactly. I've not done clinical research but I have done market research. And, while you can cherry-pick apparent differences (or lack of differences), construct stories around those, and just conclude some results are weird anomalies, at some point you need to conclude there's very little evidence there's a lot of consistent signal in some particular policy/demographic/cultural difference.
Well that's my point. If these measures were really so effective, then there should have been a strong signal in spite of the other variables, but we didn't see it.
It should be strong if the effect is strong. We find strong signal in noisy data in all kinds of contexts.
If all the states with masks and social distancing mandates had, on average, 30% less cases per capita than states without, that would be a strong signal even if it's not conclusive given all the other variables involved. I doubt any other variable could be found that would show that much signal. But we haven't see anything like that.
> It should be strong if the effect is strong. We find strong signal in noisy data in all kinds of contexts
And we fail to find signal, or can find whatever "signal" we want to find in all kinds of other noisy data. What says any kind of useful info is here to find?
At some point then though, it's about faith. The data is noisy but we believe this hard to discern signal to be true even in the absence of statistical evidence because it's complicated.
For many, that mitigation measures for which so much blood, sweat, and tears were poured into at significant cost and strife must have been worthwhile even given scant evidence.
"All" is doing a lot of work there. My experience in Massachusetts, for example, is that there was quite a high rate of compliance with public masking rules in general. Yes, some people were sloppy about wearing them and many wore less effective masks. But I saw very little outright refusal in indoor public places.
I think many people were practicing performative masking and social distancing in public spaces, while at the same time spending lots of time with relatives and friends in private. If the latter was what drove the majority of the spread, then masks and social distancing policies could only have marginal impact.
Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people were observant of some rules in public, but not in private, it would almost certainly make private transmission more prevalent.
That doesn't mean masks and distancing didn't work. It's quite possible that if they weren't being observed at all in public, the spread might have been a lot higher in this space.
Assuming the above is true, it's quite possible that public + private spread would have driven the pandemic to much higher numbers.
> How can social distancing NOT help during a pandemic?
It's not that it doesn't help at all. It's that it doesn't help enough to be worth the cost. As an analogy, consider that a wholesale ban on trains would help prevent things like what happened in East Palestine, but nobody thinks doing that would be a good idea.
I'm curious how this differentiates between voluntary and involuntary lockdowns. Locally, we had compulsory lockdown for quite a while, but it was not even close to as effective as the early self-imposed social isolation that people did entirely of their own choice.
In the US, specifically California, the so-called "mandatory" lockdowns were in effect without real legal threat. There were no police checkpoints and no meaningful enforcement. It was obvious that some people completely ignored the situation and did what they pleased regardless because they could claim they were "essential workers".
Organized gatherings are always going to attract more attention. Especially if they involve singing during a respiratory virus pandemic. There were some pretty good outbreaks related to group singing, as I recall.
Lockdowns would've 'worked' if everyone did it, hard and fast, at the same time. They obviously become less effective if the initial spread is not suppressed, then it becomes whack-a-mole. A lot of possible pandemics have been stopped this way, we just don't know about them because they were stopped.
The concept is no different putting in fire breaks to stop a forest fire - isolate the infected, infection burns itself out, end of pandemic without need for global vaccination campaign.
Lockdowns are a good idea at the beginning, bad idea in the middle, inconsequential idea at the end
They’re only a good idea if you have an exit strategy that is feasible.
We didn’t have one. We didn’t even seem to have an infeasible strategy for a long time! And as a consequence, lockdown became performative rather than strategic.
If we’d have locked down hard enough, and if infection had fully died away without meaningful transmission to animals, then we’d have been able to unlock.
But we didn’t lock down hard, and probably we realistically could not have done so.
Good. "In hindsight, we have 20/20 vision." The next pandemic will be different, with a different virus, acting differently. And dear god, I hope that we again chose the side of caution and go into lockdown. Even if it turns out to be a nett loss for the economy in the end.
And a net loss for kids education, and a net loss for the vulnerable in who’s name the lockdown is enacted, and a net loss for the health of the nation who’s services were to be prevented from collapsing. It also would be good if next time we rely on those same set of “key workers”, who just so happen to be those that are relatively disadvantaged in political, health, and economic terms, despite that the next pandemic may actually have an IFR that matters more.
But it’s good to stiff the economy. That will make up for all the other policy failures. And more people will be on board with that next time so there won’t be any of that pesky criticism of the settled science that there was this time.
But good to stiff the economy. That’s what matters.
> The IEA is an educational charity and free market think tank.
> Our mission is to improve understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society by analysing and expounding the role of the markets in solving economic and social problems. Given the current economic challenges facing Britain and the wider global environment, it is more vital than ever that we promote the intellectual case for a free economy, low taxes, freedom in education, health and welfare and lower levels of regulation.
Which explains why they appear to be using weasel words and strained comparisons to downplay the benefits of regulation.
> Mask mandates, which most countries avoided in Spring 2020, reduced mortality by 18.7 per cent, particularly mandates in workplaces; and
20% less deaths in exchange for mandating wearing a paper mask seems like a good deal? Esepecially as they're not comparing to not wearing masks, but just not requiring masks to be worn.
Translation: make ad hominem attack instead of inspecting the data?
> 20% less deaths in exchange for mandating wearing a paper mask seems like a good deal? Esepecially as they're not comparing to not wearing masks, but just not requiring masks to be worn
That would be great if paper masks did anything to "control" an aerosolized virus. The RCT studies showing the worthlessness of masks in doing so are legion, and even the CDC and WHO wrote as much as far back as 2016.
It is extremely secretive about who it is funded by, to the point of deliberately losing court cases to avoid having to disclose anything.
Even it's address, 55 Tufton Street is notorious as the home of multiple organisations which promote the same viewpoints, but it is by far the best known.
A brief attempt by Prime Minister Liz Truss to embrace it's economic wisdom by implementing massive tax cuts primarily for the wealthy without any decrease in spending almost crashed the UK economy and ended her term in office after a few weeks.
This doesn't mean everything they write is nonsense, but they most definitely will have started with a predefined conclusion and worked backwards to find a way to justify it.