Study bares hard truth: Lockdown a total policy failure yet govts cling to it

First word
IN a research paper published in April, Douglas W. Allen, an economics professor in Canada, has uncovered the hard truths about the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown policy most countries have adopted against it. He reached his conclusions after examining over 80 papers on the effects of lockdowns implemented worldwide by governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. His key findings were:

1. The lockdown policy forced the closure of businesses, supply chains and various sector activities, among other activities in daily life.
“But lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths.”

2. The policy started off on false assumptions and greatly overestimated the benefits of lockdowns while underestimating their harms.

3.  In Canada and other jurisdictions, responses to Covid-19 have been one-sided and unchanged since the beginning of the pandemic. Many jurisdictions have ignored new data over the past year, repeating the same response programs from 2020 to 2021.

4. Over the course of the pandemic, governments in Canada and across the world have not considered the benefit and cost sides of their lockdown policy decisions.

5. Governments, for obvious reasons, will not admit their mistake in their decisions during the pandemic.

6. Lockdowns could go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.

Cost benefit analysis of lockdown policy

Andrew Chen wrote a report in the Epoch Times on Allen’s study on May 5. He reported:
“Douglas W. Allen, economics professor at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, wrote his study after examining over 80 papers on the effects of lockdowns implemented worldwide by governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Primarily because he is an economist, Professor Allen’s analysis is distinguished mainly by its cost/benefit approach to his evaluation of the lockdown policy during the pandemic.

“He found that many of the early cost/benefit research started off on false assumptions and greatly overestimated the benefits of lockdowns while underestimating their harms. Allen noted that one great mistake found in those papers’ modeling is their negligence of voluntary changes in people’s behaviors that render lockdowns ineffective.”

Flawed models for lockdown

On May 10, 2021, Chen followed up with another report on Allen’s research study and an interview. He wrote:

“Professor Doug Allen wanted to know why so many early models used to create Covid-19 lockdown policies turned out to be highly incorrect. What he found was that a great majority were based on false assumptions and ‘tended to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs.’ He found it troubling that policies such as total lockdowns were based on those models.

“‘They were built on a set of assumptions. Those assumptions turned out to be really important, and the models are very sensitive to them, and they turned out to be false,’ said Allen in an interview.

“Allen says most of the early cost-benefit studies that he reviewed didn’t try to distinguish between mandated and voluntary changes in people’s behavior in the face of a pandemic. Rather, they just assumed an exponential growth of cases of infection day after day until herd immunity is reached.

“Allen says many of the studies early in the pandemic assumed that human behavior changes only as a result of state-mandated intervention, such as the closing of schools and non-essential businesses, mask and social distancing orders, and restrictions on private social gatherings.

“However, they didn’t take into consideration people’s voluntary behavioral changes in response to the virus threat, which have a major impact on evaluating the merits of a lockdown policy. …

Life years saved vs life years lost

“Allen’s own cost-benefit analysis is based on the calculation of ‘life-years saved,’ which determines ‘how many years of lost life will have been caused by the various harms of lockdowns versus how many years of lost life were saved by lockdowns.’

“Based on his lost-life calculation, lockdown measures have caused 282 times more harm than benefit to Canadian society over the long term, or 282 times more life years lost than saved.

“Furthermore, ’The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries,’ writes Allen. In other words, in his assessment, heavy lockdowns do not meaningfully reduce the number of deaths in the areas where they are implemented, when compared to areas where lockdowns were not implemented or as stringent. …

Politicians still follow same policy 

“Today, some 14 months into the pandemic, many jurisdictions across Canada are still following the same policy trajectory outlined at the beginning of the pandemic. Allen attributes this to politics.

“He says that politicians often take credit for having achieved a reduction in case numbers through their lockdown measures.

“‘I think it makes perfect sense why they do exactly what they did last year,’ Allen said.

“‘If you were a politician, would you say, ‘We’re not going to lock down because it doesn’t make a difference, and we actually did the equivalent of killing 600,000 people this last year.’

“You wouldn’t, he said, because ‘the alternative is they [politicians] have to admit that they made a mistake, and they caused … multiple more loss of life years than they saved.’”

Will IATF escape verdict?

Professor Allen’s observations about the unchanging policy trajectory of Canadian policy makers can certainly be said also of Philippine policymakers. Ours have not budged from their policy mindset since the start of the pandemic in March last year.

The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-EID) has inflicted on the Filipino people the longest lockdown/quarantine in the world — 14 straight months of lockdowns and still counting,

The Philippines stands alone among the nations in making mandatory the wearing of face shields and face masks together in public. The police have even been ordered to arrest violators of the mandate,

Strictly speaking, the IATF has never used the word “lockdown” in its policy mandates and resolutions.

It uses the term “community quarantine” instead, and painstakingly applies its multiple CQ classifications on hapless Philippine communities.

Will hairsplitting enable the task force to escape the verdict of policy failure? No way. The IATF will succeed only in fooling itself.

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