Covid-19 miscellany

[ZiprHead]

Omicron has 10% of the lethality of delta.

What a blessing. 10% the lethality, and SEVENTEEN TIMES the cases.
Only 1.7 times the deaths.
PRAYZA LOAD!

If someone wants to take on the task of teaching the statistically crippled why that's not a blessing, be my guest.

Let's go Darwin!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Omicron has 10% of the lethality of delta.

What a blessing. 10% the lethality, and SEVENTEEN TIMES the cases.
Only 1.7 times the deaths.
PRAYZA LOAD!

If someone wants to take on the task of teaching the statistically crippled why that's not a blessing, be my guest.

It is amazing that some people continue to show a complete misunderstanding of statistics, and refuse to learn from their mistakes.

The initial outbreak peaked at just over 2000 dead a day. The pre-vaccine Holidays 2020 wave peaked at 3500 dead a day. The Delta Wave peaked at 2000 dead per day. And our "not as deadly" Omicron wave peaked at 2500, second highest peak in the US for the pandemic. And Metaphor is going on about how less deadly it is. Well yeah, but the bug made up for it with transmissibility and public apathy and still killed more people than all but one wave... and AFTER WE HAD THE VACCINE!

Personally, I've had it with the fait accompli 'well this was going to happen anyway' bullshit, well had it a year ago. These people can't on making the same bad judgments over and over. And waving the Mission Accomplished banner with Omicron, when we are merely statistically more likely for the bug to whimper off... far from guaranteed. They talk about immunity, yet, that isn't warrantied either.

 

[TSwizzle]

Indeed, why does the legacy media ignore the study that shows lockdowns had practically zero impact on covid deaths?

Mainstream liberal news has largely ignored a new study showing that COVID lockdowns had virtually no effect on stopping COVID-19 - because they 'already have their own narrative written', according to the study's author. A review by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 - including stay-at-home orders, masks mandates and social distancing - only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2 percent. But the study was largely ignored by mainstream American media outlets, with just DailyMail.com, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the Washington Times publicizing it. The study was nowhere to be found on the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News websites, and while some regional NBC and CBS affiliates reported on the story, the national networks did not. On Wednesday night, a Johns Hopkins university professor who was not involved in the study slammed the media institutions for downplaying the study. Dr. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the private university in Baltimore, warned that 'people may already have their own narrative written' about the effectiveness of lockdowns in an interview with Tucker Carlson. 'Pretty quickly we started to get the data from Northern Italy that, not only was it not equally distributed in the population, but the harm was so profoundly skewed towards older people and people with co-morbidities,' he said. Even in the early days of New York, we got data that was largely ignored. That 80 percent of the deaths were in people over 65, and half of them, roughly, were in nursing homes.

Daily Mail

I think we all know why.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Indeed, why does the legacy media ignore the study that shows lockdowns had practically zero impact on covid deaths?

Mainstream liberal news has largely ignored a new study showing that COVID lockdowns had virtually no effect on stopping COVID-19 - because they 'already have their own narrative written', according to the study's author. A review by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 - including stay-at-home orders, masks mandates and social distancing - only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2 percent. But the study was largely ignored by mainstream American media outlets, with just DailyMail.com, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the Washington Times publicizing it. The study was nowhere to be found on the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News websites, and while some regional NBC and CBS affiliates reported on the story, the national networks did not. On Wednesday night, a Johns Hopkins university professor who was not involved in the study slammed the media institutions for downplaying the study. Dr. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the private university in Baltimore, warned that 'people may already have their own narrative written' about the effectiveness of lockdowns in an interview with Tucker Carlson. 'Pretty quickly we started to get the data from Northern Italy that, not only was it not equally distributed in the population, but the harm was so profoundly skewed towards older people and people with co-morbidities,' he said. Even in the early days of New York, we got data that was largely ignored. That 80 percent of the deaths were in people over 65, and half of them, roughly, were in nursing homes.

Daily Mail

I think we all know why.

Spamming the board now about the paper written by economists at Johns Hopkins.

 

[TSwizzle]

It is time we went back to normal;

Calls for the United States to declare the COVID-19 pandemic over and return to 'normal life' are growing, as cases have dropped 40 percent nationwide and it seems that all 50 states are past the worst stages of the Omicron surge that started late last year. But despite the growing sentiment, federal health officials have been slow to lift mandates. The U.S. is averaging 361,072 cases per day, a far fall from the 800,000 cases per day at the peak of the Omicron surge in mid-January. Dr Stefanos Kales, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school, told CNBC this week that the government made mistakes early on by choosing to value the opinions of infectious disease experts over all others during the early stages of the pandemic. 'I think what we saw is the danger of turning over public policy and public health recommendations to people who have had their careers exclusively focused on infectious diseases as opposed to public health in general,' he said. Last month, he published an article on LinkedIn calling for pandemic-related measures to be focused on the vulnerable instead the population as a whole. While some people with comorbidities that put them at risk of serious complications from the virus still do need some safeguards, the average healthy, vaccinated, person is totally OK, he said. 'We badly need to allow the general public, particularly the young, to get back to normal life,' he wrote.

Daily Mail

The authoritarians will not listen to science and reason though.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

It is time we went back to normal;

Calls for the United States to declare the COVID-19 pandemic over and return to 'normal life' are growing, as cases have dropped 40 percent nationwide and it seems that all 50 states are past the worst stages of the Omicron surge that started late last year. But despite the growing sentiment, federal health officials have been slow to lift mandates. The U.S. is averaging 361,072 cases per day, a far fall from the 800,000 cases per day at the peak of the Omicron surge in mid-January. Dr Stefanos Kales, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school, told CNBC this week that the government made mistakes early on by choosing to value the opinions of infectious disease experts over all others during the early stages of the pandemic. 'I think what we saw is the danger of turning over public policy and public health recommendations to people who have had their careers exclusively focused on infectious diseases as opposed to public health in general,' he said. Last month, he published an article on LinkedIn calling for pandemic-related measures to be focused on the vulnerable instead the population as a whole. While some people with comorbidities that put them at risk of serious complications from the virus still do need some safeguards, the average healthy, vaccinated, person is totally OK, he said. 'We badly need to allow the general public, particularly the young, to get back to normal life,' he wrote.

Daily Mail

The authoritarians will not listen to science and reason though.

No, no you haven't.

 

[ZiprHead]

Here is a link to the paper The Covid-19 Fraud & War On Humanity

Already starts out with a very scientifically derived title.

Then the very first chapter is titled

The globalist agenda​

A conspiracy theory.

I haven't read much further but I doubt it gets any better.

Great job, Tswizzle!

 

[ZiprHead]

My apologies. That's^ not the paper Tswizzle is referencing. He's referencing a "paper" published on Linkedin. Not published in a scientific journal for peer review. It contains no references. Here's one responce in the thread:

Dr. Raj Subbu
This is hardly a paper in the normal scientific course of peer review - just a typed 3 page individual opinion citing limited data and absolutely no references. Why pick LinkedIn and the media outlets as a means of dissemination? This is rather curious. Does the Harvard credential automatically give a pass on the need for peer review? Further, it is very unclear what is being painted as us continuing to live in a lockdown society circa Q2/3 2020. Reality could not be further from this for most of us who have figured out science informed common sense measures to live life, work, travel, and play while staying safe and not carelessly putting others more vulnerable at risk. As another commentator mentions no one has heard of people dying from the common cold. Covid obviously blasted into the scene in Q1 2020 with remarkably different traits and wreaked havoc worldwide until quite recently. It does not make much sense to throw away all we have learnt these 2 years just so those fortunate among us to be healthy can be less inconvenienced. Further, it is indeed wishful thinking that Covid will magically mutate into more harmless variants. Please cite the historical data that provides this assurance.

 

[Metaphor]

Omicron has 10% of the lethality of delta.

What a blessing. 10% the lethality, and SEVENTEEN TIMES the cases.
Only 1.7 times the deaths.
PRAYZA LOAD!

If someone wants to take on the task of teaching the statistically crippled why that's not a blessing, be my guest.

Actually, it appears that the lethality rate is much, much, much lower than 1/10 of delta's, as there is evidence the majority of people with omicron are not aware they have it.

Random COVID tests to be conducted after survey finds up to 90pc of positive cases don't know they have it

Two surveys conducted on the Gold Coast late last month reveal more people are living with the virus than reported, with authorities to conduct random tests this weekend to better understand the pandemic's extent.

www.abc.net.au

Omicron is 2.7 to 3.7x more infectious than delta. I don't know where you are getting your 15x multiplier.

Can You Get Omicron and Delta COVID-19 Variants at the Same Time?

With Omicron and Delta variants circulating, can you get both at the same time? Here's what infectious disease experts and epidemiologists say.

www.health.com

Omicron will usher in the end of the pandemic sooner than most alternative scenarios. Future waves will be less and will have lower total deaths.

I track the daily deaths from COVID. The daily number of worldwide deaths has been dropping since since 1 February. (It might spike however if infections go up after lunar new year celebrations).

 

[Metaphor]

I think many people on this thread appear to have had trouble separating out transmissibility and actual transmission rate in a particular time period and geography.

Omicron emerged at a time when a large number of jurisdictions had more relaxed public health orders than at almost any time since March 2020. In my jurisdiction at the time (late last year), there were no notable restrictions (except the person per square metre rule for indoor venues). In my jurisdiction prior to that, we'd had lockdowns, we had mask rules indoors and outdoors, mandatory digital check in to every business, playground and public venue closedowns, 'no contact' handovers from delivery services, restrictions on visitors in private homes. We'd had 14 day isolation periods which are now 5 day. (Not the case in Australia, but Omicron also emerged when the majority of the world's population was experiencing winter).

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Legacy media still mute on John Hopkins study that found lockdowns etc to cause more harm than good;

A Johns Hopkins professor slammed his university and the mainstream media for downplaying a study conducted by economists at the university that found that COVID-19 lockdowns only reduced virus deaths by 0.2 percent. Dr. Martin Makary warned that 'people may already have their own narrative written' about the effectiveness of lockdowns in an interview with Tucker Carlson Wednesday night. 'Johns Hopkins itself did not even put out a press release about this study, and if you look at the media coverage, it's one of the biggest stories in the world today, and yet certain media outlets have not even covered it,' Makary told the Fox News host. Economists at the college carried out a meta-analysis and found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 - including stay-at-home orders, compulsory masks and social distancing - only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2 percent. They warned that lockdowns caused 'enormous economic and social costs' and concluded that they were 'ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument' going forward.

Daily Mail

It's not being covered because they're recognizing it for what it is--shit.

1) Note that while they refer to "lockdown" they're really examining all NPIs.

2) It's designed to fail--they rigged it so it wouldn't see the successes.

3) Even if true all it's actually showing is that when you do a shitty job it doesn't work.

This is simply one of the myriad pieces of shit that have been flooding pre-print servers and then being trumped as "research" despite the fact that it hasn't gone through peer review.

It was also written by economists.

It's just data analysis, I won't reject it because they're economists--you don't need medical training to do this sort of study.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Indeed, why does the legacy media ignore the study that shows lockdowns had practically zero impact on covid deaths?

Mainstream liberal news has largely ignored a new study showing that COVID lockdowns had virtually no effect on stopping COVID-19 - because they 'already have their own narrative written', according to the study's author. A review by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 - including stay-at-home orders, masks mandates and social distancing - only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2 percent. But the study was largely ignored by mainstream American media outlets, with just DailyMail.com, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the Washington Times publicizing it. The study was nowhere to be found on the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News websites, and while some regional NBC and CBS affiliates reported on the story, the national networks did not. On Wednesday night, a Johns Hopkins university professor who was not involved in the study slammed the media institutions for downplaying the study. Dr. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the private university in Baltimore, warned that 'people may already have their own narrative written' about the effectiveness of lockdowns in an interview with Tucker Carlson. 'Pretty quickly we started to get the data from Northern Italy that, not only was it not equally distributed in the population, but the harm was so profoundly skewed towards older people and people with co-morbidities,' he said. Even in the early days of New York, we got data that was largely ignored. That 80 percent of the deaths were in people over 65, and half of them, roughly, were in nursing homes.

Daily Mail

I think we all know why.

Repeating the crap doesn't make it true.

 

[Jarhyn]

Indeed, why does the legacy media ignore the study that shows lockdowns had practically zero impact on covid deaths?

Mainstream liberal news has largely ignored a new study showing that COVID lockdowns had virtually no effect on stopping COVID-19 - because they 'already have their own narrative written', according to the study's author. A review by three respected economists from Johns Hopkins University, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, found that restrictions imposed in the spring of 2020 - including stay-at-home orders, masks mandates and social distancing - only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2 percent. But the study was largely ignored by mainstream American media outlets, with just DailyMail.com, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and the Washington Times publicizing it. The study was nowhere to be found on the New York Times, Washington Post and ABC News websites, and while some regional NBC and CBS affiliates reported on the story, the national networks did not. On Wednesday night, a Johns Hopkins university professor who was not involved in the study slammed the media institutions for downplaying the study. Dr. Martin Makary, a professor of surgery at the private university in Baltimore, warned that 'people may already have their own narrative written' about the effectiveness of lockdowns in an interview with Tucker Carlson. 'Pretty quickly we started to get the data from Northern Italy that, not only was it not equally distributed in the population, but the harm was so profoundly skewed towards older people and people with co-morbidities,' he said. Even in the early days of New York, we got data that was largely ignored. That 80 percent of the deaths were in people over 65, and half of them, roughly, were in nursing homes.

Daily Mail

I think we all know why.

Repeating the crap doesn't make it true.

"People over the age of 65 don't matter".

The thing that most often drives me to tears is the thought I will never get to meet my grandmother (in law) again before she dies.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

This is from a recent study reported on CDC website:

Also, in regard to the study that TSwizzle keeps posting about, here is a graph from FoxNews summarizing part of the findings of that study:

While conservatives keep screaming about the one statistic they like (0.2%), there are a whole bunch of other numbers, that even includes this nugget within the paper:

Mandating facemasks – an intervention that was not widely used in the spring of 2020, and in many countries was even discouraged – seems to have a large effect (-21.2%), but this conclusion is based on only two studies. 43 Again, our categorization may play a role, as the larger mask-estimate from Chernozhukov et al. (2021) is in fact “employee facemasks,” not a general mask mandate.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

While conservatives keep screaming about the one statistic they like (0.2%), there are a whole bunch of other numbers, that even includes this nugget within the paper:

Mandating facemasks – an intervention that was not widely used in the spring of 2020, and in many countries was even discouraged – seems to have a large effect (-21.2%), but this conclusion is based on only two studies. 43 Again, our categorization may play a role, as the larger mask-estimate from Chernozhukov et al. (2021) is in fact “employee facemasks,” not a general mask mandate.

Good find!

And it's quite understandable that there weren't mask mandates early on--there weren't enough masks to go around.

 

[TSwizzle]

From the UK;

The number of patients being admitted to intensive care units for Covid in England, Wales and Northern Ireland fell to as little as two in one day last month, according to data from the Care National Audit and Research Centre.

Daily Mail

The lifting of restrictions is long overdue.

 

[lpetrich]

Did So-Called ‘Johns Hopkins Study’ Really Show Lockdowns Were Ineffective Against Covid-19?

Have you seen the so-called “Johns Hopkins study” that’s been making the social media and Bill Maher rounds lately? Some folks have been asserting that this “Johns Hopkins study” somehow showed that Covid-19 “lockdowns” have been essentially useless. If you haven’t seen what they’ve been referring to, could it possibly be because there’s been so-called “a full-on media blackout” of this so-called “Johns Hopkins study,” as an article for Fox News has claimed ? Or maybe, just maybe, this “Johns Hopkins study” didn’t receive much press because it wasn’t exactly what some people have been claiming that it is.

...
Yeah, the University itself didn’t write the paper, because buildings can’t type on laptops without crushing them. Heck, the paper even stated that, “views expressed in each working paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions that the authors are affiliated with.”

...
Moreover, Maher didn’t clarify that the three authors were economists rather than medical, epidemiology, or public health experts. Isn’t that a bit like three proctologists telling you how the economy is doing? It’s not clear how much economists alone would understand the complexities and subtleties of medicine and public health. After all, if you were to end up in the emergency room with an injury, “don’t worry an economist will be around shortly to re-attach your arm” may not be the most comforting thing to hear.

...
This working paper did make some bold claims. For example, it concluded that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.” By the way, what did the authors consider lockdowns? Well, according to the working paper, “lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI).”

Holy changing definitions, Batman. By Herby, Jonung, and Hanke’s definition, even face mask requirements would be considered a “lockdown,” right? After all, face masks are a NPI since you don’t eat or inject face masks into you.

...
OK, changing definitions aside, did this working paper really provide enough evidence to support its bold claims? In a word, no. In two words, heck no. The authors claimed that they performed a systematic review and meta-analysis. That should mean that they should have considered and included all published peer-reviewed studies relevant to the topic at hand. Yet, this working paper did not include or even acknowledge many such studies that have shown the benefits of NPI’s such as face mask wearing and social distancing without explaining why the three authors excluded such studies.

 

[Metaphor]

Did So-Called ‘Johns Hopkins Study’ Really Show Lockdowns Were Ineffective Against Covid-19?

Have you seen the so-called “Johns Hopkins study” that’s been making the social media and Bill Maher rounds lately? Some folks have been asserting that this “Johns Hopkins study” somehow showed that Covid-19 “lockdowns” have been essentially useless. If you haven’t seen what they’ve been referring to, could it possibly be because there’s been so-called “a full-on media blackout” of this so-called “Johns Hopkins study,” as an article for Fox News has claimed ? Or maybe, just maybe, this “Johns Hopkins study” didn’t receive much press because it wasn’t exactly what some people have been claiming that it is.

...
Yeah, the University itself didn’t write the paper, because buildings can’t type on laptops without crushing them. Heck, the paper even stated that, “views expressed in each working paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions that the authors are affiliated with.”

...
Moreover, Maher didn’t clarify that the three authors were economists rather than medical, epidemiology, or public health experts. Isn’t that a bit like three proctologists telling you how the economy is doing? It’s not clear how much economists alone would understand the complexities and subtleties of medicine and public health. After all, if you were to end up in the emergency room with an injury, “don’t worry an economist will be around shortly to re-attach your arm” may not be the most comforting thing to hear.

...
This working paper did make some bold claims. For example, it concluded that “lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.” By the way, what did the authors consider lockdowns? Well, according to the working paper, “lockdowns are defined as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI).”

Holy changing definitions, Batman. By Herby, Jonung, and Hanke’s definition, even face mask requirements would be considered a “lockdown,” right? After all, face masks are a NPI since you don’t eat or inject face masks into you.

...
OK, changing definitions aside, did this working paper really provide enough evidence to support its bold claims? In a word, no. In two words, heck no. The authors claimed that they performed a systematic review and meta-analysis. That should mean that they should have considered and included all published peer-reviewed studies relevant to the topic at hand. Yet, this working paper did not include or even acknowledge many such studies that have shown the benefits of NPI’s such as face mask wearing and social distancing without explaining why the three authors excluded such studies.

Why is this person tilting at windmills? The Johns Hopkins paper did not consider the effect of face mask wearing (which is not a lockdown). Why would the paper make conclusions about face mask wearing?

Even if this author sarcastically says face mask wearing should have been included and treated as if it were a 'lockdown' because of how the authors defined a lockdown (non-pharmaceutical intervention), clearly neither the authors nor this opinion piece writer thinks face mask wearing is actually a lockdown.

 

[lpetrich]

Health Nerd on Twitter: "This paper has been doing the rounds, ..." / Twitter

This paper has been doing the rounds, claiming that lockdown was useless (the source of the 0.2% effect of lockdown claim). Dozens of people have asked my opinion of it, so here we go:

In my opinion, it is a very weak review that doesn't really show much, if anything 1/n

2/n The paper is a systematic review performed by three very highly-regarded economists who have also been extremely anti-lockdown since March 2020. You can find it here: A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

3/n As others have noted, this is a "working paper", which essentially means it's not peer-reviewed and reflects only the opinions of the three authors named

4/n The first issues with the review itself are very basic - the inclusions/exclusions

None of the criteria make much sense to me

5/n For example, all papers with modelled counterfactuals are excluded. Because this is the most common method used in infectious disease assessments, this has the practical impact of excluding most epidemiological research from the review

6/n The authors claim that they only include studies using a "difference in difference approach", but according to other economists, well...

7/n So, the included studies certainly aren't representative of research as a whole on lockdowns - not even close. Many of the most robust papers on the impact of lockdowns are, by definition, excluded

8/n We can see the impact of this in the main table of results. This is the source of that 0.2% figure you might've seen thrown around

This is just a useless meta-analysis

9/n Why is it useless?

Well, let's look at the studies here

Bjørnskov = Oxford stringency index correlated to crude death reports
Shiva/Molana = Oxford stringency index correlated to crude death reports
Stockenhuber = well, you get the gist

10/n The only differences in these studies are the countries included, timing, corrections for confounding, and lags. Also some modelling differences

11/n One study that's noticeably absent is the Hale et al paper which PRODUCED THE OXFORD STRINGENCY INDEX ON WHICH ALL OF THIS IS BASED

They estimated a massive reduction in death due to lockdown

12/n If you've got 7 papers that take the same databases and manipulate them in different ways, it doesn't really make sense to calculate a mean weighted by standard error and call that the result. It's just bizarre

13/n But it gets even weirder. If you look at the model, almost the entire weighting is based on this paper, Chisadza et al

But Chisadza et al found a BENEFIT for lockdowns

14/n Indeed, the authors of this paper have publicly disagreed with the review, and accused the review authors of having a predetermined conclusion when writing the paper

15/n If you look closely, it seems that there are similar issues with quite a lot of the included research. For example, in table 5 much of the aggregate model is based on this paper...

16/n ...the senior author of which has agreed that you can't really interpret their regression estimates in this way

17/n Another included paper found that significant restrictions were effective, but is included in this review as estimating a 13.1% INCREASE in fatalities. The maths used to derive this is pretty opaque

18/n All of this adds up to a very weird review paper. The authors exclude many of the most rigorous studies, including those that are the entire basis for their meta-analysis in the first place

19/n They then take a number of papers, most of which found that restrictive NPIs had a benefit on mortality, and derive some mathematical estimate from the regression coefficients indicating less benefit than the papers suggest

20/n There's no real rating of the potential for bias in the included research (the review only uses these 4 really bizarre 'quality dimensions' which...well)

21/n All of this together means that the actual numbers produced in the review are largely uninterpretable. The "quality" assessment is meaningless, and the numbers themselves not really correct

22/n In reality, the impact of "lockdowns" is very hard to assess, if for no other reason than we have no good definition of "lockdown" in the first place. The authors of this review define a "lockdown" as LITERALLY ANY INTERVENTION

23/n However, this is certainly not how the analysis is actually done. In most cases, it seems the authors have taken estimates for stay-at-home orders as their practical definition of "lockdown" (this is pretty common)

24/n And honestly, I'd agree that the evidence for marginal benefit from stay-at-home orders once you've already implemented dozens of restrictions is probably quite weak. One of the included studies, Spiegel et al, makes this point rather well

25/n That being said, if we consider "lockdown" to be any compulsory restriction at all, the reality is that virtually all research shows a (short-term) mortality benefit from at least some restrictions

26/n You can even see this IN THE REVIEW. The authors found benefits for compulsory facemasks, business closures, border closures/quarantine, and school closures. Some of the benefits were very large!

27/n Imo if we define "lockdown" as "the marginal benefit of stay-at-home orders on top of many other restrictions", it's probably fair to argue from this paper that the benefit might be quite small

28/n Indeed, that's been shown before, and is quite a reasonable position based on the evidence! The -0.2% figure is pretty meaningless, but the general idea is not totally wild

29/n If we define "lockdown" as "any compulsory restriction against COVID-19", however, this paper actually shows quite the opposite, that many compulsory restrictions are very effective at controlling the disease

30/n All of this comes with the huge proviso that the estimates in the paper probably aren't very useful, and the specific numbers are likely to be quite a bit off

31/n As a minor addendum, I would also note that I personally agree that a lot of people originally underestimated the impact of voluntary behaviour change on COVID-19 death rates - it's probably not wrong to argue that lockdowns weren't as effective as we initially thought

32/n You can actually see this quite fascinatingly in new research by @JanMBrauner and co, which showed that the impacts of restrictions in the second wave was decidedly different to the first

33/n HOWEVER, this runs both ways - it is also quite likely that lockdowns did not have the NEGATIVE impact most people propose, because some behaviour changes were voluntary!

34/ Some more excellent critique of the very bad 0.2% estimate

35/n Worth noting there are numerous other issues with this study, but at 34 tweets this is getting far too long. We will be publishing an academic commentary shortly, but suffice to say it's an extremely poor-quality study that is not useful as evidence for anything

That raises some big questions about the research methods of those economists. Seems suspiciously like motivated reasoning.

 

[lpetrich]

Andreas Backhaus on Twitter: "Meta-shmeta analysis. ..." / Twitter

Meta-shmeta analysis. They claim they find that lockdowns reduced mortality in Europe and U.S. only by 0.2%. After browsing through their methodology and results though, it's obvious they aren't doing what they claim they're doing and their analyis is deceptive. /1

They claim they're only selecting credible studies for their review by checking whether the study is using the difference-in-difference estimation framework. Diff-in-diff can indeed be credible if assumptions hold. And if you actually do it. /2

I've looked into some of the studies that are important for their review though and they aren't doing diff-in-diff. They don't even mention it. See for example Chisadza et al. (2021) and Alderman & Hajoto (2020). Both have also appeared in rather niche or obscure journals. /3

Why have I picked these two studies? Because they receive a ridiculously high weight in the meta analysis without being particularly credible. And they find smaller effects of lockdowns than the other studies. Pure coincidence that these two are getting so much weight! /4

Some background on diff-in-diff. A couple of assumptions need to hold for it to be credible. Studies can present evidence that these assumptions aren't blatantly violated. But many studies in this meta-review don't do it. Because they don't use it. /5

While the review hence makes quite serious erroneous claims about their review's methodology and studies included, it is also worth noting that a handful of reviewed studies use other methods that can yield credible results. But they don't receive special weight in the review. /6

So the authors were doing only a very limited selection of studies, and ended up ignoring lots of contrary ones.