Note from Charles. The original title of this piece was:
Do Lockdowns Reduce the Spread? Maybe a Little. But what else do they do?
However, the data also lead to the new title.
End note.
Guest post by David Stienmier, PhD (Mechanical Engineering)
Case and mortality data from Johns Hopkins (https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series)
Population estimates for 2019 from the US Census (https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-counties-total.html#par_textimage_70769902)
Unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statisics (https://www.bls.gov/)
Partisan makeup of state legislatures from the National Conference of State Legislatures (https://www.ncsl.org/Portals/1/Documents/Elections/Legis_Control_2020_April%201.pdf)
I’ve had this data for a month or so now and I’ve been trying to decide what to say about it. I assumed someone else would show this somewhere first and I could resume my quiet observation. But I haven’t seen it anywhere and with everyone talking about locking down again I decided I should at least put it out there with minimum comment. So here it is.
Lockdowns are intended to reduce the spread of cases and therefore the number of deaths. A known side effect of the lockdowns is an increase in unemployment. So we should be able to use the increase in unemployment as a proxy for how hard a state locked down. Figure 1 shows how cases relate to lockdown intensity as measured by unemployment. There appears to be very little relationship, but maybe it reduces the number of cases slightly.
Unemployment, however has long been associated with poor health outcomes so it’s reasonable to ask if this is the case with Covid. Figure 2 shows total Covid deaths vs unemployment increase. Do I need to comment?
While reducing total deaths is the goal, the known relationship with unemployment is with health (all cause mortality). So it’s reasonable to look at the case fatality rate. Figure 3 shows that 47% of the variance between states in case fatality rate can be explained by a simple linear relationship with how hard states locked down (and it’s not in the direction intended by the states that locked down hard). I know, “correlation is not causation”. But negative correlation is at least an indication of lack of causation.
And one is compelled to ask who is closing down so hard and failing to prevent if not causing so much death. I don’t think anyone will be surprised by Figure 4. Figure 5 through Figure 7 show how that worked out for the other variables.
And just because I had the data Figure 8 confirms what we probably all knew. The improved mortality is NOT because republicans are generally healthier than democrats.
Table 1 shows all of the data for the above graphs. It’s helpful for locating a state since the labels are sometimes overlapping.
Table 1: Data in above Figures. Mortality and Case Data from Johns Hopkins University, Unemployment Data from the Department of Labor Statistics, Legislature Data from NCSL, and Obesity Data from the CDC
| State | Unemployment Increase | Cases per Million 10/7/2020 | Deaths per Million 10/7/2020 | Case Fatality Rate 10/7/2020 | % Dem in Legislature | Obesity |
| Alabama | 4.03% | 32679.9 | 497.4 | 1.52% | 25.7% | 36.2% |
| Arizona | 4.00% | 30462.6 | 752.6 | 2.47% | 46.7% | 29.5% |
| Arkansas | 3.43% | 29159.6 | 396.6 | 1.36% | 24.4% | 37.1% |
| California | 9.30% | 21121.5 | 381.0 | 1.80% | 75.0% | 25.8% |
| Colorado | 4.93% | 12961.2 | 350.4 | 2.70% | 60.0% | 23.0% |
| Connecticut | 5.60% | 16646.8 | 1260.8 | 7.57% | 60.4% | 27.4% |
| Delaware | 5.83% | 22095.4 | 643.9 | 2.91% | 59.9% | 33.5% |
| District of Columbia | 3.83% | 22177.9 | 879.9 | 3.97% | 92.9% | 24.7% |
| Florida | 6.30% | 33400.8 | 620.0 | 1.86% | 40.0% | 30.7% |
| Georgia | 3.60% | 30400.0 | 622.0 | 2.05% | 40.7% | 32.5% |
| Idaho | 2.00% | 25375.2 | 250.1 | 0.99% | 20.0% | 28.4% |
| Illinois | 8.57% | 24408.7 | 686.0 | 2.81% | 64.4% | 31.8% |
| Indiana | 5.43% | 19003.5 | 521.7 | 2.75% | 28.7% | 34.1% |
| Iowa | 3.67% | 29930.0 | 407.0 | 1.36% | 43.3% | 35.3% |
| Kansas | 3.73% | 21147.2 | 206.3 | 0.98% | 31.5% | 34.4% |
| Kentucky | 0.77% | 17035.2 | 248.9 | 1.46% | 34.1% | 36.6% |
| Louisiana | 4.10% | 36514.8 | 1156.6 | 3.17% | 32.6% | 36.8% |
| Maine | 4.60% | 4168.2 | 104.2 | 2.50% | 58.6% | 30.4% |
| Maryland | 4.37% | 21216.4 | 642.3 | 3.03% | 69.1% | 30.9% |
| Massachusetts | 11.83% | 19779.6 | 1351.8 | 6.83% | 80.0% | 25.7% |
| Michigan | 7.07% | 14495.1 | 699.0 | 4.82% | 45.9% | 33.0% |
| Minnesota | 4.00% | 18817.9 | 358.4 | 1.90% | 53.2% | 30.1% |
| Mississippi | 4.37% | 33918.9 | 944.2 | 2.78% | 35.6% | 39.5% |
| Missouri | 3.43% | 20416.2 | 277.4 | 1.36% | 28.4% | 35.0% |
| Montana | 3.07% | 14752.7 | 149.7 | 1.01% | 41.3% | 26.9% |
| Nebraska | 1.27% | 25036.9 | 233.7 | 0.93% | 25.0% | 34.1% |
| Nevada | 9.57% | 26796.8 | 497.1 | 1.85% | 65.1% | 29.5% |
| New Hampshire | 5.80% | 6421.2 | 322.1 | 5.02% | 58.5% | 29.6% |
| New Jersey | 9.67% | 23615.6 | 1809.1 | 7.66% | 64.2% | 25.7% |
| New Mexico | 5.97% | 14909.1 | 405.9 | 2.72% | 64.3% | 32.3% |
| New York | 10.73% | 17899.0 | 1264.9 | 7.07% | 64.6% | 27.6% |
| North Carolina | 4.13% | 21007.0 | 309.6 | 1.47% | 44.7% | 33.0% |
| North Dakota | 3.00% | 32118.8 | 253.3 | 0.79% | 17.7% | 35.1% |
| Ohio | 5.30% | 13884.9 | 395.5 | 2.85% | 35.6% | 34.0% |
| Oklahoma | 3.23% | 23497.5 | 239.6 | 1.02% | 21.5% | 34.8% |
| Oregon | 6.00% | 8401.0 | 125.4 | 1.49% | 61.1% | 29.9% |
| Pennsylvania | 7.63% | 13370.0 | 623.7 | 4.67% | 45.1% | 30.9% |
| Rhode Island | 8.73% | 24287.4 | 1035.5 | 4.26% | 87.6% | 27.7% |
| South Carolina | 5.10% | 29567.7 | 623.8 | 2.11% | 37.1% | 34.3% |
| South Dakota | 2.73% | 29283.6 | 228.3 | 0.78% | 15.2% | 30.1% |
| Tennessee | 5.80% | 30001.6 | 327.0 | 1.09% | 23.5% | 34.4% |
| Texas | 3.90% | 27531.7 | 521.7 | 1.89% | 43.1% | 34.8% |
| Utah | 1.40% | 24979.4 | 137.6 | 0.55% | 21.2% | 27.8% |
| Vermont | 4.77% | 2927.9 | 93.0 | 3.17% | 64.4% | 27.5% |
| Virginia | 4.23% | 17748.7 | 353.7 | 1.99% | 54.3% | 30.4% |
| Washington | 4.90% | 11856.1 | 269.1 | 2.27% | 58.5% | 28.7% |
| West Virginia | 4.80% | 9420.0 | 175.8 | 1.87% | 41.0% | 39.5% |
| Wisconsin | 4.03% | 23688.0 | 213.7 | 0.90% | 37.9% | 32.0% |
| Wyoming | 2.70% | 11920.3 | 86.4 | 0.72% | 13.3% | 29.0% |
I’m with Willis.
End the lockdowns!
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Here in PA we have a REP legislature with a DEM governor. The lockdowns and policy to send the COVID flu folks to the long term care facilities was a edict by the GOV.
Would it be possible to augment the COVID vs % DEM legislature with points flagged with the DEM REP governor noted. Say solid squares vs open circles?
Column B in the linked spreadsheet is the party of the governor.
All the unemployment versus covid cases and death assumes the arrow of causality.
I think the data is clear that lockdowns do not effect the transmission of the virus to any substantive degree.
The facts show that the lockdowns are merely a mostly futile attempt by humans to control something they can’t, at least not without a vaccine to artificially induce a Covid herd immunity.
Vaccines are science. Lockdowns are human folly masquerading as science.
Without a vaccine, we merely think we can affect the virus spread viral ecology), when we cannot as long as we must interact in connected, dependent society for food, fuel, essential activities to our interconnected modern lives. It is mostly unfounded hubris in play.
It is the very human political response to order shutdowns (that then cause unemployment to spike) in response to increasing and accelerating cases that we see in the graphs. It is not a viral ecology (biological) response that we want to see. Just like with changing climate, the human emotional side of us wants to believe we can control which we cannot. (Without a vaccine).
WHO, back in 2019, said lockdowns for pandemics were not recommended.
So did the CDC. They also said simple masks were useless for preventing the spread of viruses. They’ve only changed their tune now because they don’t want to risk angering their masters in government.
I’ve had a lot of contact with medical professionals just recently – among other things, I have a friend who just had a brain tumor removed. All her nurses told her the masks were bullshit – not intended for defense against viruses – but, boy, after the PC police moved in, they changed their tune – NOW, masks ‘work’ – they can’t tell you why, other than they’ve been given marching orders to repeat that dictate.
Three blind studies have been published that concluded that masks are not effective against viruses. NONE have been produced that have reached the opposite conclusion.
Years prior to this Fauci also said masks are ineffective against viruses. Something about trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence.
I don’t know. Do you know?
I think everything we have done to prevent spread of CoVID has been mostly futile with the exception that in some cases it spread out the initial wave which may have been beneficial to regions where health services were overrun. A colleague of mine in infection control recently confessed to me his sense of futility that anything we did was changing the ultimate outcome.
What is certain is that it is a mistake to consider any measure to reduce CoVID transmission without considering the costs/unintended consequences. Given that, according to today’s stats, 99.2% of the world population has not tested positive for CoVID and 99.98% have not died from it, there is a very high chance that all the measures to “lock down” and close the economy have had negative effects far out of proportion to the threat. A tiny proportion of people have been directly affected by covid but nearly everyone has been affected negatively by the government response.
People who die from covid are mostly (but not exclusively) elderly or chronically unwell so that the impact on their longevity is small. People who die from suicide, social violence, hunger, lack of access to timely medical care for treatable conditions etc. Are losing much more of their productive lives and we don’t seem to be counting them.
In addition people lose businesses, jobs, educational opportunities, social and family relationships, self confidence and self worth and these losses may impact the rest of their lives. PTSD will likely become epidemic.
+6%
Andy Pattullo on November 23, 2020 at 10:35 am
said
The only worthwhile metric(way of measuring) the impact of mortality, due to “the virus” is Quality-adjusted Life-years lost(QALY). When measured this way it is clear that “the virus” is a non-event.
Economic damage causes early death and morbidity. That is utterly inarguable.
As well as co-morbidities it is a certainty that huge numbers of people, of all ages(but especially the elderly) have multiple nutritional deficiencies. For example the medical profession has vitamin D below 20 ng/ml as “deficient”, but this is absurdly low. At least 60 ng/ml is required for optimum health and 70 is probably even slightly better. People are also deficient in zinc, selenium vitamin C vitaminE and magnesium.
The NZ medical cabal ensures that anyone who follows their advice on vitamin D WILL be deficient. Their recommendation is the exact reverse of what it should be. They say, paraphrased, to get sun early morning and late afternoon in summer, but this is worthless. UVB is much more stroongly absorbed than UVA. Atall times in order to get best benefit for least damage sun exposure should be when the sun is nearest vertically overhead(Sun elevation above 60 degrees is good enough; below 45 degrees is worthless). Nowhere in NZ is any vitamin
D formed in winter.
https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/publications/vitamind-sun-exposure.pdf
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
Another thought about the statistics above. It appears to me that some other factors may be playing a role in the shape of the epidemic in various locations. These include local population density (E.g. high density Manhatten versus low density rural areas) and cultural factors and behaviours. Woiud love to see more data on these items.
Isolation protects from the virus. If you are not near enough to anyone to be infected you will not get infected. If you accept no goods from anyone just in case.
A lockdown is a partial isolation and thus yields partial success by slowing down the spread. Prolonging the time to herd immunity.
Senior care homes must be isolated. Seniors who are worried may self-isolate. Those 65 and under should live a normal life with an expected death-rate from COVID no more than that due to driving a car. But anyone at all can self-isolate if they wish, Karen, including you.
At 77 I want to socialize. Interactions with other people are that which gives life meaning.
Sumpin’s gonna get me gone. I don’t want forced hermit status. No wish to end life, a quality of life wish.
Here’s what I’m sick over: People using percentage instead of count, to suit an agenda.
A glance at figure 8, “OH MY GOD the fewer Dems in the StateGov, the more obseity!” If I took such a thing as causal (which this graphing hopes to infer), I would be justified in saying “If I move to New York I’ll Get Thin!” That’s how void the worldview of this essay/chart is. It’s is a prime example of use of percentage to nail a slant.
Here’s the rework assignment:
In table 1, look at column 7, marked “Obesity.”
Now, get rid of the percentage.
List the total NUMBER of obese humans in the state.
Now make a scatter graph of DemsInGov vs NumberOfObesePeople.
You will see this: the more Dems in Gov, the more obese people.
[ADD: by the way, a graph of DemsInGov vs NUMBERofDeathsFromCovid would be interesting.]
I’m sure you would see exactly that. And you would learn nothing. All of the data here is per capita. That is a fraction. Some of the fractions are per million (ppm) and some are per hundred (percent) for scale. But that is how you compare apples to apples. Using total NUMBERs would be misleading. The obesity numbers were mostly for humor (The idea of the fat redneck has a touch of merit maybe … as I look in the mirror). But your statement that if I moved to a democrat city and started hanging out with vegans and doing yoga I might lose weight maybe has merit too.
Obesity is caused by what vegans eat, not by what carnivores eat.
All the rest of your post = zero, as well.
Busybody governments have gotten so single-minded about stopping the spread of Covid that they have ignored important facts that should have brought the whole effort to a halt many months ago:
* Like all cold and flu viruses, Covid gets less dangerous over time. By now it doesn’t matter much if we get it.
* Children, in particular, aren’t susceptible. So closing schools was and is bonkers.
* Prolonged shutdowns ruin people financially — a much more devastating problem than having a cough for a month or two.
* Forbidding normal social activities ruins people’s quality of life.
* The largest clusters of deaths have all come from specific harmful government actions such as forcing nursing homes in New York to accept Covid patients. (Governor Cuomo needs to go on trial for murder.)
There is a lesson to be learnt here, and it deserves publicity. The lesson is that we need to revamp laws (including common law) granting any official emergency powers, so that if such things happen again, we the victims are entitled to challenge them in court and get them stopped quickly.
I suspect that your data correlates much more directly with population density – or more precisely the proportion of each State’s population that lives in crowded cities. A high proportion that lives in crowded cities leads to a fast spread of COVID causing Governors to implement stricter lockdowns causing more unemployment. We all know that the percentage of Democrats is the highest in major cities.
Not in Japan
Thanks to David Stienmier, an engineer.
My son, an engineer, began raising serious concerns privately in February. Shockingly it is only recently that a number of medical people have begun to raise these concerns in Ireland – more than eight months later!!! He has felt like he is banging his head against a wall simply trying to get colleagues and friends to seriously consider major flaws and deficiencies in the presentations of medical government advisors, politicians and the media.
While he believes that within the next week or two official data from (all cause and excess deaths) both the UK and Sweden will show even more clearly – among those who reason carefully and logically – how terribly wrong our political leaders and their advisors have been, they will refuse to acknowledge this and try their best to attribute declines in cases and deaths to draconian and worthless measures. He believes that they have to do this because the alternative is to have their credibility and careers totally destroyed.
will show even more clearly – among those who reason carefully and logically
Well that lets the political class out. There’s no reason or logic to be found amongst them other then the logic of grabbing and holding onto power.
Here in Victoria, Australia, we have today the triple donut of zero new Covid cases, zero Covid deaths and zero known Covid cases. First time triple zero since early 2020.
If lockdowns did not help to achieve this freedom, what did? The State was getting to a high drain on hospitals treating Covid a few weeks ago. People feared an epidemic going out of control. Instead we have peace of mind with quarantine and vaccine policies to come.
Politics had little to do with anything positive, but some connections to stuff-ups. Any government would have followed similar courses because the looked so medically appropriate. Geoff S
Causation or correlation?
This is a huge difference.
Do not hold your breath for a honest political answer – this is more lethal than covid-19.
It’s summer.
Not in Japan
Concerning ”elective surgery’. First off one hell of a lot of people have been delayed or denied surgery or treatments that were not “elective” here in the US and elsewhere.
But here in Indiana I have a surgery scheduled for December 9th after presenting to the OR being unable to pee on Nov 4th.
Having taken the tests and a CT scan with contrast it was found besides a swollen prostate I also have two diverticulum (sacks) off my bladder. The urologist recommended that I have both problems taken care of in the same surgery. Diverticulum in the bladder usually results in repetitive URIs and sometimes “bladder stones”. So the “green light” procedure which is a laser surgery done by scope that has become the preferred procedure for relieving the pressure on the urethra is out and it’s gross dissection for me.
After a week with a Foley Cath I had that taken out am an now taking medications and self cathing every 8 hours or so as needed.
I will have to be tested for COVID 19 and have some other blood work done seven days prior to admittance for surgery. The time from diagnosis to surgery does not seem excessive to me for the condition I have. I thank God I don’t live in Canada or the UK.
Best to you, rah.
Keep on truckin’.
Thanks John
No truckin right now and I’m wondering if I will be able to do the on-call salary job I have done the last 7 years when I do go back. We’ll see. The job will be waiting for me if I want it. If I can’t deal with that more demanding position anymore than I will probably get myself a nice dedicated route that has a regular schedule. One that provides just enough work to keep me on full time status and allows for long weekends and all major Holidays off.