COVID-19 was spread by people hanging out with other people. One of the terrible truths of the outbreaks in 2020 and 2021 was that the most dangerous activities were the most important parts of life: extended families getting together for lengthy, laughter-filled dinners.
Put another way, the way to stop the spread of COVID was to give up sociality. For that reason, it’s unsurprising when studies find that government rules keeping people apart were not ultimately effective at stopping the spread.
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“Did Lockdowns Work?” is the title of a new study by American and European researchers. They examined tens of thousands of studies on the efficacy of lockdowns and concluded that “lockdowns had negligible public health effects when measured by mortality.”
Here were the specific numbers: “The average lockdown in Europe and the United States in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 3.2 per cent. This translates into approximately 6,000 avoided deaths in Europe and 4,000 in the United States.”
Again, this doesn’t mean that COVID was harmless or mitigation was pointless. The study found that “voluntary changes in behaviour, such as social distancing, did play an important role in mitigating the pandemic.”
By current numbers, 1.131 million Americans died from COVID. Without lockdowns, 1.135 million Americans would have died. If we rounded to normal digits, lockdown America gave us 1.1 million deaths and non-lockdown America would have given us 1.1 million deaths.
Of course saving 4,000 American lives is incredibly valuable. But saving 4,000 lives through lockdowns was also incredibly costly. Closing schools, canceling Little League seasons, barring social gatherings, closing neighborhood coffee shops, decimating Main Streets, and outlawing church was not cost-free. These lockdowns all dramatically harmed millions of lives. These harms included depression, isolation, alienation, and sadness. Divorces, suicides, drug addictions, overdoses, and alcoholism all resulted from these lockdowns.
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Our current crime waves are also the fruits of our lockdowns. Look at the crimes that surged first: assault, arson, and carjackings in which the carjackers just take the cars for joyrides and crash them. You see the pattern. These are crimes of boredom and isolation. These are the results of alienation.
If we prevented 4,000 COVID deaths by trampling on our principles of individual liberty, was it worth it? It’s hard to say yes, when you witness the decline in our social cohesion over the past three years.
