Bhalla: Covid beat Covid measures.
“As the pandemic has raged on, so has research on non-pharmaceutical interventions to stem its spread. For the first time in human history, lockdowns were used as a strategy to counter the virus. While conventional wisdom, to date, has been that lockdowns were successful (ranging from mild to spectacular) we find not one piece of evidence supporting this claim. This paper has attempted to document, and estimate, all the methods employed in the literature. Broadly, the evidence is as follows: China was the origin of the virus, and the origin of the lockdown works hypothesis. It is true that the low numbers of virus in China (controlling for size of the population) are indicative of spectacular success. Yet, regional and other comparative data for China does not support the hypothesis that lockdown was responsible for the low rate of infections. Research is needed to identify why countries as diverse as China, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Sudan, Laos, Vietnam etc. succeeded while many other countries, with identical characteristics, and identical policies, failed. Lockdowns were never practiced before despite several provocations. We presented evidence how the US explicitly downgraded the possibility of lockdowns despite severe influenza crises (with the same estimate of excess deaths as COVID) in the late fifties and early sixties. Why the world chose to inflict lockdowns on itself in 2020 is a question left unanswered by most, including our, research.”