The lockdowns saved lives and did little harm, new data show
Despite the evidence, the issue is kept alive by pandemic politics
The pandemic may be ebbing, at least in the U.S. and some other wellvaccinated countries, but debate over the government and public response to the crisis is destined to live on.
That’s certainly the case with government-ordered lockdowns, the most onerous and controversial policies imposed to keep people safe from COVID-19.
Fortunately, they’re also among the most widely studied policies, and research about their effectiveness is beginning to flow to economic and scientific journals.
The published data point to two related conclusions: First, lockdowns played a significant role in reducing infection rates. Second, they had a very modest role in producing economic damage. Conversely, lifting lockdowns has done little to spur economic resurgence.
Some of the evidence for both propositions has been expertly compiled by Noah Smith, a former finance professor now writing economic commentary for Bloomberg.
There’s a flaw in Smith’s presentation, however: his conviction that the issue is moot, since the pandemic is receding and lockdowns are “basically over,” due to the rapid ramp-up of vaccinations in most parts of the U.S.
The lockdown issue is not moot. It’s being kept alive by pandemic politics, which will endure.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis thinks he’ll be able to run for president in 2024 based on the fact that he outlawed lockdowns in much of his state, without suffering in COVID statistics, and protected his economy. Neither claim is true, as we’ve shown, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be repeating them.
On the other side of the coin, California’s relatively stringent and far-reaching lockdowns are a centerpiece of the Republican Party’s campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Debate over the efficacy of lockdowns in limiting the spread of COVID-19 is certain to continue, in part because it’s inextricable from partisanship.
A team of UCLA researchers, in a paper first published in May 2020 and updated later, found that “likely Trump voters” reduced their movements by 9% following a local stay-athome order, “compared to a 21% reduction among their Clinton-voting neighbors, who face similar exposure risks and identical government orders.”
Hostility toward measures short of a lockdown, such as social distancing and masks, bears the same partisan coloration.
It makes sense, therefore, to examine the evidence — or rather, gather ammunition for the coming debate.
Numerous studies from across the world have found that lockdowns succeeded in suppressing transmission rates. An Italian team found that lockdowns start to reduce the number of COVID infections about 10 days after they start and keep reducing the case rate for as long as 20 days following initiation.
French researchers, in a paper published in January, compared the experience in countries that imposed stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and lifted the restrictions gradually — New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and
Britain — to that of Sweden, which imposed no lockdown, and the U.S., which had (and still has) a patchwork of state policies often involving late orders followed by abrupt and premature lifting.
The first group saw rapid reductions in infections and a rapid economic recovery, compared with the second.
“Early-onset lockdown with gradual deconfinement allowed shortening the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and reducing contaminations,” the researchers concluded. “Lockdown should be considered as an effective public health intervention to halt epidemic progression.”
The UCLA researchers estimated that reductions in movement resulting from stay-at-home orders reduced transmission in the hardest-hit communities, such as Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, by 50% or more.
All of these findings point to savings of millions of lives globally. None are especially surprising. Compliance with stay-at-home orders meant reducing one’s exposure to strangers whose viral conditions were unknown. That was especially crucial in locations where COVID was raging and, therefore, the prospect of coming into close contact with an infected individual was relatively high.
That leaves the economic question. Critics of lockdowns typically advocate balancing the public health gains from stay-athome orders against the economic losses from keeping bars, restaurants, hair salons and other small businesses closed. They argue, as has DeSantis and other red-state governors, that concerns about the latter should take primacy over the benefits of the former.
The problem with this argument is that there’s very little evidence that lockdowns damaged local economies more than individual behavior that would have happened anyway. Nor is there much evidence that lifting lockdowns produced a faster recovery.
Those who have studied the course of the pandemic in the U.S. and Europe understand why the lockdowns have less economic impact than one might expect. The reason is that people made their own choices to stay home or to patronize only businesses where they felt safe.
As Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syversen of the University of Chicago said of their study on the economic slump during the pandemic, “the vast majority of the decline was due to consumers choosing of their own volition to avoid commercial activity.”
That’s evident from the chronology of the business slump. Most counties and states didn’t impose stayat-home orders until late March or early April; even Newsom, who is depicted as having shut down the California economy particularly aggressively, didn’t act until March 19.
Yet in California and throughout the country, residents started withdrawing from face-to-face commerce well before then, with the sharpest reductions in the first half of March. Government-ordered shutdowns did less to force people to stay home than to give them legal grounds to do so.
Foot traffic fell by about 60% during the pandemic, Goolsbee and Syverson concluded from their study of smartphone mobility statistics. But government orders accounted for only seven percentage points of that.
In short, it wasn’t government policy that kept people home. It was fear.