We do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs

It was always going to come to this.  Reality finds a way.  From Assessing Mandatory Stay‐at‐Home and Business Closure Effects on the Spread of COVID‐19 by Eran Bendavid, Christopher Oh, Jay Bhattacharya, and  John P.A. Ioannidis.  

Pre-Covid, WHO and other national health organizations all acknowledged and recommended against generic lock-downs.  From past pandemics we knew that general lockdowns are not beneficial.  As soon as Covid-19 burst out of China, however, institution after institution and government agency after government agency endorsed lockdowns.  

In the US, with it culture of natural rights and checks and balances, this centralized planning and coercive approach engendered much opposition.  Instead of making an evidence-based argument for the effectiveness of their proposed actions, the Mandarin Class doubled down on coercion, later supplemented by the Tech Giants who began deplatforming anyone who denied the Mandarin Class orthodoxy.

If you insisted on your rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the Mandarin Class, without authority insisted on criminalizing ordinary Americans, violating constitutional norms, their own limited authority, and traditions of providing evidence for arguments.

The evidence is beginning to come in that the central planning authoritarian lockdown proponents are indeed the emperor with no clothing.  From the Abstract:

Abstract 

 

Background and Aims 

 

The most restrictive non‐pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for controlling the spread of COVID‐19 are mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures. Given the consequences of these policies, it is important to assess their effects. We evaluate the effects on epidemic case growth of more restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs), above and beyond those of less restrictive NPIs (lrNPIs).

Methods 

 

We first estimate COVID‐19 case growth in relation to any NPI implementation in subnational regions of 10 countries: England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and the US. Using first‐difference models with fixed effects, we isolate the effects of mrNPIs by subtracting the combined effects of lrNPIs and epidemic dynamics from all NPIs. We use case growth in Sweden and South Korea, two countries that did not implement mandatory stay‐at‐home and business closures, as comparison countries for the other 8 countries (16 total comparisons).

Results  

 

Implementing any NPIs was associated with significant reductions in case growth in 9 out of 10 study countries, including South Korea and Sweden that implemented only lrNPIs (Spain had a non‐significant effect). After subtracting the epidemic and lrNPI effects, we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of mrNPIs on case growth in any country. In France, e.g., the effect of mrNPIs was +7% (95CI ‐5%‐19%) when compared with Sweden, and +13% (‐12%‐38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro‐contagion). The 95% confidence intervals excluded 30% declines in all 16 comparisons and 15% declines in 11/16 comparisons.

Conclusions 

 

While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.

Moderates and Classical Liberals seem to have won this argument.  I wonder how the central planning authoritarian left will respond, given their extensive record of ad hominem attacks, force and coercion against citizens.