Yes, they work but no they don't make a difference. The delusions of the clerisy.

Oh, my.  From The New York Times.  And to memorialize this since at some point they will almost certainly edit it:

Click to enlarge.

Yes, they work but no they don't make a difference.  This almost amounts to a mental illness.  

Leonhardt is clearly a man with an agenda.  And he is not subtle about it.  He explicitly wants to find that vaccines reduce infections and deaths and he wants to find that the usual Covid precautions (work from home, maintain distance, masks, school lockdowns, closing public spaces, etc.) are all effective at reducing the transmission and deaths from Covid-19.

And as everyone who has been watching the data for the past three years know, these arguments cannot be sustained.   In his partisan advocacy column, Leonhardt barely acknowledges the range of confounds which have to be taken in to account when comparing across states - average age, income, access to medical services, etc.  He wants to simply compare state level averages and conclude that vaccines work and that precautions work.

They don't.  As even the CDC periodically acknowledges.  So this is more than simply partisan politics and ideology.  Maybe even more than just being embarrassed for being profoundly wrong.  It almost feels like Leonhardt wants to ignore the data in order to maintain his own sense of virtue - logic, reason, empiricism and the scientific method be damned.

Leonhardt starts with acknowledging that even after three years and masses of research, different parts of the country are responding to the same disease in radically different ways.  The Red states basically following the science and the Blue states exercising authoritarian coercion.

Daily life in red and blue America has continued to be quite different over the past few months. It’s a reflection of the partisan divide over Covid-19. Consider:

• In the country’s most liberal cities, many people are still avoiding restaurants. The number of seated diners last month was at least 40 percent below prepandemic levels in New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Cambridge, Mass., according to OpenTable. By contrast, the number of diners has fully recovered in Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, Phoenix, Charlotte, N.C., and Austin, Texas, as well as in Oklahoma, Nebraska and New Hampshire. 

• Residents of liberal cities like New York, Washington and San Jose, Calif., are still spending significantly more time at home and less at the office than before the pandemic began, according to Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research group. In more conservative places, the rhythms of daily life have returned nearly to normal. 

• During the Omicron wave, schools in heavily Democratic areas were more likely to close some classrooms or require that students stay home for extended periods. 

• Mask wearing remains far more common in liberal communities than conservative ones.

He then confront the embarrassing reality for the True Believers as Eric Hoffer calls them.

These stark differences have created a kind of natural experiment: Did Omicron spread less in the parts of the U.S. where social distancing and masking were more common?

The answer is surprisingly unclear.

Nationwide, the number of official Covid cases has recently been somewhat higher in heavily Democratic areas than Republican areas, according to The Times’s data. That comparison doesn’t fully answer the question, though, because Democratic areas were also conducting more tests, and the percentage of positive tests tended to be somewhat higher in Republican areas.

No single statistic offers a definitive answer. When I look at all the evidence, I emerge thinking that liberal areas probably had slightly lower Omicron infection rates than conservative areas. But it is difficult to be sure, as these state-level charts — by my colleague Ashley Wu — suggest:

Note: Charts show 7-day averages.Sources: New York Times database; Edison ResearchBy Ashley Wu

 

The lack of a clear pattern is itself striking. Remember, not only have Democratic voters been avoiding restaurants and wearing masks; they are also much more likely to be vaccinated and boosted (and vaccines substantially reduce the chances of infection). Combined, these factors seem as if they should have caused large differences in case rates.

They have not. And that they haven’t offers some clarity about the relative effectiveness of different Covid interventions. 

Note again - Leonhardt does no control for confounding variables - it is a naive comparison of different state regardless of differences which might be explanatory.  

Based on his own naive methodology, and contrary to "The answer is surprisingly unclear", the answer is straightforwardly clear.  Precautions make no material difference.  He wants the answer to be different, but his data does not support that.

The rest of the article is all predicated upon with his priors.  If you have been following the data and the science, his conclusion are unsustainable and not worth refuting one-be-one.  The only reason to read is that you get such a clear picture of what drives his thinking.  He isn't even concerned about whether states votes Red or Blue, Republican or Democrat.  In a clear case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Leonhardt is obsessed with comparing Trump voters versus Biden voters.  

Sometimes it is hard to tell an anti-semite from an anti-Zionist - their arguments can dangerously overlap.  Similarly with Leonhardt.  It is hard to tell whether he most despises people who voted for Trump or whether he simply despises the lower classes.  The bottom 80%.  

For all that - that headline is astounding.  Despite wanting to believe otherwise, the interventions were contra-past experience, contra established protocols at the time of the emergence of Covid-19, contra the existing body of evidence and contra the body of evidence that has emerged since March of 2021.   And despite Leonhradt steadfast refusal to acknowledge it, there have been legions of experts testifying to the probable ineffectiveness of all the coerced interventions since the very beginning.

If you want the facts, don't try and find them in the New York Times and especially don't waste time with Leonhardt.