In some respects, it feels like the COVID pandemic was a lifetime ago. However, it was only about six years ago that the World Health Organization (WHO) named the disease COVID-19. Aside from countries such as Sweden, humanity collectively freaked out and governments across the world implemented lockdowns in response to COVID-19. The rationale for the lockdowns was not simply that cases were rising, but that if something were not done to flatten the curve, the healthcare systems would be overwhelmed.
It turns out that needing to implement lockdowns was even more unnecessary than previously thought. A recent study from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society examined COVID policy, including the lockdowns (Wood et al., 2026). One of their main findings was that most countries reached peak COVID infection before the lockdowns were implemented. This led the authors to say that "the results imply that the full lockdowns were largely unnecessary."
"Largely unnecessary." If only someone warned us beforehand. And no, I am not only talking about when I wrote shortly before the lockdowns in the U.S. that we did not need lockdowns. It turns out that shortly before the pandemic, both the WHO and Johns Hopkins released pandemic guidance stating that there was no rationale for the lockdowns. The authors of this paper try to couch it by saying that the lockdowns might have kept those infection rates down. I have to disagree with that notion. Simply because the lockdowns coincided with the decline does not mean they caused it, as the paper already shows. Many people were already altering their behavior before the lockdowns went into effect. Imagine that: people can adapt to risk during a pandemic without being coerced into a lockdown. It is not as if there has never been a pandemic. These findings from the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society show that the lockdowns were not necessary because the curve for most countries was already bending before the lockdowns began.
The major implication of this study is that the lockdowns were empirically unnecessary to reverse COVID waves. In other words, the major justification for the lockdowns was weak. The problem, though, is that the costs of the lockdown were neither weak, hidden, nor unpredictable. In April 2020 and May 2020, I covered many costs, whether that was economic devastation, neglected non-COVID healthcare, and social unrest. Sadly, I was right about the havoc that the lockdowns caused.
Rather than save lives, the lockdowns actually increased excess deaths. Lockdowns decreased the U.S. GDP by 5.4 percent and consumer spending by 7.5 percent, which came with an economic cost of $9.3 trillion to the U.S. economy. Then there is the widening global inequality; stunting the educational advancement of an entire generation of children; declining social-emotional skills; ruder people, greater fear, and more authoritarianism; higher obesity, greater substance abuse, and a backlog of healthcare issues; and increased political polarization, conspiracy thinking, mental illness, and violence.
There is no shortage of the damage that the lockdowns caused. Lockdowns were necessary for and costly for everything. What makes this lamentable is that it was predictable and unnecessary. Yet no one is being held accountable for this carnage, maybe because so many were complicit or because it is easier to avoid inconvenient truths than it is to ignore deleterious policy. So why do I bring this up six years later? Because there will be another pandemic and important decisions will need to be made for pandemic strategy. It is my hope that perhaps next time decision-makers can actually use evidence and basic risk assessment instead of fear, panic, and lockdowns that ruin millions of lives. Because let's be real: a policy that was unnecessary, harmful, and predictable should never been applauded as "following the science."
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