The COVID pandemic saw lots of fear and panic, but no more so than it did with lockdowns. Millions were ordered to stay home with the idea of slowing the spread of COVID and saving lives. As more data come in and more studies are conducted, it becomes clearer over time that lockdown proponents were severely mistaken in their so-called logic.
The latest in research shows the painful reality that lockdowns were even less effective than previously believed. A new systematic review and meta-analysis from the Institute of Economic Affairs published by professors from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University looked through nearly 20,000 studies (Herby et al., 2023). Their three levels of screening narrowed it down to 32 relevant studies. Out of the 32 studies, 22 were used to create a meta-analysis.
Similar to the 2022 Johns Hopkins meta-analysis, the authors separated the studies into three groups: stringency index studies, shelter-in-place-order (SIPO) studies, and non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) study. Depending on which type of study one uses gives a different estimate. Since I live in the United States, I will give the estimates for the United States. The authors calculated that stringency index studies put the lives saved at 4,000 deaths. The SIPO studies put it at 3,000 in the United States, whereas the NPI studies put the lives saved at 16,000 deaths. This means we have a range from 3,000 to 16,000 deaths.
Let's forget for a moment how lockdowns were supposed to save up to 2 million lives if we were to believe the Imperial College modeling that scared the United Kingdom into lockdowns. How much did that save in economic cost? It might sound callous to some to put a monetary value on human life, but it is standard practice in the actuarial industry, as well as the field of public policy. Insurance companies put the value on the low end because they want to pay out less. Government agencies put a higher value on it because it helps justify government programs. For argument's sake, let's go with the higher amounts. FEMA puts the value of a human life at $7.5 million in 2020 dollars, whereas the EPA puts it at $10.05 million in 2020 dollars. With inflation-adjusted dollars, let's change that $10.05 million to $11.82 million. Multiply that by 16,000 individuals, that puts the price of lives saved from lockdown at $189.12 billion.
Nearly $200 billion sounds like a lot of money. At the same time, we have to remember that there is no such thing as a silver bullet policy that will solve our woes without any costs. Like with any other form of public policy, there are tradeoffs. Lockdowns were de facto bans on labor performing work across large swathes in the economy. According to a study from University of California-Riverside (Tellis et al., 2022), consumer spending decreased by 7.5 percent and GDP decreased by 5.4 percent. This translated in $28,000 less in GDP per capita. Multiply that $28,000 by an estimated 331.45 million Americans in April 2020 (Census). What did the lockdowns end up costing? An estimated economic cost of $9.28 trillion.
If we only look at it from that strict cost-benefit lens, it would come out to a cost-benefit ratio of about $49. That means for every dollar in benefit, we had to pay $49 dollars. However, it is all but certain that my back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit ratio is an underestimate of what lockdowns actually cost.
A professor of the Universities of Washington and Edinburgh conducted his own systematic review of 600 studies (Bardosh, 2023) that was released late last month. He showed that the costs were "substantial, wide-ranging, and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions in the years ahead." Some of those costs are ones I have covered before, including non-COVID excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviors, social polarization, soaring debt, democratic backsliding, and declining human rights.
I first took issue with lockdowns in March 2020 one week before they began and I was right to do so. In practice, lockdowns showed us that multiple sectors of the economy cannot be shut down for months on end without long-term consequences. Not only were lockdowns cost-ineffective (see Harvard analysis here). As we see in the previous paragraph, they have come with considerable costs that have yet to fully materialize. Ignorance was no excuse to implement such harm on millions of people. It is not a stretch to say that lockdowns were the worst peacetime public policy decision in human history.
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