Lockdowns and the Emperors New Clothes

Do lockdowns work? I think it's becoming apparent that the Emperor has no clothes.

Obviously if you lock yourself in a box at the North Pole you're not going to be getting the 'rona. So on that level obviously a lockdown works. However the question is whether the type of lockdown we have had is sufficiently close to a box at the North Pole to have made a difference.

So has it? Well look for yourself.

We hear lots of talk about irresponsible people causing spikes in the infection rate. VE day  and the bank holiday was the biggest I can remember and I can assure you that there were - lots - of parties in Primrose Hill. Then there was Black Lives Matter which was blamed for risking the lives of those participating and those arounds them. More recently there was the 20th May when all those terrible people flocked to the beaches.

So VE day was 8th May. The big demos for Black Lives Matter were 8th June. The incubation period is generally five or six days plus or minus a few. So you are looking for a spike peaking a week after, perhaps spread out over about a week.

So spot the spike....

You can find the original data here,

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

Difficult isn't it? It's not so much that the effect is small, it's that it almost isn't even there. Public Health England testing may lack coverage, but much like a radio with the volume turned down, you should still be able to hear crackles - just quieter.

The newspapers say similar things. Not that they should need to because it is so obvious. But anyhow.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/24/black-lives-matter-protests-havent-caused-spike-covid-cases-12899049/

However PHE have not exactly covered themselves in glory - perhaps we should look at another source of data. So let's play again...

You can find the original data here,

https://covid19.joinzoe.com/data

Now this is interesting because I think there is the faintest echo of a spike which might be related to the VE day celebrations. It's difficult really to say that it is a significant signal because it is so small. But there might be something there.

But... the elephant in the room is that the 'rona continues on like a juggernaut. It rolls over these spikes and tramples them almost entirely flat. Any changes in our behavior are steamrollered under its relentless progress.

There are other things we can look at too. How did it go for countries that didn't have a formal lockdown and just told people to be careful? Well there aren't too many of them but Sweden stands out as a country that dared to say no. They got dragged over the coals for it, but one has to be impressed by politicians who had the courage to do what they thought was right despite the fact that it went so against the grain. Interestingly the Swedish strategy was very similar to the original UK strategy before Boris bottled it, oops before Boris decided to go with the science.

The other country that didn’t impose a lockdown was Turkey. So if lockdowns work then Sweden and Turkey should have had a pretty rubbish time.

So would you like to play spot the countries that didn't lock down?

Here you can see excess death graphs for a variety of countries. Can you spot the two countries that didn't have a lockdown? Everyone else locked down right at the start of the red bits.

If you want the answer you can find the original graphs here.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries

There are other graphs too. The NYT has a great series in which you can see when lockdown was brought in, taken out and the number of cases reported. If you can see a pattern in them you're a better person than me.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html

It's not so much that lockdown doesn't work, it's that it works so badly that you might as well ignore it. If it worked well we would be able to see the results when we didn't stick to the rules and frankly there is either nothing, or close to nothing there. If the Emperor is wearing clothes they are no more than a negligee.

Of course even the most irresponsible people aren't stupid. Presumably most people take care not to do anything really idiotic like taking turns to spit ping pong balls into beer glasses as happened in Ischgl in Austria. 

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/24/europe/austria-ski-resort-ischgl-coronavirus-intl/index.html

So it's not so much that being careful doesn't make a difference it's that the level of care a formal lockdown creates doesn't seem to make any more difference than the level of care that people exercise when told to be careful.

It seems to me that the evidence for this is overwhelming but that we are locked in by confirmation bias. Wouldn't it be awful to think that the past three months had all been entirely pointless? 

Certainly Boris isn't going to be jumping up and announcing that it was all a waste of time but that it's ok because we've got the next 50 years to pay for it.

However until we are honest about this I cannot see are not going to go anywhere fast. How can we tackle these very real problems until we recognize that our core strategy doesn't actually work?