Covid: Why most of what you know is wrong by Sebastian Rushworth

Author:Sebastian Rushworth [Rushworth, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789188729828
Publisher: Karneval Publishing
Published: 2021-03-08T23:00:00+00:00

DOES LOCKDOWN PREVENT COVID DEATHS?

As humans, we have a strong tendency to make decisions based on common sense. And a lot of the time, common sense is completely wrong. A thousand years ago it was considered common sense that the world was flat, and just a few hundred years ago it was considered common sense that most diseases were caused by imbalances in the fluids in our bodies, and that the most effective medical treatment for almost all medical conditions were induced vomiting and bloodletting. So, if we trust in common sense, rather than in science, we’re going to do a lot of dumb things.

To most people, lockdown seems like common sense. If we close all shops, restaurants, bars, and so on, and stop sending children to school, and tell everyone to sit at home and avoid other people, that should decrease the spread of a viral disease. Common sense.

The decision to lock down was largely made based on the apparent success of the lockdown that China instituted in Wuhan early in the course of the pandemic, and on modeling done by statisticians at Imperial College in London, which suggested that half a million people in the UK would die without a severe lockdown. It’s important to understand here that modeling is not scientific evidence. A model is basically an equation that you invent – you feed the equation with all the variables that you think matter, and then you see what the equation spits out. So, the model will generally produce the result that you, the creator, want it to, since you’re the one deciding which assumptions will be built into the model, and you’re the one deciding which variables will be fed into the model.

So, we have here two very questionable pieces of evidence. “Information” coming out of China, a totalitarian dictatorship with a long history of using media to manipulate the public, and low quality modeling that has since been proven to be utterly wrong. These two questionable pieces of evidence were added to the idea that lockdown ought to work, because it’s “common sense”.

Now, however, we have several months worth of real world data on the effectiveness of lockdown, so we don’t have to rely on common sense and modeling any more. We can look at what’s actually happened.

A very interesting article was published in The Lancet in July that sought to understand which factors correlate, on a country level, with Covid related outcomes.1 The study was observational, so it can only show correlation, not causation, but it can still give pretty strong hints as to which factors protect people from Covid, and which factors increase the risk of being harmed.

The most interesting thing about the study, from my perspective, was that it sought to understand what effect lockdowns, border closures, and widespread testing have in terms of decreasing the number of Covid deaths. Although correlation does not automatically imply causation, if there is a lack of correlation, then that strongly suggests a lack of causation, or at least, that any causative relationship that does exist is extremely weak.

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