Many cost-benefit analyses (especially early in the pandemic) compared modelled, not actual, benefits of lockdowns—note that epidemiological models have repeatedly proven overly pessimistic—usually with estimated short-term monetary costs of lockdowns. Generally these cost-benefit analyses ignored non-monetary costs, even though they’re huge. They also tended to calculate benefits by comparing lockdowns vs doing nothing, ignoring options like supporting the elderly to isolate themselves while letting everyone else go about their lives.
We now know that lockdowns had minimal-to-zero benefits in terms of preventing short-term excess deaths: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28930#fromrss (If you don’t have patience to read the paper, just consider Sweden’s average-for-Europe performance despite its decision not to lockdown, or the minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states.)
So given that the actual factually-demonstrated benefits are statistically indistinguishable from zero (so realistically some small positive), and the costs are immense, I find it hard to claim that a reasonable cost-benefit analysis would support lockdowns.
Do you have links to any scientifically rigorous cost-benefit analyses that actually take into account all Covid costs, including long-term impacts to health, education and life expectancy? And that also use factual inputs when estimating benefits rather than epidemiological models of dubious accuracy? If you can post links to such high-quality cost-benefit analyses, I will consider updating my views. If not, I hope you will update yours.
Compared to other Scandinavian countries, the Swedish death rate is very high: Sweden has 1459 covid deaths per million. For Norway that number is 238, for Finland it is 280 and for Denmark it is 559.
The Danish population density is more than 5 times that of the other Scandinavian countries, so perhaps Scandinavia without Denmark is a better reference class. I’m not claiming that Scandinavia (with or without Denmark) is the correct reference class, I’m just saying that Europe is not the only possible reference class and other reference classes paints a completely different picture.
Population density is entirely the wrong metric to look at here. You could fudge the denmark “population density” count by just including Greenland, and including the empty swathes of land in the nordic countries has the same effect.
Well said. Eyeballing the chart shows no correlation between population density and covid death rate. Looking strictly at Europe, CSPI has a good chart (halfway down the long detailed post) showing minimal correlation. My take on population density is that the pro-lockdown media in March and April 2020 were predicting bodies piled high in the streets and the total collapse of healthcare systems without lockdowns. Because back then populations hadn’t normalised extreme losses of freedom so you needed to predict Armageddon in order to sell the lockdowns. Sweden, and later the US red states, proved that Armageddon was factually false. So the journalists needed some rationalisations for why Sweden hadn’t turned into a hell-hole and population density was the first thing they thought of.
If you still want to control for population density, compare Stockholm against European cities likeParis with similar population density. I’m pretty sure I read a good report finding that Stockholm was average again, but I seem to have lost the link.
Fair point. The relevant metric might be something like average population density around an average person (or density might not be that relevant at all). Looking at this map of population density, my conclusion is that every country is different, so using Scadinavia without Denmark as a reference class is probably unfair cherry-picking. Still, Sweden has more than 2.6 times as many covid deaths per million as any other Scandinavian country.
My prior for this is that the population-level differences are probably almost entirely centered around care-homes, and questions related to care-homes (or, more generally, very old people). Since my knowledge on comparisons between care-homes in scandinavian countries is close to zero, I cannot really provide any insight here. But something as banal as “did people who are sick stop going to work in care-homes” will probably bias the results far more than population density.
Edit: regarding population density: I don’t think there’s no effect, I just don’t know what the effect is or if it is even monotone. Almost all the people I know who got covid either (a) live in a village and don’t trust the government or (b) are highly-connected even for big-city standards. So it could be that there is a sweet spot local-minimum where people in cities feel super at risk because of all the strangers around them and isolate, but the effects of the additional density don’t meaningfully lead to more covid.
Maybe that’s more from lower vaccination rates, than lockdowns—but it still undermines the argument that´s based on no significant red/blue state differences.
Dumbledore’s Army was speaking about excess deaths. The article to which you link is about COVID mortality.
In addition, it says “Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020.” That suggests that the lockdowns didn’t cause a difference in COVID-19 mortality but the vaccines actually did. Sweden is also an example of no lockdown but decent vaccine uptake.
In one thread someone wrote about one rationalist dying to sepsis because they locked down to the extent that they didn’t go to the hospital. I have one friend who said that three acquaintances of hers committed suicide during the lockdowns.
Looking at excess deaths makes a lot more sense because the additional deaths caused by the lockdown matter.
Yeah, I agree that excess death data is preferable when available. For some reason Dumbledore’s Army’s original link isn’t working for me (“page not found”). So I haven’t yet seen state by state excess mortality data. But if it actually doesn’t find any difference between the red/blue states that would undermine the argument from the NYT article above.
Looking at Our World in Data’s limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries (with similar vaccination rates). That undermines any simple arguments based on Sweden (other than ones with weaker conclusions—such as that avoiding lockdowns don’t 10X+ net covid mortality).
Ofc there could be some other explanation for excess Swedish mortality. But an argument against lockdowns based on Sweden as a datapoint would need a pretty solid explanation of this.
Fixed the link, thanks for letting me know it wasn’t working. If For whatever reason that link doesn’t work, it’s called The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on Excess Mortality andthe authors are Agrawal, Cantor, Sood and Whaley.
Looking at Our World in Data’s limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries
“The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years.”
Sweden 883 Finland 411 Denmark 154 Norway 110 Iceland 92
Ah, that data isn’t cumulative. It is just looking at current excess mortality. A lot of Sweden’s excess mortality happened early on (I believe, while the other Scandinavian countries were locking down more). So the cumulative number is higher, but not the current number.
I think it’s entirely from different vaccination rates. Check the stats for 2020 only ie before vaccines were widely available. Because there were indeed no significant red-blue state differences then. The paper I linked above includes all US states in its analysis as well as 43 other countries.
Edited to add: try going through the US states data in this report, written March 2021 ie before the Delta wave with differential vaccine rates.
Many cost-benefit analyses (especially early in the pandemic) compared modelled, not actual, benefits of lockdowns—note that epidemiological models have repeatedly proven overly pessimistic—usually with estimated short-term monetary costs of lockdowns. Generally these cost-benefit analyses ignored non-monetary costs, even though they’re huge. They also tended to calculate benefits by comparing lockdowns vs doing nothing, ignoring options like supporting the elderly to isolate themselves while letting everyone else go about their lives.
We now know that lockdowns had minimal-to-zero benefits in terms of preventing short-term excess deaths: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28930#fromrss (If you don’t have patience to read the paper, just consider Sweden’s average-for-Europe performance despite its decision not to lockdown, or the minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states.)
So given that the actual factually-demonstrated benefits are statistically indistinguishable from zero (so realistically some small positive), and the costs are immense, I find it hard to claim that a reasonable cost-benefit analysis would support lockdowns.
Do you have links to any scientifically rigorous cost-benefit analyses that actually take into account all Covid costs, including long-term impacts to health, education and life expectancy? And that also use factual inputs when estimating benefits rather than epidemiological models of dubious accuracy? If you can post links to such high-quality cost-benefit analyses, I will consider updating my views. If not, I hope you will update yours.
Compared to other Scandinavian countries, the Swedish death rate is very high: Sweden has 1459 covid deaths per million. For Norway that number is 238, for Finland it is 280 and for Denmark it is 559.
The Danish population density is more than 5 times that of the other Scandinavian countries, so perhaps Scandinavia without Denmark is a better reference class. I’m not claiming that Scandinavia (with or without Denmark) is the correct reference class, I’m just saying that Europe is not the only possible reference class and other reference classes paints a completely different picture.
Covid numbers are from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Population density is entirely the wrong metric to look at here. You could fudge the denmark “population density” count by just including Greenland, and including the empty swathes of land in the nordic countries has the same effect.
Well said. Eyeballing the chart shows no correlation between population density and covid death rate. Looking strictly at Europe, CSPI has a good chart (halfway down the long detailed post) showing minimal correlation. My take on population density is that the pro-lockdown media in March and April 2020 were predicting bodies piled high in the streets and the total collapse of healthcare systems without lockdowns. Because back then populations hadn’t normalised extreme losses of freedom so you needed to predict Armageddon in order to sell the lockdowns. Sweden, and later the US red states, proved that Armageddon was factually false. So the journalists needed some rationalisations for why Sweden hadn’t turned into a hell-hole and population density was the first thing they thought of.
If you still want to control for population density, compare Stockholm against European cities likeParis with similar population density. I’m pretty sure I read a good report finding that Stockholm was average again, but I seem to have lost the link.
Fair point. The relevant metric might be something like average population density around an average person (or density might not be that relevant at all). Looking at this map of population density, my conclusion is that every country is different, so using Scadinavia without Denmark as a reference class is probably unfair cherry-picking. Still, Sweden has more than 2.6 times as many covid deaths per million as any other Scandinavian country.
My prior for this is that the population-level differences are probably almost entirely centered around care-homes, and questions related to care-homes (or, more generally, very old people). Since my knowledge on comparisons between care-homes in scandinavian countries is close to zero, I cannot really provide any insight here. But something as banal as “did people who are sick stop going to work in care-homes” will probably bias the results far more than population density.
Edit: regarding population density: I don’t think there’s no effect, I just don’t know what the effect is or if it is even monotone. Almost all the people I know who got covid either (a) live in a village and don’t trust the government or (b) are highly-connected even for big-city standards. So it could be that there is a sweet spot local-minimum where people in cities feel super at risk because of all the strangers around them and isolate, but the effects of the additional density don’t meaningfully lead to more covid.
Hm. I wonder if there’s really a ” minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states”. From the graph here it looks like red states had ~40% higher mortality per capita: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/briefing/covid-death-toll-red-america.html
Maybe that’s more from lower vaccination rates, than lockdowns—but it still undermines the argument that´s based on no significant red/blue state differences.
Dumbledore’s Army was speaking about excess deaths. The article to which you link is about COVID mortality.
In addition, it says “Either way, the per capita death toll in blue America and red America was similar by the final weeks of 2020.” That suggests that the lockdowns didn’t cause a difference in COVID-19 mortality but the vaccines actually did. Sweden is also an example of no lockdown but decent vaccine uptake.
In one thread someone wrote about one rationalist dying to sepsis because they locked down to the extent that they didn’t go to the hospital. I have one friend who said that three acquaintances of hers committed suicide during the lockdowns.
Looking at excess deaths makes a lot more sense because the additional deaths caused by the lockdown matter.
Yeah, I agree that excess death data is preferable when available. For some reason Dumbledore’s Army’s original link isn’t working for me (“page not found”). So I haven’t yet seen state by state excess mortality data. But if it actually doesn’t find any difference between the red/blue states that would undermine the argument from the NYT article above.
Looking at Our World in Data’s limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries (with similar vaccination rates). That undermines any simple arguments based on Sweden (other than ones with weaker conclusions—such as that avoiding lockdowns don’t 10X+ net covid mortality).
Ofc there could be some other explanation for excess Swedish mortality. But an argument against lockdowns based on Sweden as a datapoint would need a pretty solid explanation of this.
Fixed the link, thanks for letting me know it wasn’t working. If For whatever reason that link doesn’t work, it’s called The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on Excess Mortality and the authors are Agrawal, Cantor, Sood and Whaley.
No. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid is the page for excess mortality.
Finland has +19 pp absolute change and +165% relative change while Sweden only has +8 pp and +125%. Norway even has +24 pp and +355%.
Sweden has lower excess mortality than Finland and Norway.
Yeah, precisely that page. Scroll down to the graph:
”Excess mortality: Cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projection based on
previous years, per million people, Dec 19, 2021
“The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years.”
Sweden 883
Finland 411
Denmark 154
Norway 110
Iceland 92
Proportions are similar if you check out the economist’s data below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?country=OWID_WRL~CHN~IND~USA~IDN~BRA
Where are you getting your numbers?
I’m referencing the numbers on https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=table&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF
Sweden has a higher population than the other countries listed so total numbers are not comparable. That alone doesn’t explain all the difference.
It’s unclear to me why https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=map&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid come to such different conclusions.
“Sweden has a higher population than the other countries listed so total numbers are not comparable. That alone doesn’t explain all the difference.”
The numbers I’m citing above are population normalized. They are total excess deaths per million (and per 100k in the economist link).
”It’s unclear to me why https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=map&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid come to such different conclusions.”
Ah, that data isn’t cumulative. It is just looking at current excess mortality. A lot of Sweden’s excess mortality happened early on (I believe, while the other Scandinavian countries were locking down more). So the cumulative number is higher, but not the current number.
I think it’s entirely from different vaccination rates. Check the stats for 2020 only ie before vaccines were widely available. Because there were indeed no significant red-blue state differences then. The paper I linked above includes all US states in its analysis as well as 43 other countries.
Edited to add: try going through the US states data in this report, written March 2021 ie before the Delta wave with differential vaccine rates.