The editors of the Wall Street Journal commenting on the economic effects of the lockdowns in 2020 take an unsurprising stance:
As the U.S. economy reopens more fully, comparative data is emerging about the 50 states that illuminate how much of the economic harm was self-inflicted.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently published state personal income and GDP data for the fourth quarter and 2020 calendar year. Most states suffered a massive decline in GDP in 2020’s second quarter as governors followed the advice of public-health officials to shut down businesses to “flatten the curve.â€
But the new data show that states that allowed businesses to reopen sooner, and maintained fewer restrictions for the rest of the year, recovered by year-end. Real GDP for private industries fell 1.3% nationally at an annual compounded rate between the first and fourth quarters, according to BEA.
Yet there was large variation among the states. Hawaii’s economy declined the most (-9.9%)—no surprise given its dependence on tourism. Wyoming (-6.6%) and other energy-producing states were also slow to bounce back. New York’s (-5%) recovery was third worst, and even New Jersey (-2.3%) and Connecticut (-0.3%) fared better. Utah performed the best, growing 4.3%. It also has the sixth lowest per capita Covid death rate.
Northeast states were slammed hardest in the spring, so governors in the region were understandably more cautious about easing business restrictions. Yet New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo kept many businesses shut all summer despite ample hospital capacity and fewer Covid cases. He let retail and restaurants in New York City partially reopen in the fall, but then reimposed a near-total lockdown in December. New York’s economy never awoke from its spring coma.
By contrast, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis let nearly all businesses stay open after May. Florida’s private GDP had shrunk only 1.1% by year-end, dragged down by weak international and domestic tourism. New York’s food and accommodation industry shrank more than twice as much as Florida’s and the most in the U.S.
Retail also recovered in most states during the summer and fall, thanks in part to online commerce and federal payments to individuals. States in the South and Southwest that reopened sooner—such as Utah (8.3%), Arkansas (5.7%), Arizona (4.9%) and Georgia (4.7%)—had the strongest retail growth from the first quarter. The biggest exception? New York (-8.8%). Even New Jersey saw a small retail uptick between the first and fourth quarters.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s business restrictions were the strictest in the Midwest. Her state’s private GDP also fell three times more than the Great Lakes region. Or consider California, whose private economy shrank 1.9% between the first and fourth quarters as Gov. Gavin Newsom gradually lifted restrictions last summer only to reimpose a stay-at-home order in November. By contrast, Arizona’s private GDP increased 1%, buoyed by construction, manufacturing and retail comebacks.
Democratic Governors began to ease business restrictions this January as cases ebbed, vaccines rolled out and Joe Biden became President. But the unemployment rates in California (8.5%) and New York (8.9%) remained significantly higher in February than the national 6.2% average. Unemployment in New York City was still 12.9%.
But that dodges the larger question: did the lockdowns save lives? The jury remains out on that question. Such answers as I have been able to find remain strongly politically motivated.
I searched in vain for any models of, for example, fatalities in New York with or without the lockdowns. Research, too, appears to be highly politically motivated.
I have long felt that morbidity and mortality due to SARS-CoV-2 was less related to policy that to other factors like population behaviors, demographics including age distribution and genetic variation, density, climate, and geography. It may be decades, centuries before we have conclusive answers if ever. We really need them now.
You need to look at not only lockdowns but compliance. Actually, you need to look at tons of stuff so a difficult study. Still, as a rule, once lockdowns happen, or when people do the same voluntarily (the GPS tracking studies) spread stopped.
As an aside it looks like the non-partisan WSJ is backing DeSantis. Note that Florida also had a decrease in GDP but they avoided putting that negative sign in front of the Florida numbers unlike with those NE states. Subtle but effective.
Steve
That’s pretty much what I said in the post.
So, being pro-economic growth and pro-business is a partisan issue? Good to know.
The original rationale for the lockdowns was that they would slow the spread of the virus and thus protect the hospitals from overcrowding. There was never any claim in the beginning that they would reduce the number of cases or deaths. Those depend entirely on the original number of people susceptible to the virus.
So, the short answer is, No, the lockdowns did not prevent one death.
The CDC and the MSM have changed the story line so many times that they cannot remember their lines.
“So, being pro-economic growth and pro-business is a partisan issue? Good to know.”
So we get better economic growth with Republicans? Good to know.
Steve
Far too multi factorial to reach definitive conclusions. But I would venture that age/comorbidities, density and compliance dominate. However, non compliance just tells us it was no strategy at all. That all said, I made the point Sykes makes way back in April/May. We just time shifted.
Good to see steve still can’t carry through a line of argumentation to its conclusion, and instead throws a temper tantrum.
TL;DR. It saved a lot of lives, but probably less than hoped for or expected.
Vaccines are the rebuttal that lockdowns simply time shifted deaths. Since vaccines arrived, the time-shifting equals lives saved.
You start off with median consensus assumptions. That SARS-COV2 was a R0 of 2.5 and has an IFR of about 1% for the US demographic profile (median age of 40).
If an alternate timeline — where no effective vaccine was ever created, and the US reached “herd immunity” the long hard way, approximately 60% * 1% = 0.6% of the population would have died. In that timeline, 2 million Americans would have died.
Then you make a forward assumption (hope?) that vaccines will end the pandemic and death tolls will be negligible from today. The CDC has a graph showing the number of excess deaths since Feb 2020, it is around 600K — if one assumes the excess deaths are solely due to COVID; which I think is a reasonable one.
From those number, a tentative conclusion is that vaccines / lockdowns / masks combined saved 1,400,000 lives.
Then one needs to calculate the 1,400,000 that were saved due to lockdowns.
This part is harder because you are counting the number of people who would have died from the COVID got enough time to get the vaccine.
It cannot be all 1,400,000 because (a) while small regions like Bergamo, Italy did reach herd immunity, no country of size reached herd immunity, even with no lockdowns, e.g. Sweden. (b) people, organizations take action based on perceived risks regardless of government action,
e.g. air travel and dining were already down more then 50% before the first government mandates were issued in mid-March 2020.
That implies in the alternate timeline where no lockdowns were imposed but vaccine arrived at the same schedule, the death toll would have been higher then 600K but not reach 2 million.
Then looking at excess death data across countries from the Economist; the countries with the highest excess deaths were about 70% higher then US figures (Peru, Russia, Mexico). I make an assumption that in world with no mandated lockdowns, but vaccines arriving at the same time, US would have been hit as hard those countries. That would be about 1 million deaths.
The difference of 400,000 lives is the people who would have COVID but were saved because the lockdowns prevented them from getting exposed to SARS-COV2 until after the vaccine was available.
So a best guestimate is the vaccines will save 1 million lives in the US, while the lockdowns and vaccine combined saved another 400K lives.
400K is a lot, but its not hard to imagine better implemented lockdowns and other mitigation measures could have saved 200K-300K more lives. e.g. if the country had done as well North Carolina.
Fairly nice paper looking at if lockdowns helped. Like the effort to determine how strict the lockdowns were, but wish they had a compliance component.
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/222/10/1601/5879762
Steve
To my eye the most important passage in the study is this one:
What do you think should be concluded from that?
I think it says that by the methods they used doubling times increased a lot faster, so spread was decreased, in states that had stay at home orders. The weakness here is that we only had 5 states without stay at home orders. I wouldnt draw definite conclusions, but coupled with past studies supports the idea that lockdown measures slow spread.
Steve
Then you add in studies like this one. (Original study actually in JAMA bbq not sure you could access that one.)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2765665
Steve