Any objective look at the data will show that Covid 19 has been in decline in the US since about April 1st or so. But why? Public officials will immediately take credit saying that it was the government imposed lock downs. This is perfectly reasonable to assume... but it is an ASSUMPTION. (Also it makes for great reelection material, "I Governor Bob saved us from death with my bold leadership" sounds a lot better than "well sorry we made you all lose you jobs for nothing") However, Is there scientific evidence and data to support the claim that the lockdowns are the primary driver behind the slowing of the virus? First off, off course lock downs help reduce the spread of the virus to some extent but they also come with a HUGE cost to millions of people in both money, well being and even life itself. Furthermore, there are multiple factors that can slow the spread of a virus...
1) Seasonality
2) Mitigation
3) Mutation in the virus
4) Increasing herd immunity levels. 5) Increasing testing and isolation.
6) Population density
And many more. So the question is not did the lockdowns help slow the spread, the question is HOW MUCH did the lockdowns help slow the spread compared to other factors and was that worth the cost? This is a classic case where a multi variate analysis is needed to determine which cases are MOST responsible. It is my hypothesis that lockdowns do very little to slow the spread of the virus and come with a massive economic cost and should be avoided except for in the most extreme circumstances.
Here is why we should doubt that Lockdowns have a major affect.
Basic statistics show speed to lockdown has no correlation with improved outcomes in the US. https://medium.com/@yinonweiss/lets-visualize-state-by-state-shutdown-effectiveness-on-covid-19-e13a5cdb50ad
Hawaii got the virus EARLIER than NYC and locked down AFTER NYC and had 17 deaths and NYC has 20,000K+
Locations that did not lock down (like Sweden and South Dakota) have similar outbreak patterns to those who did not.
Seasonality seems to have a large effect on the virus ability to spread and we are in the period where season viruses begin to decline anyway. I wrote in detail about this previously https://www.thesouthpawblog.com/post/summer-the-wall-covid-19-can-t-climb
There has been no significant outbreaks tied to grocery store or delivery workers despite them never closing down. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/06/ny-gov-cuomo-says-its-shocking-most-new-coronavirus-hospitalizations-are-people-staying-home.html
States and countries that are reopening are not seeing any major increases in outbreak numbers. (see Georgia, Germany, South Korea, China etc etc)
So what is slowing the virus?
Many things but I would argue that chief among them are.....
1) Season: I already wrote about this so I will just link to my other piece on it. It seems obvious based on UV ray effect on the virus and the difference between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres that season pushed this thing hard. Therefore we are at the season when the virus should go into decline anyway. 2) Mitigation: One thing that we know has happened in the past month or two is that people have changed their behavior. This is not the same as a lockdown. Sweden and many Asian countries like South Korea have shown that you can keep your economies largely open and mitigate at the same time. Certainly our efforts to be more careful have helped slow the spread but don't conflate that with government lockdown. 3) Herd immunity increases: Some areas that have been hard hit (Like NYC) or who have let the virus spread in a controlled way (Like Stockholm) are approaching 30% of people having antibodies to the virus. This is NOT full herd immunity but it is a substantial number of people in the population who are essential human shields. And if children are relatively poor transmitters of the virus then that number may even be higher. 4) Testing improvements: With us finding more cases and confirming them it creates greater awareness of who may be at risk. People at risk are then able to isolate or be more careful. Testing is not a way to eradicate the virus but as it has ramped up we gain greater visibility and control.
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