Did lockdowns cause more harm than good, or did they save lives? Independent report lends weight to anti-closure cause

There are two very different versions of the COVID truth. The first is that strict interventions, especially lockdowns, saved lots of lives. The second is that lockdowns were not merely ineffective but caused more harm than good. The second view is favoured in many ways by the recently released Fault Lines report, funded by three non-profit organisations and chaired by Peter Shergold AC.

The first version, still remarkably supported by many, is that the approach — first implemented by the Chinese Communist Party — was instrumental in saving lives. (Jason Murphy in Crikey recently even wondered “if China knows something” with regard to its COVID lockdown policies.) But the notion of Chinese superiority is likely news to the millions of Chinese citizens forcibly locked in their tiny apartments for months on end, or sent to prison camps masquerading as quarantine centres while their pets are brutally murdered — yes, that happened. 

Before 2020, quarantining the most at-risk population had never genuinely been attempted on a mass scale. In a remarkable feat, the CCP managed to change the global narrative in early 2020. In February 2020, with President Xi Jinping (recently anointed leader for life) facing the most significant threat to his control after the highly publicised death of whistleblower Li Wenliang, the CCP undertook its now infamous Wuhan lockdown. Most remarkable wasn’t that the powerful CCP was able to implement the 76-day lockdown, but that it was able to convince other Western nations (at first Italy but then much of the world) of the benefits of locking down the healthy to protect the at-risk population.

Most remarkable wasn’t that the powerful CCP was able to implement its 76-day Wuhan lockdown, but that it was able to convince other Western nations, such as Italy, of the benefits of its COVID management.

There have essentially been two major points of argument. First, were lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) effective tools in reducing the fatality rate of COVID? Second, did the consequences of those interventions usurp any alleged benefits?

With regards to the first question, thankfully, because different countries and states took different approaches to NPIs, we are able to compare different fatality rates from different regions.

For lockdowns to have been genuinely effective, regions that refused to take such measures would need to have experienced far higher excess deaths and COVID-related deaths. Perhaps counterintuitively, in many cases, the opposite occurred — with some regions that locked down instead experiencing more excess deaths. The most obvious (but certainly not only) example was oft-criticised Sweden, which took a lighter-touch approach. Sweden didn’t forcibly shut down non-essential workplaces. Instead, Sweden encouraged people to work from home and closed senior schools and universities (but allowed younger students to continue to attend in-person classes). 

Perhaps paradoxically, Sweden suffered fewer excess deaths than many other countries that undertook lengthy lockdowns, including Peru, Italy, the US, Spain, Chile, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and France. Sweden even recorded fewer relative excess deaths than Hong Kong, which still, almost three years into the pandemic, requires returning residents to quarantine for three days.

Sweden was far from the only example though. South Dakota in the US provides another useful case study, having refused to impose any genuine interventions. It ended up down in 22nd spot out of 50 US states for relative COVID deaths (read the data here, when filtered by deaths per million). North Dakota, which also refused to lockdown residents, was in 33rd spot. Even Florida, which undertook limited restrictions after May 2020, ended up with a lower relative death rate than New Jersey.

The Fault Lines report provided an interesting study, showing an often negative correlation between the stringency of COVID measures and excess COVID deaths: Greece, Chile and Italy, all of which imposed stringent measures, had far higher excess deaths than the far less strict Sweden and Iceland:

Many misattribute lockdowns to lower deaths because some countries that were initially more successful at limiting fatalities adopted lockdowns as well as more effective border closures and accompanying quarantine rules.

Border closures coupled with strict movement restrictions appeared to work well in the short term for island states like New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Japan. But COVID rates would dramatically increase when the virus mutated into a form that even border closures couldn’t prevent. Fortunately, by the time the highly transmissible Omicron variant arrived, vaccines had materially reduced COVID’s lethality, so excess death rates remained subdued.

The data indicates that some regions that locked down performed better, others performed worse — and that in some cases strict stay-at-home orders appear to have been only moderately effective at slowing transmission.

One cited explanation for the ineffectiveness of Western-style lockdowns is the broad definition of essential services — because so many people continued to leave the home to work or shop, they inevitably contracted the virus, which quickly spread to family members. This explains why poorer, often larger, multi-generational migrant families were hardest hit during earlier lockdowns.

Unsurprisingly, these demographics bore most of the brunt of lockdown policies. While the uber-wealthy escaped to their super yachts and holiday mansions, in NSW alone, children aged between 13-17 received 3840 fines. One teenager with an intellectual disability received three $1000 fines for being outside their house. Areas of social disadvantage were hardest hit — Liverpool and Mt Druitt in Sydney’s west accrued $1 million in fines between July and October 2021, while leafy Rozelle received a mere $43,000. (The NSW government kindly allowed young fine victims to “work off” their debt, in a sort of Dickensian slave labour scheme.)

Extraordinarily, 90% of police activity during lockdowns in NSW related to enforcing pandemic rules.

The impact on children’s education is likely the most significant side-effect of lockdowns. Recent US NEAP test scores revealed that “the average reading score fell by five points, the largest drop since 1990. In math, scores dropped seven points, the first decline of any kind in the 50-year history of the test. Based on these results, the pandemic wiped out 20 years of student gains in both subjects.”

The largest drops were for Black and Latino students. Poorer students suffered twice the erosion as wealthier ones. Michael Bloomberg has called the situation a “national emergency”.

The Fault Lines report echoed this view, finding that “it was wrong to close entire school systems, particularly once new information indicated that schools were not high-transmission environments. For children and parents (particularly women), we failed to get the balance right between protecting health and imposing long-term costs on education, mental health, the economy and workforce outcomes.”

A high-profile (and apolitical) recent article by The Lancet noted “nearly 370 million children across 50 countries have missed meals since school closures began, and that globally an estimated 39 billion in-school meals have been missed as a result of pandemic-induced school closures … One estimate from the World Bank suggests that this generation of children could potentially lose an estimated $10 trillion globally in their life earnings.”

The UK also saw dramatic decreases in reading ability, and as a psychology professor also noted: “the stunted progress extends beyond academic ability … we’re seeing children turning up at school who aren’t toilet-trained, not able to use cutlery or even speak properly.”

The pandemic response also coincided with UK childhood obesity significantly increasing from 9.9% to 14.4%, after decades of slow improvement. Unsurprisingly, locking children in their houses and preventing organised sport for months may not have led to positive health outcomes. 

But the side effects of lockdowns aren’t exclusive to children. In the UK, alcoholism and smoking surged — according to the NHS, the proportion of “high-risk” drinkers increased from 12.4% to 17.4%, an increase expected to lead to 25,000 extra deaths and cost £5.2 billion. The number of young smokers also increased from 21.5% to 26.8%.

Also unsurprising has been the impact on domestic violence, as The Lancet noted: “Lockdowns also resulted in increased gender-based violence … the United Nations Population Fund projected in April 2020 that if the lockdown continued for six months or more, 31 million additional cases of gender-based violence could be expected to occur.”

That is saying nothing of the economic impacts of expansionary pandemic economic policies. Forced closures of Western economies forced debt-ridden governments to undertake a series of unprecedented fiscal and monetary expansions. Policies like Australia’s poorly designed JobKeeper or the United States’ US$2.3 billion in spending contributed to an outbreak of decades-high inflation. The need for central banks to quickly hike interest rates will lead to a near-certain global recession. Again, the victims will be the poor and disadvantaged who don’t own inflation-hedged assets like property or shares.

As The Lancet noted, “the epidemic response of many governments has been led by political considerations and hospital-system administrators rather than by public health considerations and specialists”. And with data showing the harms of lockdowns, the belief that you can control a highly transmissible respiratory virus remains lore for many.