{"id":75247,"date":"2020-09-18T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-18T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=75247"},"modified":"2020-09-12T18:49:10","modified_gmt":"2020-09-12T23:49:10","slug":"what-if-we-held-a-state-of-emergency-and-the-state-of-nature-didnt-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=75247","title":{"rendered":"What If We Held A State Of Emergency, And The State Of Nature Didn’t Care?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hypothesis: neither the lockdown nor the re-opening really affected the course of the pandemic<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported COVID-19 cases in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland\u2019s Transportation Institute into a \u201cSocial Distancing Index.\u201d<\/p>

Measuring from the start of the year to each state\u2019s point of maximum lockdown, which range from April 5 to April 18, it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns \u2014 DC, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts \u2014 had the heaviest caseloads.<\/p>

It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks<\/a>. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors, such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The whole thing is worth a read and a critical evaluation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as this thing progresses, it seems more and more that the public health response was largely political posturing, and that the scientifically supported <\/em>response was to promote responsible personal behavior (not just wearing masks and washing hands, either – losing weight, quitting smoking, managing diabetes and blood pressure all have outsized importance), aggressively protecting the extremely vulnerable, and investigate treatments (ideally free of politically-motivated interference). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are in times in which the conservative approach (i.e., science) is pretty radical. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hypothesis: neither the lockdown nor the re-opening really affected the course of the pandemic: TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported COVID-19 cases in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[416,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid19","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75247"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75301,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75247\/revisions\/75301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}