Thus far, I have said little about why people wouldnât want to restrict their behavior. Despite the fact that lockdowns were effective, bringing down the initial surge in blue states and giving everyone time to prepare for subsequent transmission, the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration make the claim that their externalities werenât worth it because of their socioeconomic toll.
The fatal flaw of this argumentâclearly borne out by the dataâis that it neglects the socioeconomic toll of the virus. Thereâs a simple yet important line in the John Snow Memorandum which reads: âWe must protect our workforce [to] avoid long-term uncertainty.â This uncertainty had by then already proven to be a major obstacle as discussed in most economic literature.
Iâll start with a well-done paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research published in May 2020. The authors were specifically looking at South Korea because it never locked down during the first wave of COVID (they used test & trace). Despite having a contained, regional outbreak, the area in which there were cases still suffered half as much economic damage as the US or UK. Unemployment rose because firms saw the situation as uncertain and stopped hiring. Being able to make accurate predictions about the future is extremely important in economics, both for businesses and consumers. So they stopped spending and investing which also slowed the economy.
The authors apply these observations to countries which shut down, for example the US which saw double digit unemployment and diminished spending still in June, or the UK where foot traffic to retail shops was still down by 50%. The World Bank reports that much of that damage came from high-income individuals not spending, which hurt small businesses and the consumption of those who worked for them. But that was a voluntary choice we obviously couldnât coerce them out of. So economists recommended stimulating the economy to keep things running artificially, which as weâll discuss in a moment is precisely what we did. Simply removing protections after the formal lockdown would not have solved the problem.
Another remarkable study on the effect of uncertainty looks at reactions to past disasters in the United States. They examined how markers of economic productivity declined after events like Hurricane Katrina or September 11th. For Katrina, which was much less severe in terms of its human toll than COVID, they found it took a year out for full economic recovery in the areas affected. The longest lasting effects were on service industry employment and travel. They then extrapolate from the dataset to the deaths and aid given for COVID, predicting a: âcumulative reduction of 39%, or loss of nearly 55 million service sector jobs before the onset of recovery,â and up to 86 million in the worst case scenario. This was pretty close to accurate given the 55 million new unemployment claims from March to July. And it falls in line with what could be extrapolated from the past.
If you donât want to rely on individual studies, a review by the International Monetary Fund also finds a roughly equal effect on the economy of lockdowns and personal behavior, with the latter being slightly stronger in rich countries like the United States. The World Bank seems to suggest the effect after initial lockdowns was smaller because 75% of businesses were already re-opened by 6 weeks after on average across countries, and 90% at 10 weeks.Â
Another paper from the NBER argues the economic effects may be overstated because initial lockdowns did bring cases down. They predict that in their absence we might see a âW-shaped recessionâ where the economy rebounds upon re-opening but retracts as infections rise. This was prescient as a later survey of 32 esteemed quantitative economists found that most agreed the economy would be stronger if we had locked down more aggressively. And even later the Congressional Research Service would say that lack of vaccines in poorer countries was a contributor to economic inequity (suggesting people were still reacting to COVID).
You have to add onto this international uncertainty, since about one quarter of GDP contraction across countries was due to disruptions in global supply. So we can say that something greater than a majority of the initial economic impact (perhaps a supermajority) had nothing to do with government-mandated lockdowns. And to make up for that fraction of the effect, we passed the largest federal aid bill in history (CARES), a subsequent bill months later about half as large (HEALS), and states themselves dolled out money to those who couldnât work. This caused the IMF to substantially revise its expectations for a contraction in advanced economies, and thus seemed like a good use of money to let people stay home safely. Critically, most of those who were poorer who died got the virus by working.
Could we have done more? Sure. But to claim an artificially imposed lockdown itself wrecked the economy without any accountability or recompense is objectively untrue.
Mediating Factors
Beyond the economy, there are some other externalities to account for. To frame them I borrow a quote from Jay Bhattacharya: âI think the lockdowns are a failure of imagination and creativity in policy.â He is asking public health to be more creative in protecting the elderly. The problem I see is him and his coauthors are less willing to be creative when discussing the externalities of the pandemic.
Hereâs an example. We know that domestic abuse increased substantially during the early days of the pandemic. This is devastating, and we absolutely needed to do something about it. The rhetoric of the GBD typically implies that societal ills resulting from the lockdown are a direct result thereof and should lead to its immediate end. But this is myopic, because every social phenomenon has mediating factors we can and should address.
I can also tell you that when a home sports team loses, or when itâs very hot which drives people indoors, domestic abuse in a city increases by 10%. My conclusion from seeing this data is not that if itâs hot or the home team is losing, abuse inevitably follows (so I must change the weather or abolish sports). Itâs that I need to acknowledge this is coming and take policy measures to counteract the expected effect. And we do that often, because a number of psychosocial problems vary routinely throughout the year without our always knowing why (e.g. suicide).
Unfortunately, supporters of The Great Barrington Declaration tend only to focus on the harms of lockdowns and not to explore feasible solutions. This is harmful in that public awareness, funding, and volunteer support is a direct and primary determinant of whether social issues get solved.
I know because Iâve worked (or mostly interned) in a few nonprofits throughout the years, including volunteering for a charity run by social workers in San Diego during the pandemic. My goal was to help them increase donations so they could assist assault, abuse and hunger victims. My small actions (just a few hours a week for a few months) helped them save at least $500 which could then go back to the community. I wonder how many people could have been helped if all the lockdown rhetoric was focused on attainable solutions.
I sometimes even see the GBD authors explicitly overlook solutions from trusted nonprofit organizations. The most obvious case is when they point to world hunger and attack public health. For example, I once pushed back on a claim by Dr. Bhattacharya that the lockdowns were âthe greatest public health crisis in history.â When I brought up the number of deaths from COVID, which are not so amenable to mediation, he linked me to an article by UNICEF on infant wasting. The implication was that lockdowns = mass hunger. Iâve seen him do this often.Â
To my surprise, when I actually opened the article, I found that UNICEF directly contradicted Dr. Bhattacharya. The article argues that the virus is to blame for a socioeconomic crisis producing food insecurity in poorer nations: âWe must act now to stop the disease from spreading, help the sick, and protect first responders on the frontlines.â It then asks for an influx of donations from other countries to feed children while the pandemic is raging, along with smarter policy within nations which âdesignates food markets as essential services.âÂ
If for some reason you donât trust UNICEF, take it from the extremely competent World Food Program whose director won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for helping to feed over 100 million people. He stated at the beginning of the pandemic: âIt is critical we come together as one united global community to defeat this disease, and protect the most vulnerable nations and communities from its potentially devastating effects.â Both.
He would later reaffirm this message, calling for 1) trade done safely: âIt is critically important we balance sensible measures to contain the spread of the virus, with the need to keep borders open and supply chains going and trade flows movingâ and 2) more money: âWe need $4.9 billion to feed, for one year, all 30 million people who will die without WFPâs assistance. Worldwide, there are over 2,000 billionaires with a net worth of $8 trillion. In my home country, the USA, there are 12 individuals alone worth $1 trillion. In fact, reports state that three of them made billions upon billions during COVID! I am not opposed to people making money, but humanity is facing the greatest crisis any of us have seen in our lifetimes.âÂ
Itâs hard to draw a line from this socially progressive message of wealth redistribution to a call for average Americans to risk or even guarantee infection (which all signs say would slow economy).
Obviously, lockdowns would have impacted food distribution in these countries. But a substantial amount of that had to do with their lockdowns, the pandemicâs effect on global trade, and voluntary economic interactions like tourism (which no policy can force). The US also gave an unprecedented amount of money to cover needs where possible. We could have done better since it seems like you can probably produce and trade a lot of food safely, and that we didnât is an immense moral failing. But the ethics of asking ordinary people to simply work through an uncontained pandemicâthat even with vaccines and NPIs killed nearly one million of usâto cover the remainder of deficits in countries which also voluntarily locked down are unclear to me.
More productive discourse would have focused on nuanced solutions and advocated increased aid. Arguably, those who focused only on one solution (end lockdowns) reduced awareness and therefore our ability to solve these problems.
Lockdowns as Original Sin
One more tendency worth noting is that supporters of The Great Barrington Declaration will often inflate the damages of lockdowns, and generalize the term lockdown, perhaps to extend its perceived duration, by focusing on the damages attributable to the initial shutdown in March of 2020. Because this was a total shutdown clouded in fear and uncertainty about the future, its impacts were vastly disproportionate to those of later protective measures.
Take for instance the common claim that lockdowns contributed to mental health problems and loneliness. This is true. However, two large reports from The Lancet Global Mental Health Commission and the Wellcome Trust found that mental health symptoms spiked early on but then tended to level out. Even loneliness, which you would have expected to increase the most, went from 11% to 13.8%. A significant amount of this effect might be explained by political division and severed ties that year, along with the huge number of people who would have lost family members to the pandemic. And whereas pandemic loneliness is temporary, losses to COVID can expectably have lifelong negative mental health effects.
Something similar is true for the economic effects of lockdowns, where the initial shock reverberates despite the economy being technically open. The damage is centralized around the most extreme measures. It is convenient for the supporters of the GBD not to mention this because most people understand the initial lockdown was bound to happen.