Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No

Savage Premium Subscription

WALL STREET JOURNAL

The speed with which officials shuttered the economy appears not to be a factor in Covid deaths.

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis. To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state.

READ MORE AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL