FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY AT REASON: Were the COVID-19 Lockdowns a Mistake?

Many Americans are losing patience with statewide shelter-in-place orders.

“We don’t have months or weeks—businesses are hurting,” says Jim Desmond, a San Diego county supervisor who unsuccessfully attempted to introduce legislation hastening the re-opening of businesses in his county despite the statewide lockdown in California.

“[Those] hurt the most in this are the poor people, the people that rent, that worked in the hospitality sector and the restaurants, and a lot of single moms….We have people on the phone crying saying, ‘Hey, I got a kid to feed,'” Desmond tells Reason.

So have the lockdowns actually saved lives? There’s a debate over how to analyze the data.

“Lockdowns just don’t actually alter behavior all that much,” says Lyman Stone, an economist and demographer who’s an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. He argues that there’s no correlation between the timing of statewide or regional shelter-in-place orders and a decline in the COVID-19 death rate.

“We can basically build a theory and assert that the world obeys our theory and just go looking for any scrap of evidence that supports it,” says Stone, “or we can start by looking at what are the trends we actually observe.”

A month later, the trends we all observed were the dancing TikTok nurses promoting the George Floyd rioters. Both of which groups, perhaps unintentionally, definitively answered the question.