These numbers need to be compared to the numbers in the same country for the previous year. For example, in China a 3% increase is actually a regression, because they did 6% in 2019.
Even that isn't enough, because we don't have the numbers for each country if it didn't lock down. It's all hypothetical. What would Norway's GDP growth rate have been without a lockdown, for example? The answer is a number. It's unknowable. People claiming that things would have been as bad, or worse, have zero evidence to back them up. People like me who say it would not have been as bad have evidence based on observed consumer behavior which was clearly curtailed during the lockdown and improved after.
Right it's pretty fucking willy-nilly no matter the conditions you are testing for correlation. The nations you mentioned all had pretty different public responses as well.
That is why I think it's dangerous to proclaim lockdowns are a panacea because with a few exceptions you end up with similar results but a fucked economy
Just compare the GDP hit taken by Japan and Korea, which had essentially no lockdowns, with that taken by the European countries that locked down. Places with extensive lockdowns had GDP fall by 5-10 percentage points more. Or compare US states with more lockdowns vs those with less or no lockdown: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/red-states-are-outpe....
Lockdowns vs no lockdown is an false dichotomy. The lockdown didn’t impact many people like myself, and many people can still be financially impacted even without a lockdown. Some people and businesses have actually been thriving. So your model is too black and white and doesn’t really match reality.
Only one country has successfully gotten to linear growth without lockdown. South Korea. [1] [2] [3]
Every other place has had exponential growth, that goes linear a week or two after lockdown is in place.
That's more than enough evidence for me. We know that lockdown works. We know that wishful thinking doesn't. All we can do is tweak the parameters of what lockdown looks like.
[1] Except it does have a lockdown! Whoops! It banned gatherings, shut down parks, closed borders, closed daycares, schools, sporting events, closed public spaces, etc, etc, etc. It's a lockdown by another name.
[2] Sweeden also closed its borders, and banned large gatherings. It didn't do most of the other things. It's currently in the exponential growth stage.
[3] Singapore is also on an exponential trajectory. Which is why it is also shutting down.
No way. China did an even more intense lockdown. If anything, the data from China indicated we should have done more, sooner. And that’s assuming you can even trust the data from China. Which you can’t.
Of course it's easy to show declines when you had much higher numbers to start with. The implication here that lockdowns were a mistake is totally specious.
The one thing that can be said about lockdowns is that it's not some obvious clear cut "it definitely helps a ton" type of thing. If that were true we should see nations and US states with strict lockdowns do much better than those without.
Instead some places with more strict measures (say the UK and Belgium) are doing worse than Sweden, and Sweden's curve is also flattening. The number of confounding variables just seem too large to make anything close to definitive statements about anything at the moment.
> This sounds like a pretty weak correlation to be honest. Just because a lockdown is officially lifted doesn't mean everyone suddenly reverts to their old behaviors.
The behavior changes vs. policy changes is interesting. Estimates of Rt were falling before the lockdowns and continued falling at about the same rate without any apparent discontinuity through the intervention.
It makes one wonder how effective the policy measures really were-- if they were effective vs. what the population did voluntarily vs. any inherent effects from the structure of the contact network, you'd expect to be able to see some effect in a time series.
We don't know what would have happened in the US if we hadn't locked down. Considering the human cost so far with a lockdown, I think 20/20 hindsight indicates that we made the right choice. We can't just assume that things would have remained the same without a lockdown.
And if things had become worse than now, how would that have impacted the economy?
That’s not a useful comparison though. You want to compare cases now to cases when lockdown or similar measures were imposed. Otherwise a country that wastes 2 months doing nothing and then takes action far too late just gets put in the “lockdown” bin.
Even that isn't enough, because we don't have the numbers for each country if it didn't lock down. It's all hypothetical. What would Norway's GDP growth rate have been without a lockdown, for example? The answer is a number. It's unknowable. People claiming that things would have been as bad, or worse, have zero evidence to back them up. People like me who say it would not have been as bad have evidence based on observed consumer behavior which was clearly curtailed during the lockdown and improved after.
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