UK medical journals call for new Covid restrictions

Bring Covid curbs back AGAIN, say top medical journals: Editorial calls for new clampdown on Britons that could include 'restrictions on gatherings' and mask mandates | Mail Online - Stephen Matthews:

July 18, 2022 - "Economically-crippling Covid restrictions need to be brought back immediately to save the 'dying' NHS, ministers have been told.... [I]n a scathing editorial demanding action today, the editors of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Health Service Journal (HSJ) — two of the country's leading health publications — accused Boris Johnson's Government of 'gaslighting the public' about Covid's threat. Dr Kamran Abbasi (BMJ) and Alastair McLellan (HSJ) said: 'Now is the time to face the fact that the nation's attempt to "live with Covid" is the straw that is breaking the NHS's back. 'The heart of the problem is the failure to recognise that the pandemic is far from over and that a return to some of the measures taken in the past two years is needed.'

"Examples of curbs needed included a return to wearing masks in healthcare settings and on public transport, the reintroduction of the £2billion-a-month free testing scheme, WFH [working from home] where possible and 'restrictions on some types and sizes of gathering'. They didn't set out what gatherings should be curbed. But previous limits enforced in England saw just six people allowed to meet indoors, weddings limited to a handful of guests and festivals cancelled....

"Britain's Covid cases soared by 800,000 last week with more than one in 20 people infected on any given day — prompting people to cancel plans, stay home and wear masks again. The Office for National Statistics' (ONS) weekly infection survey estimated 3.5million Britons were carrying the virus in the week ending July 6 as cases roses nationally by around a third. Sarah Crofts, chief analyst at the ONS, said infections 'are showing no signs of decreasing' and suggested they could reach pandemic highs this summer — which could throw public services into further chaos. Covid sickness is already wreaking havoc on the NHS, rail operators and airlines, echoing the Christmas wave when there were mass rail cancellations, axed operations, school closures and overflowing rubbish bins.

"While the Government has promised not to reimpose restrictions unless the Covid surge turns deadly, Britons already appear to be tempering their behaviours in response to the rising statistics. An exclusive poll for MailOnline today found three in 10 people have stayed at home to avoid Covid in the last month and 42 per cent have worn a face mask. Almost half observed social distancing rules that have not been in place since February, while two-thirds said they had sanitised their hands. Just 16 per cent of people, around one in six, have not taken any precautions over the last month, according to the survey of 1,500 Britons by Redfield & Wilton Strategies.... 

"Daily Covid hospital admissions have risen to a near 18-month high, with around 2,000 people currently being hospitalised every day. Yet only a third of 'patients' needing care primarily ill with the virus itself. The rest have incidentally tested positive, NHS figures show. Deaths and ICU rates have remained flat despite the uptick in cases, with fatalities sitting at roughly 30 a day. Top scientists say this is because the variants behind the current wave — BA.4 and BA.5 — are mild, and that sky-high immunity rates from vaccines and previous waves have blunted the virus's threat. 

"One Government adviser, who didn't want to be named, insisted there is 'no need for Government measures' anymore. They argued draconian restrictions only worked when the public was scared by the disease itself, and now society isn't so 'worried about catching what's essentially a cross between a cold and flu'. 'The time of mandates and restrictions is finished and won't help,' the top scientist said. 'The last two waves went down without either.' Professor Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert based at the University of East Anglia, said reintroducing curbs now 'is not going to actually achieve much' and would 'cause substantial disruption'.... 

"But the BMJ and HSJ argue that high infection rates are increasing the number of Covid and long Covid patients it has to care for. It is also pushing up staff absences and crippling its ability to tackle the backlog of routine care the spiralled during the pandemic, the authors said....  Similar warnings from Independent Sage, a panel of experts who pushed for a Chinese-style elimination strategy, called for restrictions when cases were already falling. 

"During Omicron's winter resurgence, infections fell. Only rules requiring masks to be worn in indoor venues were brought back in — but they were quickly dropped when it was clear the virus was in retreat. Ministers refused to bring any curbs back during April, when cases soared to pandemic highs." 

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11024137/Bring-Covid-curbs-say-medical-journals-Editorial-calls-new-clampdown-Britons.html

Read editorial: https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj.o1779

Covid-19 FAQ vs GBD (4): How many would die?

Anti-virus: The Covid-19 FAQ on the Great Barrington Declaration 
IV: How many would die? 

by George J. Dance

from "A Defence of the Great Barrington Declaration from Its Powerful Critics", The Daily Sceptic, 22 March 2021.  

 4) “Focused protection” would still mean a very large number of deaths among the wider population. Applying a rough age-based infection-fatality ratio based on this table,[15] and assuming half the wider population caught Covid and only a small number (5%) of pensioners ended up getting it, that would still mean 90,000 extra deaths. If 15% of pensioners caught Covid in this scenario, it would mean 175,000 deaths. However, even this is likely to be an underestimate, for reasons discussed in our next point.(9)

The FAQsters' mathematics seems sound enough; what looks more questionable is their initial assumption, that over 40% of the adult population would need to be infected before reaching the herd immunity threshold (HIT). Consider that:

• they estimate an initial R number of 2.5-3.5% for Covid-19,(16) implying a HIT of 67-72%,
• estimates of the number of Brits who have already caught Covid-19 range from 15% to more than 20%,(17, 18) and
• over 30% have had at least one dose of a vaccine.(19)

Given these numbers, it is a stretch to think that a further 40%+ would need to acquire immunity before hitting the HIT. Given that vaccinations are rising much faster than infections, it is almost impossible to believe that all of those 40% would end up gaining immunity via infection instead. 

As with all of their points after their first point – "We have vaccines now" – the FAQsters are ignoring that first point, and arguing as if we do not have vaccines now.  They have simply recycled old anti-GBD arguments from last October, when there were no vaccines, and the coming of vaccines has not induced them to even re-examine, much less question, those earlier arguments and assumptions.

Vaccines or not, the above was never a good argument. It rests on the questionable assumption that lockdowns would somehow prevent all those deaths – whereas in fact the same number of people would be just as susceptible, at the very same risk of hospitalization and death, with a lockdown or without. Either way, the same number of people would have to be infected to reach the HIT, and ceteris paribus the same number of people could be expected to die in the process. All that a lockdown could do would be to reduce the R number, ‘flatten the curve,’ and slow down the death rate. Merely slowing down the death rate is not ‘saving lives’, but just kicking the corpses down the road.

Today, though, now that "We have vaccines", the idea that anywhere near that number would be infected and die in the absence of lockdowns looks like pure imagination. Dressing up imagined assumptions in mathematical dress (as in computer modelling) may give them a patina of scientific validity; but with maths (as with logic), the conclusions reached remain just as imaginary as the starting premises. 

[Six months after I wrote the above, there is evidence that vaccinated people are being infected and infecting others; so the FAQsters' may be right that 40% of Britons will eventually catch Covid-19. However, equally strong evidence shows that most vaccinated have strong protection against hospitalization and death. So, with more than 2/3 of Britons now fully vaccinated, their estimates of both deaths and hospitalizations still look implausibly high.]

 5) The health service would be overwhelmed in this scenario, leading to a potentially much higher death rate among the rest of the population. On top of the deaths we could expect based on the fatality rates from the pandemic so far, so many other people in the rest of the population would be hospitalised in the Great Barrington scenario that the NHS would be totally overwhelmed. Applying the hospitalisation rates from this article to the rest of the population, and assuming 50% of the younger population caught COVID along with 5% of pensioners, that would mean 860,000 people would be hospitalised. If 15% of pensioners accidentally caught the virus, it would mean around 1.1m hospitalisations. This would overwhelm the health service. There are only 4,123 adult critical care beds in England, so many or most patients requiring hospitalisation would not be able to receive full treatment, and would have a much higher mortality rate.

Since this argument is so similar to the previous one – with the same oudated assumptions, and the same failure to re-examine them – a reply can be brief. 

The only difference I can see this time is an added assumption that an increase in infections and hospitalisations would happen almost immediately; that, without lockdowns, everyone’s first thought would be to run out and happily (“merrily”) catch COVID-19. To which the best reply would be to remind the FAQsters of their next point: "Young people don't want the virus either." No one wants to catch Covid, ceterus paribus, and that gives everyone a reason to voluntarily distance. 

[Voluntary distancing, like lockdown, can slow the spread of a disease It is not meant to stamp out the disease, or to prevent hospitalizations and deaths; it is meant slow them down, to reduce the R number, and  'flatten the curve': the same hospitalizations (and deaths) happen over a longer time, and are kept below the point at which they "overwhelm" the health care system. It works no differently from lockdowns.

[How well voluntary distancing works compared to lockdown measures is an empirical question, best decided by comparing outcomes in countries that relied on it (Sweden, Japan) to those that relied on lockdowns.]

*  - [written October 6, 2021]

9. All quotations in italics are from: “Claim: The Great Barrington Declaration gives a good alternative to lockdown”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.

15. Smriti Mallapaty, “The coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male — new data reveal the risks”, Nature, August 28th, 2020.

16. “Claim: 99.5% survive Covid – we’re overreacting”, Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ.

17. “COVID-19: 15.3% of England’s population estimated to have had coronavirus by mid-January”, Sky News, February 3rd, 2021.

18. Ashley Kirk, Anna Leach and Pamela Duncan, “One in five in England have had Covid, modelling suggests”, The Guardian, January 10th, 2021.

19. “As It Happened: Vaccines for 20m in UK a magnificent achievement”, BBC, February 28th, 2021.

Read full article here

Lockdown one of Canada's greatest policy failures, suggests economist

Economist: Lockdowns ‘Greatest Peacetime Policy Failure’ in Canada’s History | Foundation for Economic Education - Jon Miltimore: 

April 26, 2021 - "Canadian economist Douglas Ward Allen, the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, suggests the ineffectiveness of lockdowns may stem primarily from voluntary changes in behavior.

"'Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns,' writes Allen. 'The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries.'

"Allen’s thesis would help explain the abundance of data that show lockdowns and other restrictions have been, at best, largely ineffective at reducing the spread of COVID-19. His study does not stop there, however.

"While much of Allen’s paper analyzes the literature to show that studies over-estimated the benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns, he also considers the cost of the lockdowns. In order to do this, he relies on the estimate from George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan regarding the quality of life lost due to lockdowns.

"Caplan frames this problem by asking, 'Suppose you could either live a year of life in the COVID era, or X months under normal conditions. What’s the value of X?' Caplan argues 10 months seems like a conservative estimate. Another way to think of this is that people would be willing to sacrifice 2 months of life to avoid a year of lockdowns. This estimate seems reasonable, due to the violence, job loss, business failure, and substance dependencies fostered by lockdowns. If a year of lockdowns means losing an equivalent of 2 months of life per person, multiplying that 2 months over the entire population of Canada (37.7 million people) gives a cost of 6.3 million years of life lost.

"If COVID-19 lockdowns made the death rate 10 percent lower, that would be equivalent to 22,333 years of life saved. Compared to the loss of 6.3 million years, this trade-off hardly seems worth it. Even if the frightening projections of the Imperial College of London had turned out to be correct — and Allen painstakingly shows they were not — the number of years saved from lockdowns would be 1,735,580, which is still significantly below the 6.3 million years of life lost.

"As more countries and states open and do not suffer the consequences lockdown proponents predicted, the empirical data will become increasingly difficult to ignore — especially as the adverse effects of lockdowns become more clear. For example, FEE’s Brad Polumbo recently reported on new CDC data that show 87,000 people died from drug overdoses from October 2019 to September 2020, a 30 percent increase from the same period the preceding year.... As more data are made available giving a complete picture of the effects of lockdowns, a long-established truth about tradeoffs observed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase is becoming apparent.

It would clearly be desirable if the only actions performed were those in which what was gained was worth more than what was lost,” wrote Coase. “But in choosing between social arrangements within the context of which individual decisions are made, we have to bear in mind that a change in the existing system which will lead to an improvement in some decisions may well lead to a worsening of others.

"To be sure, Allen’s research will not be the final word on lockdowns. But if his data are correct it will be difficult to disagree with his verdict on how history will judge government lockdowns. '[It] is possible that lockdowns will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history,' he writes."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/economist-lockdowns-greatest-peacetime-policy-failure-in-canada-s-history/

Read study here: http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/LockdownReport.pdf

Voluntary distancing vs. lockdowns

[Note: this article is still a work in progress]

Lockdowns and libertarianism (3): Voluntary distancing vs. lockdowns

We have all been hearing the term "social distancing" for more than a year, by now, and I am sure that everyone believes they know what it means. For most people, though, that is not true; they may know a meaning, and understand perfectly the concept for which it stands; but they do not understand the full meaning, and all of the underlying concepts. In fact, "social distancing" is a good example of what Ayn Rand used to all a 'package deal' - a label applied indiscriminately to different concepts, to hide or blur the differences between them; in short, to equivocate between them. In this case, the concepts are not only different, but in contradiction. 

The first concept is that of simply keeping a distance from other people, or giving them their own space. It is not only a polite thing to do - more so, ironically, in more crowded societies like Japan - but it is also smart or prudent, given that people have always been able to spread diseases to each other. It becomes even more prudent in a pandemic: If one is susceptible, limiting face-to-face contacts with random others is the easiest and most natural way to protect oneself (as well as one's family, by not passing the disease on to them). Examples include not just staying home rather than going out, talking to friends rather rather than visiting them, working from home if possible. It is an example of people changing their own behavior to manage their risks; a part of the concept - an instance or example - of adults running or managing their own lives, and being free to do so. We can label this concept "voluntary distancing." 

A second, different concept, though, is the one guiding policy in this pandemic. Lest I be accused of misstating it or strawmanning its advocates, let me quote a definition from one of its most influential advocates, social media writer Tomas Pueyo, in his wildly influential medium article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now": 

The only way to prevent [mass death] is social distancing today. Not tomorrow. Today.
That means keeping as many people home as possible, starting now.
As a politician, community leader or business leader, you have the power and the responsibility to prevent this.

Pueyo is not talking not about people managing their own risks, but about politicians and other assorted leaders managing those for them; not of people changing their own behavior, but of those "leaders" changing it for them. It is an instance or example of people not being allowed to run their lives, but of some people claiming the right to run the lives of others. The second covers governments "closing companies, shops, mass transit, schools, enforcing lockdowns..." (to again use Pueyo's words) We can label that second concept "forced distancing" or, to use the shorter term now in general use, "lockdowns."

The two concepts could not be more different. But there are other reasons than equivocation to confound them. In this pandemic, both began at roughly the same time in mid-March. And at least in Canada, public health has relied on both. Every province enacted lockdowns. At the same time the media has been filled with public health messaging, advising people of risks and urging them to take precautions on their own.  It was understandable for non-scientists to view the view both phenomena as one unified response, and to attribute the temporary success of that response entirely to the lockdowns. 

The scientific literature was no help. The only mention of voluntary distancing I could find last spring was an April National Bureau of Economic Research paper, "Voluntary and Mandatory Social Distancing: Evidence on COVID-19 Exposure Rates from Chinese Provinces and Selected Countries," which declared flat-out that 

that voluntary self-isolation driven by individual’s perceived risk of becoming infected kicks in only towards the peak of the epidemic and has little or no impact on flattening the epidemic curve.

That finding could be an anomaly of the situation. It is uncontroversially accepted that voluntary distancing during a pandemic is affected by messaging, on information and best practices, by both public health authorities and the media. In Communist China, though, both public health and the media are under tight government control; and the official Chinese government policy pre-lockdown was Covid denial. Not only did the government not tell its citizens about the coronoavirus: it censored and even arrested those who tried to.   

Despite that, the assumption that voluntary distancing was insignificant, and only lockdown-style inverventions could cut virus transmission, quickly became entrenched in the literature. Neil Ferguson's infamous death model, for example, simply assumed that only government interventions could reduce human contact enough to affect the R (reproduction) number. The same unrealistic assumption appeared in the Flaxman death model from IC in May. The latter, which was published in Nature, has been cited over and over as proof that lockdowns save lives; even the lockdowners' manifesto, the John Snow Memorandum, cited it.

  

Biden's shifting positions on a national lockdown

Joe Biden calls for a national lockdown to contain the coronavirus | Los Angeles Times - Michael Finnegan:

March 28, 2020 - "Former Vice President Joe Biden is calling for an immediate nationwide stay-at-home order to contain the spread of the coronavirus, saying the main mistake that leaders can make in a pandemic is 'going too slow.' The Democratic presidential candidate told CNN on Friday that he agreed with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates that the uneven patchwork of state and local lockdowns in effect in the United States will inevitably cost lives and prolong the economic catastrophe....President Trump has urged Americans to practice social distancing but has declined to issue a nationwide stay-at-home order.... 

"Biden said he’d watched Gates’ appearance on CNN on Thursday night and found him 'really insightful'.... Gates, a philanthropist whose family foundation has spent billions of dollars to curb the spread of malaria, AIDS and other diseases, told CNN on Thursday that the coronavirus will keep spreading out of control 'anywhere you don’t have a serious shutdown.'

'We’re entering into a tough period that, if we do it right, we’ll only have to do it once for six to 10 weeks,' [Gates] said. 'But we have to do it. It has to be the whole country.... It’s exponential growth if you’re not stopping it,' he said. 'The sooner you engage in the shutdown, the easier it is to get to that peak. We have not peaked. The parts of the country that aren’t shut down, in late April we should see the numbers peak there'"

Read more: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-03-27/biden-coronavirus-national-lockdown

Biden says he'd lock down country if spread of coronavirus warranted it | Politico - Evan Semones:

August 21, 2020 - "Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would do 'whatever it takes" to combat the spread of coronavirus within the country — including locking down the U.S. if deemed necessary. 'I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists,' Biden told ABC’s David Muir in a joint interview with his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, to air Sunday. 'We’re going to do whatever it takes to save lives....

"'We cannot get the country moving until we control the virus. That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with,' he said. 'In order to keep the country running and moving — and the economy growing and people employed — you have to fix the virus.'"

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/21/joe-biden-lockdown-us-coronavirus-400126

Biden Says He Will Not Order National Lockdown to Fight Virus | Bloomberg - Justin Sink:

November 19, 2020 - "President-elect Joe Biden said Thursday that his administration would not impose a national lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

"'I am not going to shut down the economy, period,” he said at a news conference in Wilmington, Delaware.... 'I’m going to shut down the virus, that’s what I’m going to shut down. I’ll say it again: No national shutdown. No national shutdown,' he repeated. 'Every region, every area, every community can be different. So there’s no circumstance that I can see which would require a total national shutdown.'"

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-19/biden-says-he-will-not-order-national-lockdown-to-fight-virus

A libertarian pandemic response

Libertarianism and the Coronavirus Pandemic | Cato @ Liberty - Andy Craig:

March 25, 2020 - In recent days, there has been snark from some quarters about the current crisis somehow catching libertarians flat‐​footed. The argument goes that the need for a big government response disproves a political ideology that is often, though in somewhat oversimplified fashion, summarized as favoring 'small government." A better description would be a government limited in scope but sufficient to meet that scope.

Libertarianism, properly understood, encompasses certain core functions as the proper role of government. It is not the libertarian view that government should be ineffective at protecting individual rights or dysfunctionally paralyzed in the face of a massive threat to people’s lives. Government has a role to play in responding to the pandemic in much the same way it is the government’s job to prosecute murderers or defend the country from invasion.

At the same time, libertarian principles and insights can provide some guideposts for how to respond in this unprecedented global emergency.

One thing to keep in mind is that some limits on government power are even more crucial now. Emergency powers should be limited in duration and limited to directly addressing the present situation based on the facts as best we know them. Such policy responses shouldn’t be larded up with a pre‐​existing wish list of unrelated concerns. It is essential to preserve constitutional liberal democracy and resist excessive long‐​term concentration of power in the executive.

Social distancing measures should rely on voluntary compliance to the greatest degree possible, and most people have been voluntarily complying. Even when enforcement is necessary, simply breaking up gatherings without citation or prosecution is possible and preferable in many cases. A heavy‐​handed reliance on coercive enforcement might not only be unnecessary in some regards, it can also backfire by sparking protest non‐​compliance, and it might also be redundant to all the other measures already in place.... For that reason, some states have so far rejected compulsory "stay at home" or "shelter in place" orders. There is no need to fuel further panic or distract police from their more important duties to worry about safe and benign activities like taking the family dog for a walk.

At the same time, many jurisdictions have moved to suspend petty arrests altogether, mostly for victimless crimes, in an effort to reduce jail populations. Also under consideration are proposals to release many of those individuals currently in jail awaiting trial for minor offenses. This is a welcome shift that should prompt us to reconsider the necessity of some of these laws, many of which have long been the target of libertarian ire.

Another insight comes from Nobel laureate, libertarian icon, and Cato Distinguished Senior Fellow, the late F.A. Hayek. In works such as The Constitution of Liberty, he wrote that good laws should be general, equal, and certain. That is a principle that is relevant even in something as far removed from the libertarian ideal as the emergency economic responses currently under consideration. Rather than targeted industry bailouts and micro‐​managed interventions, policy responses should be clear, simple, system‐​wide, and with a defined end date as soon as possible. Simple universal payments to individuals are also preferable to corporate bailouts. It is not feasible for the government to abruptly order massive shutdowns of so much economic activity without some kind of compensation, in much the same way we require just compensation for eminent domain. It is proper for the government to own the consequences of its orders and to soften the shock of this sudden disruption....

Libertarian criticisms of bad regulations have proven especially prescient. A crucial government failure has been the FDA’s [Food and Drug Administration's] inflexible and heavy‐​handed bureaucracy, which has held up tests and prevented thousands of private and academic labs from quickly increasing testing capacity. For most of February, the FDA required everybody to rely solely on tests produced by the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and refused to grant permission to other labs. This proved to be catastrophically flawed when the first round of tests produced by the CDC didn’t work and had to be replaced. This failure is a large part of why America’s coronavirus testing response to date compares so unfavorably with South Korea’s.

Another example of a libertarian response to the pandemic has been the quick need to suspend many occupational licensing restrictions, such as by letting doctors practice interstate and upgrading the permissions of nurse practitioners and doctors’ assistants. Even mundane and trivial regulations of the sort that only libertarians would have worried about before have suddenly been cast aside. Two months ago, who would have thought it an urgent concern to suspend alcohol regulations so that restaurants can serve beverages to go for home delivery by rideshare drivers?

While we can welcome these wins, there is no doubt that we have also seen extreme impositions on personal freedom. Libertarians can find that loss especially painful. Even when these new rules are sadly necessary and justified by the facts, it is a cost we should carefully weigh as we eventually move to unwind restrictions and return to some kind of normalcy. In the name of saving lives from the immediate threat, governments around the world have suspended most international travel and heavily curtailed consumer freedoms and freedom of association. The acute loss of freedoms we’ve long taken for granted underscores how valuable they truly are. And some freedoms, like freedom of speech and the right to privacy, should remain sacrosanct and defended tenaciously even in the face of an emergency.

While much of the policy response so far has been in good faith (if often inept), the propensity for power grabs by authoritarian populists should not be discounted. Preserving the rule of law, checks and balances, and constitutional liberal democracy is essential. Elections should proceed on time and with whatever accommodations prove necessary. Legislatures and courts should be kept open for essential business, including by remote participation if necessary, and foundational constitutional structures should remain in place. We have no need of a dictator in the United States nor in other countries around the world.

And perhaps most importantly: emergency rules and powers should extend only for the duration of the emergency, and be repealed at the earliest feasible opportunity. We should be wary of the ratchet effect, where governments tend to retain powers and keep open programs long after their original justification has disappeared.

Freedom is precious, and in the grand sweep of human history it has often been fleeting and tenuous. Right now we are facing the greatest threat to a free and open society that most of us have ever witnessed, at least in the United States, if not in many other nations that have been through worse scourges of totalitarianism and major wars. So libertarians will continue as they always have, ready to defend the principles of human freedom at every turn."

https://www.cato.org/blog/libertarianism-coronavirus-pandemic

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Libertarians oppose all the mandates

Libertarians are not against people social distancing, wearing facemasks, or vaccinating their kids. They are against people trying to bully or force other people to do those things.

Jo Jorgensen: 'Requiring People To Vaccinate Their Children Is One of the Most Egregious Things That the Government Can Do' | Reason - Matt Welch: 

October 10, 2020 = "As the Libertarian Party has established itself as the most electorally successful third party in the United States, voters have grown accustomed to the group's radical messaging against taxation, prohibition and war.... Less broadly known, though on full display in a streamed interview I conducted last night with presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen, is the party's antipathy toward international institutions, pandemic restrictions, and vaccine mandates.

"Jorgensen last night volunteered the latter as an example of the type of 'personal decision' best left to individuals, rather than determined via the political process. So I asked her whether, philosophically, she considered it wise for public schools to require children be vaccinated as a condition for enrollment. 'I think it is immoral,' she responded. Then, after noting that she personally has chosen to vaccinate her family, Jorgensen contrasted vaccination policy with the types of prohibitions Libertarians have long opposed — on drugs, gambling, vaping, consensual sex transactions, and so on.

"'All of these are laws that the government is telling you what not to do,' she said. 'Vaccinations, on the other hand — we're talking about somebody forcibly putting a substance into your body. I am just shocked that that's even a question in our country that is supposed to be free. And even though I have chosen vaccinations, and I've chosen vaccinations for my children, I would never use the excuse of herd immunity to force other people to put something into their bodies that they don't want to.'

"This is not a majority opinion – 82 percent of American adults favored school-based vaccines in 2016 ... [and] the vaccine mandate issue divides libertarians, too, as illustrated by Reason's 2014 debate "Should Vaccines Be Mandatory?" [Still] the COVID-19 pandemic has not only put such once-esoteric philosophical discussions on the political front-burner; it has given what many Libertarian candidates see as their opening.

"The Libertarian gubernatorial candidate making the biggest splash in 2020 is Indiana's Donald Rainwater, who has polled between 6 percent and 24 percent in a three-way race. 'Indiana Libertarian candidate for governor targets voters upset by COVID-19 mandates,' went the headline this week in The Indianapolis Star. 'I don't think it's the government's responsibility to tell people how to take care of themselves," Rainwater told the paper. "I think this all goes back to the idea that I get to choose what I do to keep myself safe. I am against mandating vaccines, too.'

"The other Libertarian gubernatorial candidate likely to make Election Day waves — Montana's Lyman Bishop, who is polling within shouting distance of the Republican-Democratic margin — is also campaigning against pandemic mandates. 

"'I have said from the beginning, asking people to stay home is one thing. Telling people they have to stay home is something else altogether,' Bishop recently told Montana Public Radio.   'The same logic applies to any other precautionary measure. In the face of any threat, our liberties and individual rights must come first.... The pending collapse of our economy and the steady growth of tyranny and authoritarianism in our country is of the utmost importance and supersedes all other issues. If we cannot address these issues there will be nothing left for us to discuss'....

"As we approach the finish line, the radical limited-government party is reacting more and more to big-government pandemic policies. The politics of face masks, it turns out, is not a strictly bipartisan affair."

Read more: https://reason.com/2020/10/16/jo-jorgensen-requiring-people-to-vaccinate-their-children-is-one-of-the-most-egregious-things-that-the-government-can-do/

Also read: Jo Jorgensen on lockdowns

Postlibertarians argue lockdowns not so bad

Two former libertarians, Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center and Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, argue in recent articles that the harms attributed to lockdowns are really caused by voluntary social distancing.

A Dangerous Libertarian Strategy for Herd Immunity | Bloomberg - Tyler Cowen:

October 15, 2020 - "It would be bad enough if the Great Barrington Declaration ... was simply misguided. But the statement, which now has more than 9,000 signatories, represents a potentially dangerous way of thinking — about not only pandemics but also human nature.... It strikes exactly the wrong tone and stresses exactly the wrong points....

"The declaration also sets up a false dichotomy by comparing its policy proposals to lockdowns. The claim is this: 'Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.' The health problems are very real, but in most of the U.S., the lockdowns are not severe. In my home state of Virginia, there are relatively few commercial activities I cannot partake in, were I so inclined. I even can go see a live bluegrass concert in a nightclub (I won’t, not yet). The problem is that most people don’t want to go out to such concerts, and indeed probably should not. It is this self-enforced isolation, not a government order, which screws us up, sometimes creating mental and other health problems.

"Whatever you think of the stricter policies of last spring, they are now behind us, and the emphasis on 'lockdowns' is not helpful. The more useful question is whether the list of prohibited activities should be expanded or contracted. In some cases, surely, it should be expanded.... Even if you disagree with that judgment, the critics who emphasize lockdowns are setting up a straw man.... The truth is that lockdowns are extremely unpopular, and while they may have to be reimposed in extreme circumstances, they are not the main alternative on the table in the U.S. right now."

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-15/great-barrington-declaration-is-wrong-about-herd-immunity

The Useful Libertarian Idiocy of The Great Barrington Declaration | Will Wilkinson - Niskanen Centre: 

October 27, 2020 - "Tyler Cowen has written a persuasive and quietly devastating analysis of the Declaration’s many non-medical shortcomings at Bloomberg Opinion. If you haven’t read it, please do. Cowen, who has been either libertarian or libertarian-adjacent his entire life, recognizes that these errors reflect AIER’s rigid libertarian outlook.... 'The Great Barrington strategy is a tempting one. Coming out of a libertarian think tank, it tries to procure maximum liberty for commerce and daily life. It is a seductive idea. Yet consistency of message is not an unalloyed good, even when the subject is liberty'.... This is, to my mind, exceedingly gentle. “[C]onsistency of message is not an unalloyed good, even when the subject is liberty,” is a generous way to say that purist ideology is a mind-warping reality-distortion field. I entirely concur with Cowen’s piece, but I think it’s worth drawing out further how the Declaration’s errors showcase some of libertarianism’s signature defects....

"Nobody is going to do this. What’s even the idea here? That a governor or mayor or city council will one day announce that it is now officially a Great Barrington 'focused protection' jurisdiction and everyone will just shout 'Hurrah!' and sprint to the nearest massage parlor or high step it to the hoe down[?]...  [V]ery few of us are willing to simply allow the virus to cull the weak. Which is why next to nobody’s going to try the Great Barrington strategy. And if somebody does try it, it obviously can’t work.... 

"I’m no angel, but it’s nevertheless important to me, as a matter of elementary moral duty, to avoid becoming a link in a chain of viral transmission that could kill somebody. But even if you’re completely bereft of any sense of responsibility for the lives and welfare of others, it remains that there are plenty of selfish reasons to steer clear of the maskless rager over at the Sig Ep house (an unfortunate reality here in Iowa City.).... So mere personal prudence is enough to lead many of us to decline invitations to weddings, retire our gym memberships, and eschew dine-in restaurants. It’s enough to keep managers and business owners from calling their workers back to the office. Now add a functioning moral compass to mix. In that case, a moderate level of entirely voluntary self-isolation and avoidance of un-distanced and/or mask-free social situations becomes practically inevitable. 

"Here in Iowa, we’ve never had an official lockdown, and we’ve had very, very few restrictions of any kind. Nobody’s stopping anybody from going to the movies, but nobody goes to the movies. Restaurants are open, but there aren’t many people in them.... It’s hard to tell the practical difference between the Great Barrington approach and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ active hostility to city-level restrictions, mask mandates, and remote schooling. Yet it’s completely obvious, if you live here, that this approach hasn’t put us any nearer to 'normal'.... 

"The governor’s aggressively laissez faire approach has delivered some of the country’s highest infection rates, but with very few mitigating economic benefits. I recently visited Massachusetts, which has responded to the pandemic far more aggressively and competently than Iowa has. It now has one of the lowest infection rates in the country, which is why economic and social life there was notably more active and normal than it is here in plague-ridden, anything-goes Iowa....

[As of October 31, 'plague-ridden Iowa' reported 127,966 official cases (93,200 recovered) and 1,716 deaths (544/million), while Massachusetts reported 158,576 cases (127,054 recovered) and 9,991 deaths (1,450/M).  - gd] 

"Casselman and Tankersley sum it up well: 'A growing body of research has concluded that the steep drop in economic activity last spring was primarily a result of individual decisions by consumers and businesses rather than legal mandates. People stopped going to restaurants even before governors ordered them shut down. Airports emptied out even though there were never significant restrictions on domestic air travel.'"

Read more: https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-useful-libertarian-idiocy-of-the-great-barrington-declaration/

Sweden experiments with local non-lockdown

 Sweden is moving away from its no-lockdown strategy and preparing strict new rules amid rising coronavirus cases | Business Insider - Adam Payne:

October 18, 2020 - "After opting against lockdown measures throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Sweden is said to be shifting strategies toward the kinds of restrictive measures adopted by most of its neighbors.... Unlike its Nordic neighbors and most other countries, Sweden did not deploy wholesale lockdown measures in response to the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year. Sweden has recorded a much higher per capita death rate than its neighbors since adopting this strategy. It had recorded 5,918 deaths as of Sunday, compared with 278 in Norway and 346 in Finland."

Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-shifts-away-no-lockdown-strategy-amid-growing-case-numbers-2020-10

After Months of Minimal COVID-19 Containment, Sweden Appears to Be Considering a New Approach | Time - Jamie Ducharme: 

October 19, 2020 - "In a statement provided to TIME, however, a spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Sweden rejected that characterization. 'It is not a lockdown but some extra recommendations that could be communicated locally when a need from the regional authorities is communicated and the Public Health Agency so decides,' the spokesperson said."

Read more: https://time.com/5901352/sweden-local-lockdowns/

Uppsala goes into voluntary lockdown because of spike in coronavirus cases | Politico - Charlie Duxbury:

October 24, 2020 - "Uppsala, a city of 230,000 people about an hour’s drive north of Stockholm, on Tuesday became the first place in Sweden to announce tougher localized guidance aimed at slowing a spike in cases of COVID-19, which authorities say has put hospitals there under pressure. Residents were told to avoid public transport and not to socialize with anyone they don’t live with. On Thursday, signs stuck to bus doors told passengers to board 'only if they had to.' Posters on the sides of rubbish bins said: 'The danger is not over.' 

"While this city is hardly unique in announcing new rules this week — a similar tightening of restrictions has occurred across Europe, from Manchester to Brussels to Prague — what makes Uppsala’s approach different is that it is almost wholly voluntary. As it did with its light-touch national approach to fighting the first wave of coronavirus — when borders, schools and businesses were left open — Sweden is now breaking new ground with the hands-off nature of its localized approach. 

"In Uppsala, there are no officials checking why people are using public transport. Shops and restaurants remain open for those who want to use them, and nothing hinders groups of people from getting together. The authorities are just telling people not to do these things and hoping they respond....

"Sweden’s national approach this spring received both plaudits and condemnation.... Swedish lawmakers believe that by giving citizens a greater sense of control, they might be able to achieve greater compliance with restrictions for longer....

"The rules in Uppsala are in some ways just a restatement, if more sternly worded, of what Tegnell and the Swedish government have urged Swedes to do since March: keep their distance from each other and in particular avoid larger social gatherings. But by restating and strengthening the guidance and focusing the message on a specific city, officials hope to get more traction."

Read more: https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-coronavirus-local-lockdown-uppsala/

Four overlooked facts about COVID-19

Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19 | National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 27719 - Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha:

August 2020 - "We document four facts about the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide relevant for those studying the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 transmission. 

• First: across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide range of initially high levels to levels close to zero within 20-30 days after each region experienced 25 cumulative deaths. 
• Second: after this initial period, growth rates of daily deaths have hovered around zero or below everywhere in the world. 
• Third: the cross section standard deviation of growth rates of daily deaths across locations fell very rapidly in the first 10 days of the epidemic and has remained at a relatively low level since then. 
• Fourth: when interpreted through a range of epidemiological models, these first three facts about the growth rate of COVID deaths imply that both the effective reproduction numbers and transmission rates of COVID-19 fell from widely dispersed initial levels and the effective reproduction number has hovered around one after the first 30 days of the epidemic virtually everywhere in the world.... 

"In this paper, we document these facts regarding COVID deaths using both simple data smoothing procedures and a Bayesian estimation procedure that allows us to construct probability bands around our estimates of the growth of COVID deaths. We then use an SIR epidemiological model based on that in Kermack and McKendrick (1927) to interpret these data on the growth rate of COVID deaths ... and show that our conclusions about the worldwide decline in the transmission rate for COVID-19 are not much affected by the choice of epidemiological model....

"Several prominent studies, including Dehning et al. (2020), Hsiang et al. (2020), and Flaxman et al. (2020), have studied empirically the role of government-mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in reducing the transmission of COVID-19, and many of these studies  ... may substantially overstate the role of government-mandated NPI’s in reducing disease transmission due to an omitted variable bias. Moreover, given the observation that disease transmission rates have remained low ... as NPI’s have been lifted, we are concerned that estimates of the effectiveness of NPI’s in reducing disease transmission from the earlier period may not be relevant for forecasting the impact of the relaxation of those NPI’s in the current period....

"What might this omitted variable or variables be?... [T]he literatures in both epidemiology and economics offer several candidates. COVID-19 is not the first epidemic for which transmission rates have fallen faster than would be predicted by simple epidemiological models....

"The first of these hypotheses is that humans spontaneously take action to avoid disease transmission once an epidemic breaks out. For COVID-19, a great deal of real-time mobility and economic data indicate that human social and economic interactions have fallen substantially across a large number of locations. Further research is required, however, to determine whether this decline in human interactions is sufficiently large and widespread to account for the apparent decline in transmission rates....

"The second ... hypothesis is that the network structure of human interactions naturally leads to a slowdown in disease transmission faster than would be predicted from a simple epidemiological model in which the population interacts uniformly with each other. Further research is required to determine whether a network structure of human interactions can indeed explain the global decline....

"Finally, we must consider the possibility that ... some unobserved natural factor may have driven the decline to date in the transmission of COVID-19. Clearly, the existence of such an unobserved factor would complicate empirical studies of the causal driving forces behind COVID-19 transmission....

"One of the central policy questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is the question of which non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPIs] governments might use to influence the transmission of the disease. Our ability to identify empirically which NPI’s have what impact on disease transmission depends on there being enough independent variation in both NPI’s and disease transmission across locations as well as our having robust procedures for controlling for other observed and unobserved factors that might be influencing disease transmission. The facts that we document in this paper cast doubt on this premise."

Read more: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27719.pdf

Voluntary social distancing needs to continue

When It Comes To Social Distancing And Keeping My Family Safe, I’m Not Afraid To Be Rude | Scary Mommy - Katie Cloyd:

June 18, 2020 - "Living in total lockdown for several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic was hard.... Staying home literally all the time and not seeing the people we loved was heartbreaking. I cried watching my kids interact with their grandparents through a window screen from 10 feet away. I was living for the day the world could safely reopen. We settled in for the long haul, assuming something drastic would need to change before we could resume normal activities.

"But then the world (at least my area of it) just kind of … opened back up. COVID-19 cases are still rising, we don’t have a concrete treatment or vaccine, and yet, we have been legally permitted to return to almost normal.

"With legal restrictions lifted, voluntary social distancing is pretty much the only thing I can do to keep my family safe from the novel coronavirus now. And that is exactly what I will do, regardless of anyone else’s opinion. Until all major health organizations tell us to return to normal, my family is treating this COVID-19 pandemic like a pandemic.... I’m not joining ladies’ nights, playdates or group outings yet. No restaurant dinners, no hugs, and no big group barbecues. No shopping trips just to browse, and no crowded public places....

"My husband’s work has returned to a full crew working in the office full-time.... and I know that our COVID-19 risk is increased because of that one factor. We have no choice but to allow that risk into our lives because he has to work. But I can’t be bothered to assume any other risk I’m not one hundred percent comfortable with, and I don’t care who judges me, calls me paranoid or thinks I’m rude.

"I happen to live in an area where it’s pretty common to hear someone say that the entire pandemic is a hoax... People even roll their eyes at my family when we wear our masks in public. And my kids think I’m the meanest mom ever. They hate the masks. You know what? I hate them, too. My oldest son says his mask is hot and bothers his ears, and I wholeheartedly agree..... I am making my kids wear a mask and keep appropriate physical distance because I care about the people around me. I’m not paranoid. I’m courteous. If my husband brings the virus home from work, we could be pre-symptomatic and contagious at any time. So, we wear our masks for everyone else’s protection, and we steer very clear of anyone who won’t wear one for our protection....

"There are so many issues to weigh. A mom in New York City might make different decisions for her family than a parent in rural Montana. Families with someone in a high-risk category will likely do things differently than families who don’t have any of the most common risk factors. And people have to work.... But all of us should still be navigating this planet with the pandemic in mind.... COVID-19 is still a threat, and cases are still climbing in a lot of states. It’s important to remain vigilant, make good choices, and keep your distance from non-household-members whenever possible.

"If you’re like me, and you are trying to maintain social distance to keep your family safe in an area where that’s not the norm anymore, you might face some resistance from people who think the threat has passed. Don’t be afraid to assert yourself. It’s not rude to protect your boundaries, and anyone who can’t respect your desire to protect your family needs to work that out in their own brain. Nobody has the right to breach your boundaries or pressure you into moving the line. Nobody gets to tell you that you have to take risks you aren’t comfortable with in the name of politeness. I’m not even considering it."

Read more: https://www.scarymommy.com/social-distancing-keeping-my-family-safe-not-afraid-to-be-rude/

Americans voting with their feet to end lockdowns

Lockdown Is Ending, Whether Governments Approve or Not | Reason - Eric Boehm:

May 4, 2020 - "Some states have lifted their COVID-19 lockdowns or announced plans to let more businesses reopen soon; others have extended stay-at-home orders into late May or even early June. But regardless of what officials dictate, data from Apple and Foursquare suggest the lockdowns are gradually coming to an end on their own anyway, as more people venture out of their homes and resume various levels of economic activity.

"'As officials begin the process of relaxing some business restrictions, we're starting to see upticks in foot traffic to various places,' Foursquare reported in an April 30 blog post. 'This is true across regions, regardless of state-specific policies.' Visits to fast food restaurants and gas stations have already returned to their pre-coronavirus baselines in rural regions, Foursquare reported. While suburban and urban areas are still below normal, those areas have seen 15 percent growth since the end of March.

"Gas stations have seen a rebound too. According to Foursquare, gas station visits were down as much as 11 percent from their national averages in the early weeks of April but down only 6 percent for the week of April 24. In some parts of the country — mostly in the Midwest, where the COVID-19 outbreak has been less severe — the visits had returned to pre-coronavirus levels. Apple's Mobility Trends, which is aggregated from Apple Maps users, shows a similar uptick.... While travel in the United States was still down 16 percent from 'normal' by the end of last week, there is an undeniable upward trend, one moving faster than in other countries hit hard by COVID-19....

"Needless to say, a great deal of economic activity is not back to normal. Bars, casual dining restaurants, gyms, and retail shops continue to be hammered by mandatory shutdowns in many states — and by consumer reluctance too....

"But the Foursquare and Apple data provide policymakers with some critical insights, if they are willing to look. Clearly, individuals have been weighing the risks of the coronavirus against the difficulties of the ongoing lockdowns and deciding to venture out a bit more often. That's good news for businesses that are still open, but it does nothing for those that the government has ordered to close. Those closures should be reversed as much as possible — though obviously with an eye toward social distancing and with limited capacity.

"The data also show something about the nature of the shutdowns. They might have been encouraged by executive orders, but they were always ultimately driven by voluntary behavior. Well before states started issuing stay-at-home orders in the final week of March, many Americans were voluntarily self-quarantining.

"Since officials had only limited influence over the beginning of the lockdown, they were always going to have limited influence over its ending. This was always unsustainable over the long term, and coronavirus policies need to be reconsidered in light of that. On the other hand, declaring states to be 'open' will be meaningless unless residents feel it is safe to venture out again.

"Nor is this proof that anti-lockdown protests have worked. Dozens of Americans have descended on state capitals in displays of politicized rage, but the lockdowns are coming undone mostly because millions of other people have simply started going about their lives again, at least as much as they can. They're voting with their feet — and their cars."

Read more: https://reason.com/2020/05/04/lockdown-is-ending-whether-governments-approve-or-not/

Voluntary social distancing working in Wisconsin

The lessons from Wisconsin’s lockdown lifting | Spectator USA - Ross Clark:

June 11, 2020 - "Has the end of lockdown caused a large second spike in COVID-19 infections? We have a possible answer to this question because the experiment was carried out in Wisconsin on May 15 when the US state’s Supreme Court overthrew the governor’s ‘stay at home’ order. Gov. Tony Evers ... declared his state to be the ‘Wild West’ and predicted a surge of deaths.

"What happened in the two weeks following the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision has now been studied by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Its conclusion? There was no discernible effect on the infection rate. This was not necessarily much to do with the virus itself, however. Wisconsin’s 5.8 million residents simply refused to exercise their new found freedoms....

"Five of the state’s 72 counties imposed their own local stay at home orders, but the vast majority did not. People were suddenly free to resume ordinary life. The researchers studied what happened next via smartphone data. Taken across the state as a whole, prior to the lifting of the lockdown just under 40 percent of residents were staying at home all day. In the two days immediately following the lifting of the order this briefly fell to just over 30 percent. Yet two days after that it shot up to 45 percent — higher than it had been throughout the first half of May. From that peak, there then followed a slow decline in the proportion of people staying at home all day.

"There was a similar pattern when the researchers looked at the median number of hours people were spending at home. In the first two days it fell, then it spiked, and then it fell away steadily. It was as if a few people reacted to the lifting of the order by rushing out to enjoy themselves — or maybe to check on relatives — and then voluntarily retreated back indoors.

"We have learned a lot about the virus in recent weeks but we have also learned a lot about human behavior. Either through a sense of public duty, or simply through fear for their own safety, people have taken it upon themselves to impose their own personal lockdowns even when the law does not demand that they do so."

Read more: https://spectator.us/lessons-from-wisconsin-lockdown-lifting/

The ethics of social distancing

The Ethics of Social Distancing: A Libertarian Perspective | UNZ Review - Ilana Mercer:

April 23, 2020 - 'Having lived in both the developed and underdeveloped world, I have always associated social distancing with civility and civilization. Cultures that honor personal boundaries have always seemed better than cultures which don’t — more genteel, refined and respectful. Ditto people who keep a respectful distance: They have more merit than those who get in your face....

"In the absence of clinical therapies or a vaccine for coronavirus, the successful return to work rests, very plainly, on the willingness of the citizenry to cover up, keep clean and keep a distance. Why would anyone wish to infringe on another’s personal space, when the stakes are clearly so high? Insisting on unfettered freedom to come and go as one pleases, sans protection, comes at a grave cost to others — it could constitute aggression against innocent others.

"[T]he shuttering of private property by the State is an incontrovertible violation of private property rights. 'Without property rights,' wrote Ayn Rand, 'no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.'

"Even more fundamental, however, is that without dominion over one’s self — self-ownership — there can be no property rights. Rights to the avails of your labor originate in the right of self-ownership. If you don’t own yourself, you cannot own anything else, or produce anything, the avails of your labor and the products of your mind included. And if you are DEAD, DYING or INCAPACITATED — you own nothing....

"In libertarian theory, private property rights originate in that most important of all titles: The title in one’s own body. That body, that fount of life whence all rights originate, is the legitimate object of government protection in a pandemic. For, as I noted years ago, 'Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others — intentionally or unintentionally — falls perfectly within the purview of the night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory'....

"Against this background, the natural rights of economically stricken individuals to reopen their businesses are righteous; they stem not from a state-created right or regulation. Rather, the right of ownership is the very extension of the right to life. In order to survive, man must — and it is in his nature to — transform the resources around him by mixing his labor with them and making them his own. Man’s labor and property are extensions of himself. So, my countrymen are correct to protest the shuttering of their privately owned property, also their sole means of sustaining their lives.

"All the same, there is another, equally compelling side to the ethics of this emergency situation.... Each and every individual is or could be, inadvertently, harboring a weapon of mass destruction. Yes, a WMD — for how many men and women have died and will still die because of the inadvertent actions of the coronavirus-carrying Index Patients, during the 'seeding events'? Each one of us could be firing off deadly virus into a defenseless population, bereft of immunity. Each one of us could become armed and dangerous, or be felled by someone who is. In this case, individuals who willfully violate social distancing strictures can be viewed as willful aggressors against innocent others."

Read more: https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-ethics-of-social-distancing-a-libertarian-perspective/

Is there evidence the lockdowns saved lives? (video)

Were the COVID-19 Lockdowns a Mistake? | Reason - Zach Weismuller:

May 8, 2020 - "So have the lockdowns actually saved lives? There's a debate over how to analyze the data.... 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 ... 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....

"Stone looked at the date governments issued shelter-in-place orders compared to the total daily deaths 20 days later, the minimum amount of time medical experts believe it would take for initial exposure to the virus to lead to death. In every case, he found the decline came long before the 20-day threshold. Stone says voluntary social distancing is effective: Cell phone tracking data indicate that people were socially distancing before the shelter-in-place orders, and the orders had a negligible effect on the extent of that distancing. 'People were already socially distancing before the lockdown. Social distancing works,' says Stone.

"University of Colorado Denver economist Andrew I. Friedson disagrees. He co-authored a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research that says California's lockdown, the first in the nation, may have prevented more than 1,600 COVID deaths.... Friedson's model created a 'synthetic' version of California that never locked down by taking the weighted average of other states that didn't impose shelter-in-place orders.

"Stone says the model is less useful than looking at actual outcomes and argues that their findings don't support the use of shelter-in-place orders. 'They find that their shelter-in-place reduced deaths beginning four days after it was implemented, which means that you must assume that … a considerable share of COVID-19 cases die four days after infection,' says Stone. "The problem is that's not even long enough for the incubation time.'

"Friedson concedes that social distancing behavior increased before the lockdowns, but he argues that the lockdowns increased the magnitude of the effects by forcing noncompliant individuals to stay home more. 'What we're talking about with this lockdown is that we're putting some extra juice behind this,'  says Friedson....

"Stone says that what likely flattened the curve was voluntary social distancing, prompted by information about the dangers of the virus, in conjunction with the closure of schools and large assemblies. Instead of shelter-in-place orders, he says the rest of the world should learn from the approach taken by Hong Kong, which never issued a stay-at-home order and has just four documented COVID-19 deaths. He says the city accomplished this by banning all travel from China early on, encouraging universal use of masks, and implementing mandatory, centralized quarantines of sick or exposed individuals."

Read more: https://reason.com/video/were-the-covid-19-lockdowns-a-mistake/

Japan contains coronavirus without lockdown

Japan May Have Beaten Coronavirus Without Lockdowns or Mass Testing. But How? | TIME - Lisa Du & Grace Huang:

May 22, 2020 - "Japan’s state of emergency is set to end with new cases of the coronavirus dwindling to mere dozens. It got there despite largely ignoring the default playbook. No restrictions were placed on residents’ movements, and businesses from restaurants to hairdressers stayed open. No high-tech apps that tracked people’s movements were deployed. The country doesn’t have a center for disease control. And even as nations were exhorted to 'test, test, test,' Japan has tested just 0.2% of its population — one of the lowest rates among developed countries.

"Yet the curve has been flattened, with deaths well below 1,000, by far the fewest among the Group of Seven developed nations. In Tokyo, its dense center, cases have dropped to single digits on most days. While the possibility of a more severe second wave of infection is ever-present, Japan has entered and is set to leave its emergency in just weeks, with the status lifted already for most of the country and Tokyo and the remaining four other regions set to exit Monday.

"Analyzing just how Japan defied the odds and contained the virus while disregarding the playbook used by other successful countries has become a national conversation. Only one thing is agreed upon: that there was no silver bullet, no one factor that made the difference.... Experts consulted by Bloomberg News also suggested a myriad of factors that contributed to the outcome, and none could point to a singular policy package that could be replicated in other countries. Nonetheless, these measures still offer long-term lessons for countries in the middle of pandemic that may yet last for years.

"An early grassroots response to rising infections was crucial.... [E]xperts praise the role of Japan’s contact tracers, which swung into action after the first infections were found in January. The fast response was enabled by one of Japan’s inbuilt advantages — its public health centers, which in 2018 employed more than half of 50,000 public health nurses who are experienced in infection tracing. In normal times, these nurses would be tracking down more common infections such as influenza and tuberculosis. 'It’s very analog — it’s not an app-based system like Singapore,' said Kazuto Suzuki, a professor of public policy at Hokkaido University who has written about Japan’s response. 'But nevertheless, it has been very useful.'

"While countries such as the U.S. and the U.K. are just beginning to hire and train contact tracers as they attempt to reopen their economies, Japan has been tracking the movement of the disease since the first handful of cases were found. These local experts focused on tackling so-called clusters, or groups of infections from a single location such as clubs or hospitals, to contain cases before they got out of control....

"The early response was also boosted by an unlikely happening. Japan’s battle with the virus first came to mainstream international attention with its much-criticized response to the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February that led to hundreds of infections.... Still, the experience of the ship is credited with providing Japanese experts with invaluable data early in the crisis on how the virus spread, as well as catapulting it into the public consciousness....

"Experts are also credited with creating an easy-to-understand message of avoiding what are called the 'Three C’s' — closed spaces, crowded spaces and close-contact settings — rather than keeping away from others entirely.... “Social distancing may work, but it doesn’t really help to continue normal social life,' said Hokkaido University’s Suzuki. 'The "Three C’s" are a much more pragmatic approach and very effective, while having a similar effect'....

"Even with the state of emergency about to end, authorities are warning that life will not return to normal.... If a deadlier second wave does follow, the risk factor in Japan, which has the world’s oldest population, remains high. The country has speedily approved Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir and is now scrambling to allow the use of still unproven Fujifilm Holdings Corp.’s antiviral Avigan.... Officials have begun to speak of a phase in which people 'live with the virus,' with a recognition that Japan’s approach has no possibility of wiping out the pathogen."

Read more: https://time.com/5842139/japan-beat-coronavirus-testing-lockdowns/

What a 'lockdown' is, and is not

Lockdowns Don’t Work | The Public Discourse - Lyman Stone:

April 21, 2020 - "[W]e need to define what 'lockdowns' are and, especially, what they are not. I define lockdowns as having three characteristics.

1. First, people are ordered to stay at home or required to provide a reason for movement outside of home. ["lockdowns" proper - gd]
2. Second, assemblies are limited to a very small (usually single-digit) threshold. 
3. Third, many businesses and activities are forced to close, even if they do not technically constitute assemblies and would like to stay open. ["shutdowns" - gd]

"Stay-at-home orders, low assembly thresholds, and business closures together constitute a lockdown. Without those three features, it’s not a lockdown.

"School cancellations aren’t lockdowns.... Travel restrictions, like setting up interstate checkpoints with mandatory testing at state borders, are not lockdowns.... Moderate assembly limits, such as bans on assemblies over 100 people, are not lockdowns.... Centralized quarantine orders, where individuals who test positive or individuals who have had contact with COVID-infected people are forced to be quarantined ... in hotels or special-purpose spaces ... [and] Requirements that people wear masks are not lockdowns....

"These other policies — travel restrictions, large-assembly limits, centralized quarantine, mask requirements, and school cancellations — do work. Because COVID is an extremely severe disease that, if left unchecked, will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, it is vitally important that policymakers focus their efforts on policies that do work (masks, central quarantines, travel restrictions, school cancellations, large-assembly limits), and avoid implementing draconian, unpopular policies that don’t work (lockdowns)....

"There are very few documented cases of lockdowns being used to fight epidemic diseases in the past.... Nor does the 1918 influenza pandemic provide much help.... The most severe restrictions during that pandemic, which dramatically reduced deaths, were in St. Louis. St. Louis’s measures included closures of specific assemblies like churches, closure of all “amusements,” restricted business hours, mask orders, school cancellations, and centralized quarantine procedures. St. Louis never issued a stay-at-home order, and only imposed a complete cancellation of business for about forty-eight hours....

"I’ve built a model to predict county-level deaths per 100,000 people as of April 19. My specific interest is to know if policies like stay-at-home orders reduce deaths. Luckily, the research team at Johns Hopkins University has coded up what measures are in place for every county, and when they were put in place. I have merged this with county-level data like density, metro area size, college-educated share, racial mix, population share born in Italy (a good measure of exposure to European outbreaks), transit-usage, and how long it has been since a county’s first death (a good measure of duration of exposure to a COVID outbreak), to produce a statistical regression with a similar structure as that used by other researchers.

"My findings are striking: for every eight days (including weekends) since school cancellations began, a county tends to have one less death per 100,000 people. For every nine days a ban on gatherings over 500 people has been in place, there’s one less death per 100,000 people. These policies work. But the correlation flips for bans on gatherings of fifty people or for stay-at-home orders. For every two weeks a stay-at-home order is in place, the death rate rises by one person per 100,000. For bans of gatherings of fifty people, it’s every eleven days.... All the underlying data can be downloaded publicly.

"The only US-based academic study empirically linking lockdowns to lower deaths is a recent economics paper identifying California’s lockdown as the reason for its lower death rate. The problem with this paper is that the authors find that the lockdown began to reduce California’s deaths just five days after being implemented. The effect is too early to derive from the supposed cause....

"We don’t need to have a national debate about whether the economic costs of lockdowns outweigh their public health benefits, because lockdowns do not provide public health benefits. Many policies do provide public-health benefits. Masks work.... School cancellations are hugely important.... Bans on large assemblies are an obvious policy with good support. Restrictions on long-distance travel help reduce the occurrence of new outbreaks. Centralized quarantine helps actively reduce the spread of COVID-19 to a very low level.

"But ordering people to cower in their homes, harassing people for having playdates in the park, and ordering small businesses to close up shop regardless of their hygienic procedures simply has no demonstrated effectiveness. These policies should be replaced by stringent mask requirements, large-scale centralized quarantine protocols, and renewed emphasis on empowering people to protect themselves and their neighbors by adopting social distancing during their everyday life."

Lyman Stone is Chief Information Officer at the population consulting firm Demographic Intelligence, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He, his wife, and their baby daughter live in Hong Kong.

Read more: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/04/62572/

Fake news on Sweden from the New York Post

by George J. Dance

Sweden's decision to opt for voluntary social distancing rather than state-imposed lockdowns or business shutdowns to combat the coronavirus has led to a global debate, which has caught my interest. Looking for data on the subject, I found this story in Thursday's New York Post:   

Sweden’s voluntary coronavirus lockdown strategy is failing, study shows | New York Post - Laura Italiano:
May 21, 2020 - Sweden’s decision to go with voluntary lockdowns – instead of the mandatory measures implemented in other countries – has resulted in the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita in Europe but little of the hoped-for 'herd immunity' benefits. A Swedish study found that only 7.3 percent of Stockholmers had developed coronavirus-fighting antibodies by late April, Reuters reports.
The low percentage runs counter to the strategy of the country’s chief epidemiologist, who’d predicted that by keeping schools, restaurants, bars and businesses open, enough people would soon develop immunity to the infection to slow the disease from spreading catastrophically.
Read more: https://nypost.com/2020/05/21/swedens-voluntary-coronavirus-lockdown-strategy-is-failing-study/

The term "voluntary lockdown" is incoherent. A 'lockdown' consists of a police power ordering innocent people to stay in their homes, during an emergency, under the threat of arrest. People voluntarily staying home is voluntary social distancing, not a lockdown. I rate that description of Sweden's emergency measures Partly False. 

The claim that Sweden has "the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita in Europe" is clearly false as written. Sweden has more deaths per capita than Denmark or Germany, but less than Britain, France, Italy, Spain, or Belgium. That claim sources to a story in Wednesday's Post, which reported that "Sweden had the highest number of coronavirus deaths per capita in Europe over the last week" (stress added), but added that "deaths in Sweden are on the decline" (though not as fast as in Britain) – two important pieces of context that Thursday's article omitted. I rate that claim False.

I rate as True the author's claim that Sweden's chief epidemioligist, Anders Tegnall, predicted that his country's strategy would "slow the spread of the disease from spreading catastrophically,"  but as a Pants-on-Fire Lie her description of that strategy as "keeping schools, restaurants, bars, and businesses open [so that] enough people would soon develop immunity". As the following article illustrates, Tegnell's Swedish Public Health Agency has always "denied its strategy was based on the overall goal of herd immunity. A core aim was to introduce less stringent social distancing measures that could be maintained over a long period [of] time."

Sweden's strategy, like every other country's, was to 'flatten the curve' (or slow the rate of infection) to prevent its health care system from collapsing "catastrophically," the way the socialized health care sytems of Spain and Italy appeared to be collapsing at the time. It succeeded. "To a great part, we have been able to achieve what we set out to achieve," says Tegnell. "Swedish healthcare keeps on working, basically with a lot of stress, but not in a way that they turn patients away."

While the article's headline says that Sweden's coronavirus strategy is failing, it has in fact been succeeding. Sweden has achieved its goal of 'flattening the curve,' not through "herd immunity" and not through a lockdown, but through voluntary social distancing. The study did not prove that strategy failed; in fact the study said nothing about that strategy. The only thing the study did prove – that just over 7% of Swedes had caught the disease, two months into the epidemic – merely shows how successful voluntary social distancing had been in reducing infections. I rate the headline as another Pants-on-Fire Lie, and the entire article as Fake News.  

Sweden opts for voluntary social distancing

Coronavirus: Has Sweden got its science right? | BBC News -  Maddy Savage, Stockholm:

April 25, 2020 - "There is no lockdown here.... On the face of it little has shut down. But data suggests the vast majority of the population have taken to voluntary social distancing, which is the crux of Sweden's strategy to slow the spread of the virus.

"Usage of public transport has dropped significantly, large numbers are working from home, and most refrained from travelling over the Easter weekend. The government has also banned gatherings of more than 50 people and visits to elderly care homes. Around 9 in 10 Swedes say they keep at least a metre away from people at least some of the time, up from seven in 10 a month ago, according to a major survey by polling firm Novus. Viewed through the eyes of the Swedish Public Health Agency, the way people have responded is one to be celebrated, albeit cautiously.

"The scientists' approach has led to weeks of global debate over whether Sweden has adopted a sensible and sustainable plan, or unwittingly plunged its population into an experiment that is causing unnecessary fatalities, and could fail to keep the spread of Covid-19 under control.

"In Stockholm, the epicentre of the virus so far, cases have largely plateaued, although there was a spike at the end of this week, put down partly to increased testing. There is still space in intensive care units and a new field hospital at a former conference venue is yet to be used. 'To a great part, we have been able to achieve what we set out to achieve,' says state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. 'Swedish healthcare keeps on working, basically with a lot of stress, but not in a way that they turn patients away....' [T]he Swedish Public Health Agency has maintained high approval ratings throughout the pandemic.

"Sweden's decision to leave larger parts of society open than most of Europe came after Dr Tegnell's team used simulations which anticipated a more limited impact of the virus in relation to population size than those made by other scientists, including those behind a major report by Imperial College, London. That report apparently swayed the UK government to introduce a lockdown.

"In addition, the Swedish Public Health Agency pushed the idea early on that a large proportion of cases were likely to be mild. But it denied its strategy was based on the overall goal of herd immunity. A core aim was to introduce less stringent social distancing measures that could be maintained over a long period [of] time. Schools for under-16s have remained open to enable parents to keep working in key areas....

"Sweden, with a population of 10 million, remains amongst the top 20 in the world when it comes to the total number of cases.... It has higher death rates in relation to its population size than anywhere else in Scandinavia. Unlike in some countries, Sweden's statistics do include elderly care home residents, who account for around 50% of all deaths. Dr Tegnell admits that is a major concern.... Foreign residents, particularly those from Somalia who are more likely to live in multi-generational households, are also overrepresented in the figures....

"What happens next in Sweden may largely depend on people carrying on with social distancing.... On social media there has been vocal dissent from some foreign residents championing tougher measures. Meanwhile, there are signs that others living in Sweden believe the worst of the crisis is over. Mobile phone data suggests Stockholm's residents are spending more time in the city centre than a fortnight ago, and last weekend police raised concerns about overcrowding in nightlife hotspots. Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has warned it is 'not the time to relax' and start spending more time with friends and family. But with spring weather arriving after Sweden's notoriously long, dark winter, that may be easier said than done."

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52395866

How South Korea beat COVID-19 - for now

Coronavirus and South Korea: How lives changed to beat the virus | BBC World News:

April 30, 2020 - "South Korea has recorded its first day with no locally transmitted cases of Covid-19 since the middle of February. It did record four new cases, but all were people coming from abroad, who were diagnosed and isolated on arrival. They brought the country's total number of confirmed cases to 10,765 [and  total deaths to 256, as of May 8 - gd]. It's a major milestone for a country that was once among the world's biggest virus hotspots, but it comes after significant efforts - and remarkably, without a total lockdown.

"South Korea saw a huge spike in the number of infections in February, after a religious group in the city of Daegu was identified as a virus cluster ... and thousands of cases were later linked back to the church. The government reacted by launching a massive testing campaign. As part of making tests freely available, drive-through clinics were set up throughout the country.... The huge number of tests meant South Korea's infection numbers grew quickly, but also that authorities were able early on to effectively find those who were infected, isolate and treat them.

"South Korea also started aggressively contact tracing, finding people who had interacted with a confirmed case, isolating and testing them too. When someone tested positive, authorities would send out an alert to those living or working nearby. People soon got used to receiving a flurry of these messages from authorities.

"All churches in South Korea were advised to shut as officials fought to rein in public gatherings. Today, churches have reopened, but worshippers are still required to keep a distance and keep their masks on. And those rules also applied to ... students ... sitting for their exams last week - making sure there's no chance of contact (and even less of a chance of cheating).

"Lunch is no longer a time for socialising and catching up with friends at ... company cafeteria[s] in South Korea. Protective screens have been put up and staggered lunch breaks introduced to keep people apart. However, it's not clear if all restaurants and cafes are adhering to such strict rules - though South Koreans have still been told to practice social distancing. People are out and about on the streets, but having to get their temperature taken before being let into events or buildings.

"But it was an election earlier this month that really tested South Korea's capacity to contain the virus. Thousands lined up in front of polling stations on 15 April to vote in the National Assembly elections. They were given plastic gloves, told to stand apart, and temperatures were checked before voters entered polling stations. There were fears that the vote could cause a spike in the number of cases, but two weeks on, it's clear this hasn't happened. And the ruling party won a resounding victory, indicating public support for their handing of the crisis....

"But officials are cautious. The Korean Centre for Disease Control has said that until there is a vaccine it is inevitable that this pandemic will return."

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52482553