They're arguing simultaneously "lockdowns had no impact on people's behavior and therefore had no benefit" and "lockdowns had massive negative costs". Lo and behold that is the exact mistake the paper is making! It's basing the cost analysis off the following question:
>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 that makes the AVERAGE American indifferent?
Yet you'll notice this is not about lockdown versus non-lockdown this is "normal" versus COVID. Moreover, the number they use for X is just made-up. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black - this is the exact mistake the author goes on and on about for the other side of the cost/benefit equation.
This paper is super sketchy in other ways - it's clearly a personal diatribe, not an attempt to be accurate. Like:
> Lockdown is a formal,state-mandated “one size fits all” version of the social norm “keep your distancefrom people who are sick."
Is the author unaware of asymptomatic transmission? If all we had to do was keep away from sick people, then this would have been a SARS-1 outcome.
> As a result, the ICL model made some dire predictions ... For instance: “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour ... In total,in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US...”
The US has achieved 1/4 of those deaths with behavioral changes (from lockdowns or not), so 2 million without any behavioral changes seems like a good estimate from early data.
Fig 2B is clearly over-fit on past data. I doubt it will hold up well.
> "lockdowns had no impact on people's behavior and therefore had no benefit" and "lockdowns had massive negative costs"
I think you're overlooking the idea that "lockdowns", as we know them, do little other than impose massive costs and anxieties on society, while failing to achieve their main objective i.e. complete immobilization and eradication.
So you end up with all the costs of the policy with little upside because the dynamics of spread seem very heterogeneous, mass-spread seems to happen in relatively few people in very particular scenarios (crowded indoor areas - notice that lockdown ends up pushing the entire society, especially the least healthy and most vulnerable, indoors).
It depends some on how lockdowns are implemented. Where I live, for instance, they outlaw indoor dining but still allow outdoor dining, which seems to me to be exactly what they should do.
>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 that makes the AVERAGE American indifferent?
Yet you'll notice this is not about lockdown versus non-lockdown this is "normal" versus COVID. Moreover, the number they use for X is just made-up. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black - this is the exact mistake the author goes on and on about for the other side of the cost/benefit equation.
This paper is super sketchy in other ways - it's clearly a personal diatribe, not an attempt to be accurate. Like:
> Lockdown is a formal,state-mandated “one size fits all” version of the social norm “keep your distancefrom people who are sick."
Is the author unaware of asymptomatic transmission? If all we had to do was keep away from sick people, then this would have been a SARS-1 outcome.
> As a result, the ICL model made some dire predictions ... For instance: “In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour ... In total,in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in GB and 2.2 million in the US...”
The US has achieved 1/4 of those deaths with behavioral changes (from lockdowns or not), so 2 million without any behavioral changes seems like a good estimate from early data.
Fig 2B is clearly over-fit on past data. I doubt it will hold up well.