Lockdown doesn’t save lives; it just kills economies – Wall Street Journal

Evidence suggests that a heavy lockdown is no more effective than a light one, and opening up economies a lot is no more harmful than opening up a little.
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Lockdown restrictions in South Africa have arguably been among the harshest in the world. Our economy was still recovering from a recession when Covid-19 hit our shores, and the impact has been devastating on our fiscus. Actuary Nick Hudson of  Pandemic Data and Analytics (PANDA) makes no secret of the fact that he believes South Africa destroyed its economy unnecessarily. "The lockdown theory proposes that there will be dramatic effects on the rate at which the infections will spread in the country," he says. "And it's a very strong prediction that there will be step downs in the rate of infection, and when you release lockdown, there will be step ups. And we've gone through every single country in the world and every single lockdown event and every single release of lockdown – you can't see these step downs and step ups." Professor Graham Barr of the University of Cape Town (UCT) also says that science let us down because politicians relied too heavily on data forecasting. – Claire Badenhorst

The failed experiment of Covid lockdowns

By Donald L. Luskin

Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the US has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health — first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn't contain the disease's spread and reopening it didn't unleash a second wave of infections.

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