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More than a year into the pandemic, we can start to evaluate the overall efficacy of our COVID responses. The U.S. provides a unique opportunity to evaluate different policy responses.
TL DR: Heavy-handed approaches don't look good.
Source data: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
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The graphic below ranks states by their overall COVID policy score: This score takes into account COVID deaths/million, access to education, and increased unemployment ABOVE Feb 2020. All numbers are over the course of the entire year.
Source data: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
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In order not to overly penalize or reward “outliers,” the score is based on rank relative to other states. Raw data is linked below, to create your own scorecard.
No matter how you slice it, doesn't look good for heavy-handed approaches
Source:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
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If we take masking and mask compliance as being emblematic of heavy-handed approaches, we can see that there is a strong correlation between high levels of masking, and poor results.
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
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Looking at masking relative to individual measures, the same is true. It is not associated with lower levels of deaths—but is tightly linked with extremely low access to in-person learning, and high unemployment.
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The inefficacy of masks and other “non-pharmaceutical interventions” has been excused, because they are ostensibly no-cost interventions. Indeed, the opposite appears to be true.
wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26…
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The last year has been a global experiment in the efficacy of these “non-pharmaceutical interventions.”To gain from the experiment, we must look at results. Unfortunately, the results appear to be so bad, that there is virtually a moratorium on even asking the question.
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That this was the “pandemic of the century” has been repeatedly invoked. This is simply not true. Based on the CDC’s current disease burden estimate, the U.S. IFR is around 0.48%. This is with MANY deaths that were with COVID, not from--ultimately, it will likely be lower.
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In a late March NEJM article, Dr. Fauci mentions that in a worst case scenario, this might be like the 1957 of 1967 flus—with an IFR of 0.5%. We are lower than that, and possibly considerably lower.
nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
documentcloud.org/documents/2079…
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However, had we had the same age structure we had now, as in ’57 and ’68, the IFR would have been far worse for those flus. What’s even worse though, is our NPIs, appear to have driven the virus to the most vulnerable—increasing mortality.
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Nor was this unexpected, in fact, it is why these kinds of interventions WERE NOT recommended.
As with everything, these were things we knew, things that informed our policies, and which were jettisoned.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
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What’s more, this is not NEW information. This was known as early as May of 2020, based on the early seroprevalence work in NY. There, the IFR was 0.5%, and vanishingly small for those without co-morbidites. And there were MANY, MANY mistakes made.
thepragmatist.co/post/nearly-60…
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But rather than learning from these mistakes, understanding the magnitude of the mistakes, the scientific community, running interference for politicians, is trying to memory-hole all of this data, and everything we knew before 2020. This can’t happen
1/a (Correction)
Typo on the original graph--This is indeed, March 2020 - May 2021.
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