Thread by @ikashnitsky

This lockdown life was so miserable as if we didn't live at all, we just lost two months of life each

You know what it is? 👆

Above is the core assumption of a paper that claims to provide the most thorough cost/benefit analysis of lockdowns

THREAD 1/12

The paper itself is here if you want to read with your own eyes

Allen, D. W. (2021). Covid-19 Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature. International Journal of the Economics of Business.

2/12
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…

So one may wonder: how exactly was this 141 figure was calculated?

141! That's how much worse lockdowns are claimed to be compared with NO-lockdown

'Fasten your your seatbelt'

tl;dr: it's not much different from the stylised summary in the opening line of this thread

3/12

It depart from the idea that you can ask a person to evaluate the costs that they would be willing to accept in order to avoid the perceived "harms of lockdown"

(of course, the "harms of lockdown" are postulated as given)

4/12

So the core of this "thorough cost/benefit analysis" in fact relies on people saying "Pfff... I'd rather lived two months less in this damn 2020 than experience these lockdowns"

5/12

Let's just briefly note that people of different age bare radically different risks associated with being infected and going through c19

In a way this is asking "How many elderly are you ready to sacrifice to keep drinking your Friday beer?"

6/12

https://twitter.com/ikashnitsky/status/1483047960791457794

Okay. So the logic builds upon a speculative idea that the *average person* (TM) is willing to pay 2 months of own life in order to avoid lockdowns, it's even called "a conservative estimate"

How does Douglas W. Allen proceed from here?

7/12

Next the author picks Canada with a population of 37.7 million people

If each of them lost 2/12 of a year to the lockdown in 2020, all together they lost a stunning amount of

6,283,333 years

(also nice how precisely this can be calculated)

8/12

https://twitter.com/ikashnitsky/status/1481223818341453824

Now the final missing element. In order to confirm the postulated "harms of lockdown" this impressive 6.3m figure of *speculative* years of life lost needs to be compared with something

Why not the *actual* years of life lost due to c19 deaths?

(yes, you are reading this)

9/12

To be on the same scale, the *actual* c19 deaths need to be also expressed in years of life lost. (let's not pause here on the details of the demographic calculation that are sketchily outlined)

10/12

Yet the lockdowns did not even prevent *all* c19 deaths!

The author picks an estimate from @VC31415 that lockdown in Canada saved about 50% lives

But other studies find no or little effect. Thus be it a second "scenario" of 20% reduction in c19

11/12

Finally, all the elements are in place to compare

6.3m vs 44.4k is 141
6.3m vs 111k is 56

No wonder which figure made it into Abstract

And final line: "It is possible that lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in modern history"
🤦🤦🤦

12/12

Tagging some people with links to 🇨🇦:
@tylerblack32 @angie_rasmussen @DFisman @YoniFreedhoff @jkwan_md @BogochIsaac @DGBassani @deonandan @lisa_iannattone @KindrachukJason @jonathanstea @DeNovo_Fatima @RMCarpiano @Wikisteff @JkayFlake @PrachiSrivas @DiegoSilvaPhD

Tagging some people with links to 🇨🇦:
@crackedscience @DocMCohen @Marco_Piani @ArtKorenevsky @ShawnRadcliffe @NewsHoff @TheNeurocyclist @E_R_Sepulveda @FleuryPayeur @michaelboiss @Acosta_Kike_ @CatalinaTC_ @bergeron_mp @AlysonVanRaalte @notleora

I wonder if the strength of anti anything public health movement in Canada is somewhat fueled by the bullshit papers that happened to choose this population?

@PubPeerBot 10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051

Tiny spin-off: Douglas Allen, the author, influenced another (maybe even more awful) paper on the "harms of lockdowns"

How this 141 paper is refered to throughout is yet another illustration how little these people care about the quality of evidence

13/

https://twitter.com/ikashnitsky/status/1489892185411567620