Coronavirus spikes in regions with strict lockdowns re-ignite debate over effectiveness

Some doctors and statistical analyses are re-evaluating the effectiveness of extreme lockdowns after a new wave of infections.

By Daniel Payne
JustTheNews.com
August 17, 2020

Coronavirus infection rates are spiking in countries and some U.S. communities that imposed strict pandemic mitigation policies, including lengthy lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. The dynamic is raising fresh questions about how effective those measures ultimately are at halting the spread of the virus.

Governments worldwide began instituting far-reaching laws and executive orders earlier this year in concerted efforts to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Following the Chinese government’s lead in that country’s Wuhan province, governments in Europe and North America, including most U.S. governors, imposed quarantines, stay-at-home orders and lockdowns, shuttering much of the world’s economy and ordering tens of millions of people to remain in their homes for months.

In many countries, gradual economic re-openings were accompanied by careful, staggered “phases” in which restrictions were lifted, and sometimes re-imposed, according to the level of viral spread in the community. Many governments also ordered citizens to wear masks in public.

Authorities have argued that these policies were, and continue to be, successful at stopping or slowing the spread of the virus. Yet recent spikes in places where lockdowns have been strictly imposed for months — from Australia to Great Britain and California to Hawaii — suggest that such measures may have more limited effect than health authorities initially anticipated. The benefit in easing crushes on hospitals has been touted by many but the long-term ability to stop the spread of the disease remains in doubt.

It’s a debate that likely won’t be settled for at least another year but has found new life in the recent resurgence of cases worldwide.

“A lockdown might delay severe cases for a while, but once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear,” Johan Giesecke, the former state epidemiologist for Sweden and the former chief scientist at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, argued in May.

“Measures to flatten the curve might have an effect, but a lockdown only pushes the severe cases into the future —it will not prevent them,” he added.

Bloomberg News recently published a column earlier this month entitled “When Lockdowns Don’t Work” that garnered some attention, as did a study in the Lancet online journal EClinicalMedicine, that concluded “government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of Covid-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”

Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease expert at Edinburgh University and a member of Great Britain’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies, has sounded concern that the mitigation efforts had more effect on slowing the global economy than crushing the virus. “When the reckoning comes we may well find that the cure turned out to be far worse than the disease,” Woolhouse was quoted in the Daily Mail.

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