Many Americans are losing patience with statewide
shelter in place orders.
We don't have months or weeks, you know, businesses
are hurting.
County Supervisor Jim Desmond has been fighting
a losing battle
to reopen businesses in San Diego.
Whose hurt the most in this are the poor people,
the people that rent, the people that work
in hospitality sector, in the restaurants,
a lot of single moms.
We had a meeting the other day, we had people
on the phone crying
saying 'hey I got a kid to feed.'
Several southern states and Colorado have
started lifting or significantly loosening orders.
When you close somebody's business down and
take their livelihood
and they are literally in the face of losing
everything
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the
doubt.
Other governors are holding firm.
That if we pull back too quickly, those numbers
will go through the roof.
Let's go from essential now, questioning not
what is essential but what is safe.
There's no date, if there's a date then we're
denying the facts on the ground,
we're denying   the reality of the spread of
the virus which is dynamic.
Have the lockdowns saved lives?
There's a debate over how to analyze the data.
Lockdowns just don't alter behavior that much.
Economist Lyman Stone says there's no correlation
between the timing of state wide or regional
shelter in place orders
and the decline in the COVID 19 death rate.
We can basically build a theory and assert
that the world obeys our theory
and just go looking for any scrap of evidence
that supports it.
Or we can start looking at what are the trends
we actually observe?
Stone looked at the date governments such
as France issued shelter in place orders
compared to the total daily deaths 20 days
later.
The minimum amount of time it would take for
exposure to the virus to lead to a death.
In every case he found the decline came long
before the 20 day threshold.
Lyman says that according to the data, voluntary
social distancing is effective.
People were already socially distancing before
the lockdown.
Social distancing works.
So we have a couple different data sources
that basically track your cellphone,
which is a little bit creepy,
and what we can see is that policy choices
like shelter in place orders had almost no impact
on when people began to socially distance.
California was able to lower their caseload
significantly
and the number of deaths by quite a bit by
putting this regulation in place.
Economist Andrew Friedson co-authored a working
paper
for the National Bureau of Economic Research
that concluded California's lockdown was effective
and may have prevented more than 1600 COVID  deaths.
California's location where this could have
gotten really bad really quickly.
Essentially what we did is we took a weighted
average of other states
based on characteristics of those states that
make them look like California.
We looked at states that had similar growth
rates to California
and said okay of the states that did not put
on a shelter in place order
within a certain number of days,
and then compare that to what happened in
California.
The funny thing is that they find that their
shelter in place order reduced deaths
beginning four days after it was implemented.
Which means that you must assume that a considerable
share of COVID cases die four days after infection.
The problem is that's not even long enough
for the incubation time.
In part they're absolutely right that individual
behavior and social distancing behavior
started to change before these lockdowns changed.
What the shelter in place orders is and what
your paper estimates
is that there's this additional bump that
you get
from forcing the part of the population that's
not going to comply
to comply with the legal weight.
What makes these numbers particularly slippery
is that it's difficult to know how many of
the job losses are temporary
and come back when the disease is defeated
or come back when the order is lifted.
It's also unclear how many of these lives
saved are just deaths that are delayed.
I think the job of the economist is to tell
you what the tradeoff is
and then the job of the policymakers
is to decide what them and their constituents are comfortable with.
Stone says what did likely flatten the curve
was in fact information,
declaring public emergencies, correlated with
voluntary social distancing,
and the closure of schools and cancellation
of large gatherings
also appear to have slowed the spread.
He says that instead of shelter in place orders,
the rest of the world should learn from the
approach taken by Hong Kong.
Which never issued a shelter in place order
and has just four documented COVID deaths.
We should not hesitate to pull the trigger
on closing borders.
Second, mask early, mask often, everyone should
wear a mask
and they should do so as soon as you know
that you have a threat of a pandemic.
Information is the most powerful tool getting
people to understand the risk and protect themselves.
But after that, centralized quarantine.
Anyone who is a positive test and any close
contact of a positive test, we need to isolate them.
The majority of US states have now significantly
modified their shelter in place orders.
Even California which never came close to
seeing it's hospitals overrun
began allowing more retailers to reopen for
curbside pickup on May 8th
but remains committed to a largely top down
technocratic approach.
Unfortunately life comes with some risks and
I think we're at a point,
we're showing we're declining in numbers,
to me it looks like the goalposts keep moving
back,
you know we shut these businesses down in
a day,
why is it taking us so long to open them back
up?
I understand we want to be safe, we want to
be prudent,
but we need to start.
