Studying logic is a bit like owning a pair of the magic sunglasses from John Carpenter’s 80s science fiction/action classic They Live, only without being as cool and tough as Roddy Piper. But, like Piper’s character, once you see it, you can’t un-see it. “It”, in this case, is the shocking failures of basic logic that are almost universal in politics and media.
One of the most depressingly common of these failures of logic is what is known as the fallacy of “affirming the consequent”; a form of backwards reasoning which takes a truth and illogically uses it to justify an antecedent. For instance, arguing that if a man jumped off a cliff he would be dead, then pointing to a dead man and affirming that he must have jumped off a cliff.
In that case, anyone can easily see the illogic – there are any number of reasons why a person might be dead – but when it comes to, say, government policy, such false arguments usually pass without comment.
Consider the Ardern government’s panicked rush to lock down the entire country (after weeks of inaction): media cheerleaders point to New Zealand’s middling (but not exceptionally low, no matter what she says) rates of infection and death as proof that the policy worked.
But is it?
We do not seem to know the effectiveness of the various strategies adopted by national and regional governments to respond to the disease – ranging from the advocacy of social distancing to full-on lockdowns.
I have analysed data from the Worldometers Coronavirus project, along with information about the population, population density, median income, median age and diversity of each US state, to determine whether states that have adopted lockdowns or ‘shelter in place’ orders experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than those which pursue a social-distancing strategy without a formal lockdown. I then briefly extend this analysis to compare countries. In short, I do not find that lockdowns are a more effective way of handling coronavirus than well-done social-distancing measures.
Seven US states eschewed lock-downs in favour of much milder social-distancing restrictions, such as banning large gatherings and mandating spacing gaps and customer limits in stores. These states average 1,613 cases and 33 deaths.
The average number of cases per state over all US states was 12,520. Removing New York as an outlier (accounting for half of all US deaths), the average was 8,408 cases and 342 deaths.
Even adjusted for population, the same pattern holds: 69 cases per million for “social distancing” states, compared to an average of 1,392 per million for “lockdown” states (minus New York). Deaths are an average of 10 per million, compared to 54 per million.
Next, I ran a regression model[…]to ask was whether lockdown states experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than social-distancing states, adjusted for all[…]variables. The answer? No. The impact of state-response strategy on both my cases and deaths measures was utterly insignificant[…]
The only variable to be statistically significant in terms of cases and deaths was population.
In other words, the larger and denser the population, the bigger the impact of the Wuhan virus – regardless of public policy.
The same pattern is observed in Europe and Asia. Despite slanted media reporting, Sweden, which rejected draconian lockdowns, is doing quite well, compared to the rest of Europe.
So, while fawning media, at home and internationally, laud New Zealand’s somewhat lower infection and death rates as somehow proof positive of Jacinda Ardern’s political genius, it is a fallacious argument. New Zealand’s infection rate per person is higher than Australia’s, three times higher than social-distancing Japan’s, and 15 times higher than Taiwan’s. Death rates are slightly higher than Australia’s, 30% higher than Japan and 11 times Taiwan.
If Sydney, Australia’s New York, is removed from the equation, Australia is streets ahead of New Zealand. Less than half the infections per capita and one-third of the deaths.
The facts are plain: economically, socially and psychologically devastating police-state lockdowns have done nothing to prevent the spread of the Chinese virus.
Jacinda Ardern is like the person who points triumphantly at a charred termite nest and proudly declares that burning down her house successfully got rid of its termite infestation.
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