Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Professor Explains Flaw in Many Models Used for COVID-19 Lockdown Policies
Economics professor Doug Allen wanted to know why so many early models used to create COVID-19 lockdown policies turned out to be highly incorrect. What he found was that a great majority were based on false assumptions and “tended to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs.” He found it troubling that policies such as total lockdowns were based on those models.
“They were built on a set of assumptions. Those assumptions turned out to be really important, and the models are very sensitive to them, and they turn out to be false,” said Allen, the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, in an interview.
Allen says most of the early cost-benefit studies that he reviewed didn’t try to distinguish between mandated and voluntary changes in people’s behaviour in the face of a pandemic. Rather, they just assumed an exponential growth of cases of infection day after day until herd immunity is reached.
In a paper he published in April, in which he compiled his findings based on a review of over 80 papers on the effects of lockdowns around the world, Allen concluded that lockdowns may be one of “the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history.”
He says many of the studies early in the pandemic assumed that human behaviour changes only as a result of state-mandated intervention, such as the closing of schools and non-essential businesses, mask and social distancing orders, and restrictions on private social gatherings.
However, they didn’t take into consideration people’s voluntary behavioural changes in response to the virus threat, which have a major impact on evaluating the merits of a lockdown policy.
“Human beings make choices, and we respond to the environment that we’re in, [but] these early models did not take this into account,” Allen said. “If there’s a virus around, I don’t go to stores often. If I go to a store, I go to a store that doesn’t have me meeting so many people. If I do meet people, I tend to still stand my distance from them. You don’t need lockdowns to induce people to behave that way.”
Allen’s own cost-benefit analysis is based on the calculation of “life-years saved,” which determines “how many years of lost life will have been caused by the various harms of lockdowns versus how many years of lost life were saved by lockdowns.”
Based on his lost-life calculation, lockdown measures have caused 282 times more harm than benefit to Canadian society over the long term, or 282 times more life years lost than saved.
Furthermore, “The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries,” writes Allen. In other words, in his assessment, heavy lockdowns do not meaningfully reduce the number of deaths in the areas where they are implemented, when compared to areas where lockdowns were not implemented or as stringent.
Today, some 14 months into the pandemic, many jurisdictions across Canada are still following the same policy trajectory outlined at the beginning of the pandemic. Allen attributes this to politics.
He says that politicians often take credit for having achieved a reduction in case numbers through their lockdown measures.
“I think it makes perfect sense why they do exactly what they did last year,” Allen said.
“If you were a politician, would you say, ‘We’re not going to lock down because it doesn’t make a difference, and we actually did the equivalent of killing 600,000 people this last year.’”
You wouldn’t, he said, because “the alternative is they [politicians] have to admit that they made a mistake, and they caused … multiple more loss of life years than they saved.”
Allen laments that media for the most part have carried only one side of the debate on COVID-19 restrictions and haven’t examined the other side. Adding to the concern, he says, is that views contrary to the official government response are often pulled from social media platforms.
He says he has heard that even his own published study has been censored by some social media sites.
“In some sense these are private platforms. They can do what they want. But on the other hand, I feel kind of sad that we live in the kind of a world where posing opposing opinions is either dismissed, ignored, or … name-called, [and] in some ways cancelled,” Allen said.
****************************************
More job losses in the Biden era
BRADDOCK, Pennsylvania -- Exactly two years ago, U.S. Steel Corporation announced that the company would turn its Mon Valley Works operations into a key source of lightweight steel for the automotive industry.
At the time, local leaders and company officials called the investment "transformational."
It involved a whopping $1.5 billion upgrade to the three Mon Valley Works plants, all in Pennsylvania -- the Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock, the Irvin Plant in West Mifflin and the Clairton Coke Works in Clairton -- with technology and improvements that would have resulted in cleaner air for all three communities as well as good-paying jobs providing regional prosperity for decades.
On April 30, U.S. Steel said that after months of tug of war with the Allegheny County Health Department, it was canceling the $1.5 billion upgrade and idling three batteries at Clairton Coke Works by 2023.
U.S. Steel said in a statement that a dragged-out delay from Allegheny County officials for permitting the project contributed to the decision, along with the new direction that the company is taking to focus on sustainability.
Allegheny County chief executive Rich Fitzgerald, a city Democrat, said he was "blindsided by the news."
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, also a Democrat, was simply devastated. "It is heartbreaking," said Fetterman, whose home is across the street from the sprawling 148-year-old Edgar Thomson Works that hugs the Monongahela River.
Local economic development forecasters estimate over 1,000 direct jobs will be lost, as well as countless supporting jobs that would have facilitated the buildout.
Jeff Nobers, the president of Pittsburgh Works, an economic group made up of officials in manufacturing, steel, energy and labor unions, said the unknown costs and future implications due to this decision are formidable and long-lasting. "We have to be thinking about what manufacturers who were looking to locate here are thinking," he said. "Do they look at the climate here and wonder if it is worth it? Well, that is a problem, too."
Local elected officials are of several minds on this project. Most of them were just hoping it would fly under the radar of the climate justice warriors and go up without notice. That was never going to happen. The rest fully backed its demise because of their views on climate change.
One exception has been Fetterman, the progressive populist Democrat who is seeking his party's nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey in 2022. He was a vocal supporter of the project, which sometimes placed him at odds within his own party's ranks. His support created a strange alliance between him and Republican state lawmakers such as Allegheny County state Sen. Devlin Robinson and the state Senate majority leader, Kim Ward.
Ward said that although she does not agree with Fetterman on much, she sure does "on this one."
Robinson agreed. "The constant rhetoric attacking manufacturing in this country is going to impact jobs," he said. "That is not something to worry about in the future -- it is happening right in front of us."
Critics of the closure also point to the constant drumbeat coming from local environmental justice nonprofits and reporting organizations funded by elite, left-wing foundations such as the Heinz Endowments. These, they argue, are contributing to a hostile business climate.
The Edgar Thomson Steel Works, named after a Pennsylvania Railroad president, was built by Andrew Carnegie in the 1870s on the site of an old French and Indian War battlefield.
U.S. Steel also told its investors that it is reallocating capital to other places -- which means all of the work that was going to go here will likely go someplace where bureaucrats are less beholden to (or aligned with) environmentalists.
Fetterman calls the moment an opportunity lost: "We could have made the safest, greenest steel in the world right here in Braddock. We could have secured thousands of good-paying union jobs."
Now that opportunity is gone.
President Joe Biden said in his joint speech to Congress that there's no reason steel can't be continually manufactured in the United States, and in a safe and green way. Biden even riffed, "There's no reason the blades for wind turbines can't be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing."
"Well, that's what this investment was about," said Robinson. "This $1.5 billion was about making steel in a more environmentally friendly way. But the current environment right now is so hostile to manufacturing, manufacturers know making things in America is not a viable option. Especially not now, and especially not into the future, where they're going to see a return on their investment."
Manufacturers may have to relocate to places where there are no unions, or even outside the country. This makes hollow Biden's promise to protect union jobs and bring back manufacturing -- and it will be doubly hollow if he looks the other way when things like this happen.
This conflict between manufacturing and environmentalism is also going to place Biden at odds with both sides. Biden argues that a decarbonizing economy will create millions of jobs. Here, however, it meant zero jobs created and perhaps many destroyed.
*****************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment