Did lockdowns save any lives?

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lockdown. A word we’ve all become overly familiar with over the past two years. Lockdowns were intended to protect people, especially societies most vulnerable, from the risks associated with contracting Covid. However, a new study has been making headlines which claims to show that mandatory lockdowns have only reduced Covid-19 mortality by 0.2%, or one death in five hundred. We examine the evidence behind the claim.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, where you're always reassuring
0:05.6	guide to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.
0:10.8	This week did lockdowns actually save any lives.
0:14.4	Lawyer Listener Nick Schur would recently wrote in, asking us to get to the bottom of
0:18.3	a study from Johns Hopkins University he read about in the British newspaper The Mail
0:22.9	on Sunday.
0:24.4	The study shows mandatory lockdowns have only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% or
0:31.4	one death in 500.
0:33.6	Now that sounds like a small number and of course lockdowns come with a huge cost.
0:38.4	Nick said,
0:39.4	I'm surprised the study hasn't received more publicity given that it seems to fly
0:43.5	in the face of policies adopted around the world.
0:46.2	So what did you make of the study?
0:48.1	In fact the study has received plenty of publicity if you know where to look.
0:52.4	For example the very popular US TV channel Fox News has covered the story, as has the New
0:58.2	York Post, and The Mail on Sunday is a widely read newspaper.
1:02.9	The Mail on Sunday article pointed out that Johns Hopkins is one of America's most respected
1:07.9	universities for the study of public health, which is true.
1:11.6	But actually this study wasn't from the School of Public Health, it was written instead
1:15.8	by three economists, one of whom Steve Hanky is a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
1:21.5	He interviewed him three years ago on Morales on the subject of hyperinflation.
1:27.0	This study isn't about hyperinflation though, it's about the statistics of lockdowns.
	...

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