REALLY JUST A QUESTION OF HOW MUCH YOU VALUE LIFE:

Before we had vaccines, the main tool we had for suppressing the virus was government-mandated social distancing restrictions -- also known as "lockdowns". In practice our restrictions weren't anything like the draconian lockdowns China implemented, where people were literally sealed inside their houses. But many European did manage to use government-mandated distancing to suppress the virus...at least until the variants arrived at the end of 2020.

Had we managed to do the same, we might have saved a lot of lives, even if fast-spreading variants and distancing fatigue eventually defeated us in the fall. The reason is that in the early days of the pandemic, we didn't know how to treat COVID, and death rates were pretty high -- maybe about 1% of those who got infected, and around 1 out of 5 people who were hospitalized. By the end of the pandemic, as we learned how to use things like steroids and oxygen to keep people alive, death rates fell to less than half of that level. If "lockdowns" had been able to suppress the virus in the U.S. like they did in Germany, a lot of Americans would still be alive today. [...]

There is copious evidence that lockdowns reduced transmission of the coronavirus. Some types of social distancing restrictions are more effective than others, and some sub-populations benefit more than others, but overall, lockdowns did limit the spread and saved lives.

That's hardly a surprising result. The bigger question is, what did lockdown do to the economy? Most people make the natural assumption that lockdown hurts the economy -- if you ban people from going out to restaurants, that stops people from spending money on restaurants, right? Obviously. Many economists made this assumption when they tried to model pandemic policy. In fact, some people go so far as to blame all the economic costs of the pandemic on lockdowns:

If you think something seems fishy about that claim, you're right. The fact is, even without lockdowns, plenty of people will avoid restaurants and other crowded spaces during a pandemic simply out of fear of catching the virus. And that will hurt the economy.

And lo and behold, when we look at evidence, we find that lockdowns accounted for only a small percent of the economic slowdown. For example, economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson looked at the state border between Illinois and Iowa. On the Illinois side, the towns issued stay-at-home orders, whereas on the Iowa side they did not. And guess what -- economic activity fell almost as much on the Iowa side as on the Illinois side!

This is very similar to the results of a comparison of Sweden and Denmark. Denmark locked down and saw its economic activity decline by 29%; Sweden chose not to lock down, and saw its economic activity decline by 25%. The biggest economic destroyer by far was not government policy; it was fear of COVID.

In fact, states that didn't issue stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020 saw just about the same amount of economic devastation as states that did issue those orders:

And a paper by Eliza Forsythe, Lisa B. Kahn, Fabian Lange and David G. Wiczer from April 2020 looked at various sources of data on employment levels, and concluded:

To a first approximation, this [employment] collapse was broad based, hitting all U.S. states, regardless of the timing of stay-at-home policies...Nearly all industries and occupations saw contraction in postings and spikes in UI claims, with little difference depending on whether they are deemed essential and whether they have work-from-home capability...This set of facts suggests the economic collapse was not caused solely by the stay-at-home orders, and is therefore unlikely to be undone simply by lifting them.

The other piece of evidence that lockdown didn't hurt the economy much is the timing. For example, people stopped going to restaurants well before lockdowns were implemented. Meanwhile, a recent analysis by Chetty et al. looked at very detailed data on business activity and employment and found that "State-ordered reopenings of economies had small impacts on spending and employment." Here are some pictures:

You can't even see the effect of lockdowns at all! It's all just fear of the virus itself.

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