When the ongoing COVID pandemic first broke out, countries from all across the world started to impose all sorts of lockdowns and restrictions. The officials believed that by applying such measures, fewer people would get infected with the coronavirus.
A new study that FoxNews.com writes about claims that the recipe was wrong from the start. Lockdowns managed to reduce the death rate related to COVID illness only by .2% in the US and Europe during the first wave of the pandemic back in the spring of 2020. To come to this conclusion, researchers from Johns Hopkins University analyzed several studies.
‘Enormous economic and social costs’
The researchers analyzed the effects of measures such as business closures, mask mandates, and school shutdowns for the COVID-related deaths. One statement writes:
We find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates.
The researchers wrote as Fox News quotes:
While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted,
In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.
Shelter-in-place orders were also examined, and the researchers concluded that they reduced COVID mortality by only 2.9%.
According to data brought by worldometers.info, over 5.7 million people across the world died as a result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The USA has most of the reported COVID-related deaths: over 915,000. India comes second with almost 499,000 deaths. Brazil is the third with more than 628,000 souls that left this world. The most affected country from Europe by the pandemic is France, as it counts more than 131,000 deaths.