![]() ![]() Analysing competing harms and benefits often comes down not to scientific calculations, but to value judgements, such as how to weigh costs that fall on some sections of society more than others. But researchers have also encountered difficulties. They have reached some conclusions: countries that acted quickly to bring in stringent measures did best at preserving both lives and their economies, for instance. Scientists have been studying the effects of lockdowns during the pandemic in the hope that their findings could inform the response to future crises. “There’s costs and benefits,” says Samir Bhatt, a public-health statistician at Imperial College London and the University of Copenhagen. Closing businesses contributed to financial and social hardship, mental ill health and economic downturns. School and university closures disrupted education. The pandemic’s true health cost: how much of our lives has COVID stolen?Īt the same time, it’s clear that lockdowns had huge costs, and there is debate about the utility of any subsequent lockdown measures. “We needed to buy ourselves some time,” says Lauren Meyers, a biological data scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Most scientists agree that lockdowns did curb COVID-19 deaths and that governments had little option but to restrict people’s social contacts in early 2020, to stem SARS-CoV-2’s spread and avert the collapse of health-care systems. But these analyses are out of step with the majority of studies. The retracted paper is not the only one to contend that lockdowns failed to save lives. ( Scientific Reports is published by Springer Nature Nature’s reporting is editorially independent of its publisher.) ![]() A week after that, it retracted the work, although neither Savaris nor his co-authors agreed with the retraction. Nine months later, the journal published two letters 2, 3 that laid out the paper’s errors. Within a week, Scientific Reports added an ‘editor’s note’ to the paper, alerting readers to criticisms. As he and others would show, the results were wrong, because of errors in the paper’s choice of statistical methods. ![]() “The findings were quite remarkable, on the face of it,” says Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The paper was highlighted by prominent lockdown sceptics and some news sites and swiftly gained notoriety. In most cases, their paper in Scientific Reports concluded, it didn’t. They compared 87 locations around the world, in pairs, to see whether a lower rate of COVID-19 deaths correlated with greater time spent at home, assessed using anonymized cellphone data released by Google. When they were enforced rigorously enough to reduce people’s social contacts sharply, they shrank COVID-19 outbreaks several studies had demonstrated this.īut Savaris, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, tried a fresh analysis together with three colleagues (who worked in statistics, computer science and informatics). Lockdown measures did what they were supposed to. At the time, countries were once again dialling lockdown policies up or down, as the Alpha variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 surged in different places. It had been a year since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to apply the desperate measures collectively known as lockdowns - cancelling sporting and cultural events, closing retail outlets, restaurants, schools and universities, and ordering people to stay at home. In March 2021, a doctor in Brazil named Ricardo Savaris published a now-discredited research paper that went viral on social media 1.
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