Do lockdowns make sense?

Do lockdowns work? Was India right in imposing what was, perhaps, the most stringent lockdown in the world? I had a post earlier on this subject in which I cited the IMF's findings to say that these appear to bear out the correctness of our approach.

Subsequently, a government panel staffed by top scientists also lent support to the approach taken by the government. The committee observed:

Without a lockdown, the number of deaths in India would have overwhelmed the system within a very short timeframe, and would have eventually crossed 26 lakh fatalities. Imposing the lockdown in May would have reduced deaths to around 10 lakh. The prompt imposition of the lockdown on March 24 has resulted in deaths being around one lakh till date.  

The committee was also of the view that cases had peaked in September and we should see a decline hereafter, provided people continued to be careful.

Some nagging questions, however, remain. Why was India's record, despite a stringent lockdown, poorer than that of, say, Bangladesh and Pakistan? The lockdown may have slowed the spread- and hence made it possible for the health infrastructure to cope- but why did not result in fewer numbers?   And if the numbers that resulted were as high as they have been, was the loss of livelihoods worth the cost? It would be useful if the committee were to provide answers.

One thing is for sure: the last word on the merit of lockdowns has not been said. Surjit Bhalla has done some research on the subject and he contends in an article today that lockdowns have not been effective in this pandemic nor considered effective in earlier pandemics in the US! In other words, it's not just India where the lockdown did not produce results; this was true of other parts of the world as well. His conclusions are worth reproducing:

In my paper, I report the result of various studies on the effectiveness of lockdowns; except for a few, most of these studies report that the lockdowns were highly successful in saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Since the average death rate from COVID is 2.5 per cent, these results imply that somewhere between 10 to 20 million less infections resulted from this unnatural experiment.

Examination of the contradiction between the observed reality of 40 million cases, and the experimental reality of lockdown research, is the purpose of my above-mentioned paper. We replicate the variety of tests available in the literature and add the following important test of lockdowns — a before-and-after comparison for over 150 countries, and for one, two, and three months from the date of lockdowns. No matter what the test, the dominant result is that not only lockdowns were not effective, but that, in a large majority of cases, lockdowns were counter-productive i.e. led to more infections, and deaths, than would have been the case with no lockdowns. My analysis stops in end-July and, therefore, ignores the post-July second wave of infections. If these data are included, the fate of lockdowns would be a lot worse.

 Bhalla goes on step further and questions the efficacy of non-phamaceutical interventions, such as wearing masks and washing one's hands. He cites a WHO report on the subject:

The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions. There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission, although higher compliance in a severe pandemic might improve effectiveness. 

In short, Bhalla thinks it doesn't make any difference to the spread of the infection whether you have a lockdown or not and whether people protect themselves with what we have come to regard as basic safeguards, such as masks and washing of hands! Here's another post I came across that accords with Bhalla's view on lockdowns.

There is one person who would heartily approve of Bhalla, President Trump. Unlike much of the intelligentsia, I have great respect for the instincts of politicians and I am left wondering whether Trump has latched on to something that was lost on many experts.