Lockdown State vs. Free State Part II: Mortality
The Indisputable Results of "Stay Home Save Lives"
If you missed Part I in this series, start here:
First, let’s revisit the Mobility chart. This represents the change in frequency of people leaving their homes during 2020. One of these is the Lockdown State, the other is the Free State.
The State that imposed repeated Stay at Home orders, Closed Schools, banned “non-essential” activities like working in retail, restaurants, or worshipping at a church-
is the yellow line at the top. The State that enacted a brief, 1 month long Stay at Home order, and then re-opened schools and everything else- is the blue on the bottom.
During the pandemic, there were often times when certain states were surging in Covid Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, while others were declining. Well known, regional patterns were at play just like with influenza and other viruses. Of course this was completely ignored and the only thing that the media wanted to attribute differences to was state-enacted policies, often unilaterally enacted via emergency powers by a Governor. We all remember how frequently the media loved to blame the citizens and/or the governors of different states for Covid, especially when if gave them the chance to disparage their opposing political side.
Now that we’ve analyzed the minute differences between the 2 states’ mobility data, let’s now take a look at the overall mortality differences. What’s the correct way to measure the impact to overall life? While it’s true we will be trying to measure the pandemics impact on lost education, medical care, mental health, etc. for years to come, for the immediate policy impact; all-cause mortality is a good measure if we are trying to ascertain the impacts of policy decisions with the explicit purpose of “saving lives.”
While most reporting during the pandemic focused on population adjusted Covid case, hospitalizations and deaths ( or in worse cases, non-adjusted), I believe the fairest measure is comparing all-cause mortality. Remember we have to age-adjust this because of differences in death rates of differing groups of people (a death rate of a retirement community is going to be higher than a college town). This accounts for both the impact of Covid itself, as well as the impact of disruptions to society by all other causes that had nothing to do with the disease, but to the reaction.
Here are the same states again. See if you can correlate the charts below with the chart above. Which one of these closed schools? Which one had repeated lockdowns?
Source: https://www.mortality.watch/
