COVID-19 Policy Measures

Does the Science Support the Response?

Timothy Girgis

[email protected]

April 5, 2021

P286276 | FC701 Extended Project | Damien Kerr | Submitted April 5, 2021

COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 2

Abstract

Governments have implemented numerous policies to reduce the impact of COVID-19, but

little is known of their actual effects. Using deduction and a review of the available evidence,

this analysis finds that masks and social distancing are the most effective measures available to

mitigate infectious outbreaks. In contrast, no sound logical or scientific support exists for

lockdowns, as China’s results are unreliable, and all existing studies in support of these

measures are erroneous. Real-world data analysis actually shows an unexpected increase in

infections after many lockdowns, and the evidence does not support that these were the result

of last-minute socializing or the B117 variant in the UK. These findings underscore the need to

recognize ‘stringency’ as an irrational and counterproductive approach to public health.

Keywords: COVID-19, Lockdown, Infectious Dose, Epidemic Curve, B117

1. Introduction

Not since 1917 has the world grappled with a deadly pandemic like COVID-19

(Rosenwald, 2020). Unlike past outbreaks, however, governments believed they could inhibit

the course of this one with the right policies. One year and several hundred policies later, the

virus persists and has claimed an estimated 2,221,737 lives (Roser & Ritchie, 2020). The overall

impact of these policies on mortality, and which policies, in particular, remain points of debate,

particularly on ideological grounds (Wit, 2020). Yet an objective analysis is sorely needed, for

COVID-19 is unlikely to be the world’s last pandemic, and must therefore be examined

properly, through the lens of epidemiology, to inform better responses in the future.

In the field of epidemiology, the number of persons an infected individual will further

infect is referred to as the “R.” In contrast, “prevalence” refers to the number of people presently

infected. Changes in these metrics can indicate the effectiveness of interventions, but such

changes are often multifactorial, and thus hypotheses must be supported with long-term trend
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 3

analyses (Testa, 2020). In the absence of data, logic and principles are crucial, like the principle

of an infectious dose, which is the number of viral particles required to overcome the initial

immune response and establish infection (Mandavilli, 2020; Hogan, 2020). To minimize

potential exposure to the infectious dose and “flatten the curve” below hospital capacity, experts

recommended two-meter spacing or “social distancing” (NHS, 2021a) and public use of masks.

Later, a novel policy emerged: nationwide quarantines (“lockdown”).

Long-term trends now exist to analyse these measures, and thus this analysis will

investigate the efficacy of the preliminary recommendations to “flatten the curve,” masks and

social distancing, and the novel policy of lockdown. It will be argued that both logic and

evidence support the efficacy of social distancing and masks, but that neither supports the

efficacy of lockdowns. On the contrary, lockdowns appear to have facilitated the spread of

COVID-19, and counterhypotheses suggesting these increases were either the result of a last-

minute rush to socialize, or else the B117 “Kent” variant in the UK, are refuted by the evidence.

2. Avoiding the Infectious Dose: Social Distancing and Masks

2.1 Social Distancing. Despite recent conflation of droplets (>10 μm) with aerosols (<10

μm), COVID-19 is not an aerosol transmitted disease except in limited circumstances (World

Health Organization, 2020); it is primarily transmitted by droplets, which settle within 2 meters

(Sommerstein et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2020). It thus follows that exposure to an infectious

dose is unlikely when spaced 2-meters apart. This was confirmed in a meta-analysis of 172

studies by Chu et al. (2020), who found significant benefits starting at 1 meter and increasing

with further distance (p. 1976). Similarly, a meta-analysis by Ahmed et al (2018) found a

cumulative influenza reduction of ~23% in socially distanced workplaces, and that peaks were

both delayed and reduced, meaning flatter curves. The authors do note, however, that reductions

were inversely proportional to the R and were greater with earlier implementation and when

combined with other measures.

COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 4

2.2 Masks. Masks can be effectively combined with distancing. The use of face covers

as anticontagion is not novel, surgeons have relied on these for centuries (Strasser & Schlich,

2020, p. 19), and though the efficacy depends on the mask, all help reduce droplet transmission

(Van der Sande, Teunis, & Sabel, 2008; Macintyre & Chughtai, 2020), as shown in Figure 1.

No Mask 1 Layer Cloth 2 Layer Cloth Surgical Mask

Speaking
Coughing
Sneezing

Figure 1. High-speed droplet projections with various masks. Adapted from Bahl et al. (2020)

Masks are most effective when combined with distancing, according to Rader et al. (2021)

and Mills et al. (2020), who both also found mask use to correlate with government suggestions,

not mandates. Mandates can still be useful to protect others, but it is unlikely that a few

nonadopters imperil others involuntarily, as asymptomatic transmission is not well supported,

and presymptomatic transmission requires prolonged close contact to transmit an infectious

dose (Pollock, 2020), while the risk of surface transmission is <0.0001% (CDC, 2021). Indeed,

mask and distancing guidance, plus contact tracing, were the common factors in all nations that

eliminated COVID-19. Yet their success was often ascribed to their more draconian policies

(none of which were common between them), like Singapore’s later mask mandate, applicable

to children (Tay, 2020), and New Zealand’s lockdown with only 205 cases (Brockett, 2020).
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 5

3. Without Reason: A Comprehensive Review of Lockdowns

3.1 The Mistake of National Lockdowns. The quarantining of an entire nation all at

once was a mistake. The first “lockdown” in response to COVID-19 was that of Hubei and

several other provinces in China (Woodyatt, 2020), followed by 10 municipalities in the Italian

province of Lodi (Paul, 2020). These were not intended to reduce transmissions within those

regions, but as a cordon sanitaire to contain the disease from spreading to others (Baird, 2020).

Evidently, Spain mistook the purpose, and mass quarantined the whole nation on March 16,

2020 (Schofield, 2020), and this proved infectious, spreading to France and the rest of the

western hemisphere thereafter, no doubt encouraged by the implausible data reported by China.

3.2 Data from China is Unreliable. Simple logic casts doubt on the accuracy of China’s

reported lockdown success. First, COVID-19 is not highly visible, killing chiefly the vulnerable

(Zhou & Belluz, 2021) at an average age of 82.4 (Burgess, 2020), with a presentation nearly

indistinguishable from influenza or pneumonia except in its severity (Sudre et al., 2020, p. 3;

National Health Service [NHS], 2021a). As excess mortality is not meaningfully measured in

China (Li et al., 2019), the only way to determine the R or prevalence is testing, which is

controlled by the government (Niewenhuis, 2021; Walsh, 2020), and thus unverifiable, as the

World Health Organization recently learned (Reuters, 2021). Regardless, China does not appear

to have performed adequate testing, at most conducting ¾ the number of tests as the U.S.

(Statista, 2021; BBC, 2020) for a population 4.5 times larger (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,

2021). These tests were often inaccurate, and results were delayed by as much as 20 days

(Walsh, 2020). Furthermore, local officials are unlikely to have taken and reported tests

honestly to the central government, given a self-reinforcing culture of deception to avoid

retaliation (Palmer, 2020). In short, the data cannot be considered representative of anything,

especially given that no other nation was able to reproduce anything resembling the near-total

plateau in new cases reported by China after lockdown, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. 7-day rolling averages of new COVID-19 cases per million from date of earliest reporting to February 28, 2021.

Adapted from John Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 / Our World in Data (2021)
 As cellular mobility data show high compliance and thus low movement during all

national lockdowns (Apple, 2020; Google, 2020; Fairless, 2020), there is no causal explanation

for the remarkable difference in China. Nor can the supposed swiftness of China’s lockdowns

be a causal factor, as this narrative is fictional. China only implemented lockdowns months

after emergence (Kirchgaessner, 2021) and only after hosting superspreading events like the

Wuhan 40,000-family dinner (Buckley & Myers, 2020), presumably to project normalcy. This

means China did not benefit from early voluntary behaviour changes or shielding, making it

unlikely that COVID-19 never spread to other regions than those few later locked down,

considering it ended up everywhere else on earth. Regardless, given that China quickly restarted

international flights (The Economist, 2020), including to nations where COVID-19 remained

uncontrolled, like Egypt (Egypt Today, 2020) and Iran (Oliphant & Vahdat, 2020), even if they

did manage to avoid a second wave, it cannot be credited to a lockdown that ended months

prior. Curiously, no other nation managed to reproduce that either – allowing full commercial

flights and entry without a second wave. Scientifically speaking, when multiple attempts to

reproduce another experiment’s results with the same causal mechanism consistently yield

opposite results, it is not evidence of the original experimenter’s ‘decisiveness.’

3.3 Declines Are Expected Without Lockdowns. Experiments are generally performed

with an awareness of the factors that can impact results, but few appear to understand the nature

of epidemic curves so as to be able to measure the impact of lockdown. Crucially, all epidemic

curves naturally slow, peak, and then decline monotonically (Santillana et al., 2018; Vizi et al.,

2019), and COVID-19 is no different (Colombo et al. 2020). This is because the number of

infectable individuals declines as the infection spreads (Homburg & Kuhbandner, 2020, p. 1).

A common mistake has been to misunderstand this to mean that a decline will only occur once

whole-population herd immunity has been achieved, and further, to believe this to require 80%

of a nation’s population.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 8

Herd immunity would actually require at most 43% based on differences in mobility and

monotonic R declines (Britton, Ball, & Trapman, 2020), but this applies to national populations

only in regard to cumulative risk of infection. 43% of a whole country is not required for new

cases to decline temporarily, unless infections were equally distributed throughout a population,

which is never the case. Pathogens are typically introduced in one or several localities,

spreading outward fairly contiguously. All surges are thus subnational, meaning a UK surge

caused by a spike in Manchester would require at most 43% of Manchester (~0.37% of the UK

population) to decline, until another spike overshadows that decline. Yet this is still

oversimplified (Lipsitch, 2020) and overlooks various discontinuities, according to Colombo et

al. (2020), who found declines begin once ~15% of a locality has been infected, on average.

Further, SARS-CoV-2 (the causal pathogen of COVID-19) is highly susceptible to temperature,

(Dbouk & Drikakis, 2020), hence all nations experienced the same general decline in new cases

in the summer, before simultaneously rising again in autumn, as shown in Figures 3-4 below.

Figure 3. Logarithmic new cases per million showing global decline (blue shaded region) from late April to August. Australia

only locked down Victoria, Iceland and Sweden never locked down. Whether early lockdowns helped is still an open question,

but clearly lockdown did not cause these declines, as widely believed. Adapted from Our World in Data (2021).
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 9

Figure 4. Logarithmic new cases per million in Sweden. Increase during global decay is offset by delayed second wave.

3.4 Support for Lockdown is Bogus. The above facts reveal the key issues with a study

by Flaxman et al. (2020, p. 260), who attempted to quantify interventional efficacy by begging

the question in assuming that only interventions can cause a decline, before declaring particular

interventions to be effective because of a decline. As Homburg & Kuhbandner (2020) note, this

contradicts the fact that “the effective reproduction number starts at R(0)… and decreases

monotonically” (p.1). The Flaxman model further ascribes declines entirely to the last

intervention implemented, so that if a mask mandate were followed by a lockdown an hour

later, any future decline would be ascribed entirely to lockdown, but if the order were reversed,

then it would be attributed entirely to masks. Since 10/11 observed nations locked down as their

last intervention before an eventual decline, the authors conclude, post hoc, ergo propter hoc,

that lockdowns were causal, and all other interventions, nearly futile. This unravelled once the

11th country, Sweden, experienced a similar decline without lockdown, after which the authors

quickly updated the model to include a “country-specific effectiveness” parameter for the last

intervention implemented. This intimates an interventional ‘potency’ dependant on unknown

country-specific factors (that for some reason only affect an intervention if instituted last).
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 10

Based on this, the authors conclude that declines in the first 10 countries were mostly due

to lockdowns, while a similar decline in Sweden was somehow a result of the same public event

bans the model had just shown to be near useless in the other 10 countries, for ‘country-specific’

reasons. Perhaps the virus was too busy shopping at Ikea, but as stated by Soltesz et al. (2020):

It seems unlikely to be a result of circumstance that lockdown was implemented in the

10 countries in which it had a large effect on Rt, and omitted in the single country in

which the public events ban instead had a similar effect… We conclude that the model

is in effect too flexible, and therefore allows the data to be explained in various ways…

This kind of error—mistaking assumptions for conclusions—is easy to make, and not

especially easy to catch, in Bayesian analysis… (pp. 2-3).

The Flaxman team also published a U.S. study under Unwin et al. (2020), where they

“parametrise Rt as a function of Google mobility data and include an autoregressive term to

capture non-mobility driven behaviour” (p. 2). The term seems similar to their ‘country-

specific’ parameter. One could just as easily ‘parameterize Rt’ as a function of the number of

sandals worn in Scotland and proceed to show, after the seizing of sandals by Police Scotland,

that this reduced the R based on the later (naturally declined) R and the now reduced number of

sandals. Any differences between Scotland and other, still sandal-ridden nations could then be

explained with a term to ‘capture non-infectious sandal driven’ factors. The only difference is

that sandals are overtly absurd, whereas mobility can falsely pass for being causal. But it is

exposure to an infectious dose that is causal, and so it is erroneous to imply all mobility carries

equal risk. A jog around the park is not the same as the attendance of a football match, nor are

all persons equally susceptible. Indeed, Colombo et al. (2020), after running the Flaxman model

code, found “once the unrealistic assumption of no individual variation in susceptibility or

connectivity is relaxed, the model does not support their estimate that lockdown reduced the

case reproduction number R by 81%” (p. 3).

COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 11

Pei, Kandula, and Shaman (2020) also built a model upon unrealistic assumptions, not so

much to measure the effectiveness of lockdown as the number of lives lost by delays in

mandating “social distancing,” which the authors mistook to be a euphemism for lockdown.

While the production of a counterfactual body count seems far from unbiased, it is this study’s

faulty methodology that is of interest here. First, despite relying on cellular mobility data

available since January 2020 to observe post-lockdown mobility, the authors chose “the 2011-

2015 5-Year ACS Commuting Flows data from US census survey to prescribe the inter-county

movement in the transmission model prior to March 15, 2020, before broad control measures

were announced” (p. 6). It is unclear why the authors chose data unreflective of an informed

public, but the result is a specious picture of an oblivious populace hurdling toward oblivion

and a complete standstill when so ordered by a government.

The authors do not seem to notice that the government they assume will act is just made

up of people from the same population. There is no sense in assuming officials will act on behalf

of their population with no additional incentive, if the members of that population, who could

not have any greater incentive than not dying, would all do nothing. Indeed, it is the simplest

principle, that all intelligent creatures, in the face of danger, modify their behaviour (Darwin,

1871; Mobbs et al., 2015, p. 55; Kennedy et al., 2020, p. 732), but the authors fail to see it.

They also fail to see the problem with modelling a population wholly unresponsive to a major

threat to their health, but who suddenly respond to government mandates backed by the threat

of bodily harm, as all commands ultimately are (Stumpff-Morrison, 2016; Friedersdorf, 2016).

In any case, they combine this inapposite data with the assumption that lockdowns yield a 25%

reduction in contact, and that all contact is equally likely to cause infection. They thus conclude

from circularity that lockdowns are so effective that considerable lives would have been saved

if mandated earlier, based entirely on a model programmed from the start to assume lockdowns

reduce transmissions by a factor of 25%, and that nothing would have changed otherwise.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 12

Also assuming that nothing would have changed otherwise, numerous unreviewed studies

and media reports have repeatedly credited lockdowns with any and all declines. They do not

seem to realize that the average incubation period of COVID-19 is 4-6 days (NHS Scotland,

2021). For lockdown to have been causal, new cases should have fallen after 4-9 days based on

a maximum of 3 days for test results (NHS, 2021b), and prevalence after 14-16 days based on

an average course of ~10 days (NHS Scotland, 2021). For later declines to be a result of

lockdown, populations would need to have spontaneously started following the rules after

having previously ignored them – all at the same time and without any apparent cause. In many

cases, the declines ascribed to lockdowns began well before them (Wood, 2020; Spector, 2020,

para. 7), as with the decline ascribed to lockdown by Dehning et al. (2020), which Kuhbandner,

Homburg, Walach, and Hockertz (2020) show started well before lockdown. Alfano and

Ercolano (2020) find declines in the right timeframe but only by using feasible generalized least

squares to estimate potential ‘region-specific’ unknowns, much like Flaxman et al. (2020).

Only Lurie, Silva, Yorlets, Tao, and Chan (2020) appear to have avoided the problems

associated with searching for declines within the standard incubation period. In this study, the

authors wrongly declare lockdowns effective upon finding that, while the time for infections to

double slowed naturally in all U.S. states, those with lockdown had a slower median time

overall. The issues begin with the authors’ decision to compare the change in rates before and

after lockdowns for the 45 states that implemented them before April 30 with the change in

rates of the five states that did not lock down 21 days from when they reported 100 cases. For

many states, the authors only observed 9 days post lockdown, and ‘project’ their way to the

conclusion that some of these states would double after timeframes like 70-days after lockdown.

Some of the projected ranges reveal massive standard deviations (for instance, the range given

for Wyoming to double after lockdown is 8.97–193.10 days) to the point where it is clear the

authors do not know anything about those states with any reasonable degree of certainty.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 13

Regardless the authors then chose to compare medians with a pool of only five non-

lockdown states, which corresponds to the change in doubling time of Iowa. Not only is this

median ~3.35 times lower than the mean, but comparing medians effectively means this study

is just a comparison of Iowa early in its epidemic curve with Wisconsin near the end of its

curve. Yet the biggest defect was the authors’ decision to start measuring the change in doubling

time for lockdown states from the 15th day of lockdown, claiming it takes 14 days for policies

to impact the R. Turns out, they did not avoid the issues associated with incubation after all.

Nor did they exclude this period but added it to the non-lockdown period. This not only allowed

more time and thus more natural deceleration so as to inflate the pre/post-lockdown differences,

but also concealed the sharp increases in transmissions caused by lockdown...

3.5 Lockdowns Often Increased Infections, or Else Made No Difference. Examining

correlations between the distribution of time to diagnosis as shown in Figure 5 and the start of

lockdowns does reveal a pattern - of increased infections as shown in Figures 6-9.

Figure 5. Distribution of times to diagnosis. Cases prior to 2 days likely represent tests based on contact tracing. Adapted from

Parker (2020). Up to 3 days can be added for PCR results and reporting delays if results are not antedated when reported.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 14

Figure 6. UK daily new cases per million showing increases (red) 7 days after lockdown. Blue arrows show the flattening
before lockdown, Wood (2020) has statistically proven this to be a decline prior to lockdown. Adapted from John Hopkins
CSSE COVID-19 / Our World in Data (2021).

Figure 7. FR daily new cases per million showing increases in red starting ~4 days into lockdown. Although cases appear to
decline after lockdown, the blue arrows show turning point of flattening starting before lockdown, with a massive spike only
after lockdown. Adapted from John Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 / Our World in Data (2021).
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 15

Figure 8. IT daily new cases per million showing increases (red) ~5 days after lockdown. Again, rapid flattening had already
begun before lockdown. Adapted from John Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 / Our World in Data (2021).

Figure 9. GR daily new cases per million. Increases (red) begin ~3 days after each tightening of restrictions (blue shaded
backgrounds, darker means tightening restrictions). This seems early, but according to West et al. (2020), GR benefits from a
real-time reporting system directly to Robert Koch Institute (RKI) whose regular updates show antedated cases based on date
of onset. Purple arrows show spikes continue despite continuation of lockdown (far right reduced only from highly strict
tightening during February). Adapted from John Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 / Our World in Data (2021).
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 16

In addition to this analysis, a number of studies have emerged concluding lockdowns

were at best ineffective, including Hunter, Colón-González, Brainard, and Rushton (2020),

Meunier (2020), Bendavid, Oh, Bhattacharya, and Ioannidis (2021), Chin, Ioannidis, Tanner,

and Cripps (2020), Kepp and Bjornskov (2021), Gibson (2020), Kuhbandner et al. (2020),

Bhalla (2020), Savaris et al. (2021), and Berry, Fowler, Glazer, Handel-Meyer, and MacMillen

(2021). A closer examination reveals that many noted increases too. Hunter et al. (2020) for

instance noted, “[s]urprisingly, stay-home measures showed a positive association with cases...

as the number of lock-down days increased, so did the number of cases” (p. 8). Meunier (2020)

finds similar decays in all areas regardless of lockdown, but notes, “[c]omparison of pre and

post lockdown observations reveals a counter-intuitive slowdown in the decay of the epidemic

after lockdown” (p. 6). The ZOE symptom app also shows prior decays slow, but the creators

note that some areas outright increased after lockdown:

The increases over the last month are hard to explain, given that the Midlands has had

many areas under tight restrictions for months… Areas that were under lighter Tier 1

restrictions in October… such as the South East, South West and East of England -

showed initial rises during the first two weeks of lockdown (Spector, 2020, para. 9).

Bendavid et al. (2021) observes that “[i]n France, for example, the effect of [more

restrictive measures] was +7% (95% CI: -5%-19%) when compared with Sweden and + 13%

(-12% – 38%) when compared with South Korea (positive means pro-contagion)” (p. 1). Going

even further, Bhalla (2020) concludes that lockdowns were not just ineffective, 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” (p. 2). Supporting all of these

findings, the business analytics firm TrendMacro, while clearly having an interest in re-

openings, did legitimately document lockdown-associated increases in the U.S., writing:

COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 17

[I]t turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with

longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the

harshest lockdowns…had the heaviest caseloads… the surprising negative correlation,

while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest

caseloads. (Luskin, 2020, p. 1).

These finding were not unique to studies concluding lockdowns are ineffective either.

Alfano and Ercolano (2020), for instance, noted:

When looking at the European subsample, the situation is slightly different...

Here Lockdown is positive, suggesting that countries that implemented the lockdown

have, on average, more New Cases than in countries that did not (p. 3).

The authors suspected high pre-lockdown prevalence to be the issue. Vinceti et al. (2020)

seems to capture this too, finding reduced times to peak in areas of high pre-lockdown

prevalence. This appears to be the opposite of “flattening the curve,” which is supported by

Iacobucci (2020), who found that post-lockdown increases in the UK were most pronounced in

areas of high prevalence prior.

These increases should not actually be so surprising, given that the majority of infections

occur within homes (Grijalva et al., 2020, p. 1631; Thompson et al., 2020, p. 7;). The risk of

transmission in these settings (homes, barracks, etc.) is typically referred to as the ‘secondary

attack rate’ (Halloran, 2005; Dicker, Coronado, Koo, & Parrish, 2021, p. 191), which is the

predominant way that many pathogens spread once introduced in a population. That SARS-

CoV-2 predominantly spreads in homes is strongly supported by the contact tracing data

provided by Public Health England (PHE) to the Royal Society, shown in Figure 10 below.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 18

Figure 10. UK contact tracing data. 11/9 (just after 11/5 lockdown) shows decrease in ‘leisure/community’
exceeded by household increase. Adapted from Anderson, Vegvari, Maddren, & Baggaley (2020, p. 10).

It is therefore reasonable to suspect that decreases in the primary attack rate may be offset

or exceeded by increases in the secondary attack rate, as longer durations of contact mean a

higher chance of exposure to an infectious dose, and it is unlikely that individuals distance or

wear masks at home. Hence, during the lockdown of New York City, 66% of patients had not

left their home (Higgins-Dunn, 2020). Despite all this, the Imperial College team who advised

the UK into repeated lockdowns proposed a novel explanation for the increases in the UK.

3.5.1 First Counterhypothesis: The Rush. The counterhypothesis proposed by Imperial

College was that increased infections must have been the result of people rushing to meet with

acquaintances just before lockdown (Manthorpe, 2020). The latter part of that theory suggests

awareness of the correlation with the start of lockdown, but it is curious they suspected frivolous

socialization, and not a rush to stock up on supplies or travel home. This is like believing that

people who burned in a building must have rushed in to use the vending machines while they

still could upon hearing the fire alarm. Regardless, the mobility data, shown in Figure 8, shows

only inconsequential upticks in movement, and thus refutes this ‘the rush’ hypothesis.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 19

Lockdown
5/11–2/12

Figure 9. UK mobility. Prelockdown uptick is inconsequential. Adapted from Google (2020).

3.5.2 Second Counterhypothesis: B117 “Kent” Variant. Public Health England (PHE)

finally conceded that mobility data did not support “the rush” hypothesis and proposed instead

that a variant, dubbed B117, was at issue. According to their website, “[g]enetic evidence

suggests this variant emerged in September 2020 and then circulated at very low levels in the

population until mid-November” (PHE, 2021, para. 9). This explanation disproves the theory.

Based on Bradford Hill Causation criteria, it cannot be that B117 was causal only after

lockdown. The causal event was clearly lockdown. This does not suggest B117 is not more

transmissible, but that it makes no difference, because unless the mutation enabled motility so

as to allow the virus to move into homes on its own, infections could only have increased if

greater durations of intrahousehold contact outweighed reductions in the number of brief

contacts. In fact, a local health department in Ireland outright explained that “single cases are

rapidly leading to whole household outbreaks” (Danaher, 2021), though they believed this

unique to B117. In contrast, WHO COVID-19 Technical Lead Maria Van Kerkhove explained

“sharp increases” were seen “before these variants were circulating” believing this to support

‘the rush’ hypothesis (Hacker, 2021). But these were in homes, and the same thing occurred

again in the UK after its third lockdown (Lovett, 2021). That there were even ‘third’ lockdowns

after all this is an indication of how badly governments lost sight of their intended purpose.
COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 20

4. Discussion and Conclusion

What began as an idea that governments could help their citizens by following the science

and using their collective resources to “flatten the curve” quickly disintegrated into a fixation

with restrictions, after it was naively believed that China’s results were accurate, and that the

difference in results must have been the west’s values. In this way, ‘liberty’ became

synonymous with ‘libertine,’ as politics and mass hysteria superseded basic epistemic standards

(Winsberg, Brennan, & Surprenant, 2020). The results were the abandonment of scientifically

supported measures like masks and distancing in favour of perpetual lockdown, among further

irrational ‘restrictions’ like curfews, as if it made any sense to force more people into a store in

less time to reduce ‘contact.’ As this analysis has shown, this approach, and lockdowns in

particular, worsened the spread of COVID-19, independent of the immense collateral damage.

It is simply unreasonable to believe, against all of the evidence reviewed here, that the UK

would have fared worse in mortality than it already has (as the worst in the world), had it not

locked down more than any other nation, while Sweden and Iceland would have both somehow

done even better if they had locked down. It may be that lockdowns are of some use if

implemented early, but if an effective test and trace system existed so as to know prevalence

were low, then combined with masks and distancing, there would be no reason to lockdown. In

sum, this analysis closes with the same conclusion as four epidemiologists who, in the wake of

the 2006 U.S. Pandemic Influenza Plan, anticipated this kind of policy disaster:

There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement

by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to

slow the spread … The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so

extreme … that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious

consideration (Inglesby, Nuzzo, O’Toole, & Henderson, 2006, p. 371).

COVID-19 POLICY MEASURES 21

As far as historical observations are concerned, the frankly irrational approach of

subjecting an already devastated and terrified populace to mass confinement as a means of

somehow controlling an infection will surely be recorded as an aberration. Just how long it

takes the world to recognize this is anyone’s guess, much like the ‘science’ that led to the

implementation of these measures in the first place.

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