Do the Most Severe Lockdowns Coincide to the Highest COVID-19 Death Rates?
Saturday May 16, 2020
The organization Our World in Data is running an article on the severity of government lockdown policies used to deal with the Covid-19 disease, “How Are Governments Responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic?”. It is shows rankings of the severity (“stringency”) on nine measures of lockdown policies throughout the world; it also addresses testing and tracking. A click-able global map showing overall lockdown severity ratings for individual countries can be found here.
The measures Our World in Data uses to calibrate lockdowns are the following: the severity or comprehensiveness of school closures, work closures, cancelling public events, restrictions on public gathering, staying at home, restricting public transport, and limiting internal & international travel. Click on any country and see the 0-100 overall score. Some of the scores may or may not conform to your impression of the government’s policy based on what you are reading; I took their ratings as given for the purposes of my analysis, below.
Unfortunately, the article did not also asses the success of these policies. I e-mailed Our World in Data asking them to do so; I have received no response.
Thus, I looked at Our World in Data’s analysis on confirmed Covid-19 deaths per million in 17 selected countries.
The table below shows what I found.
read on...
