Study from MIT professors: Targeted lockdowns would save more lives, hurt economy less

Guest Post by Dan Calabrese

I’m not so sure it’s about saving lives anymore, as much as it’s about control and not admitting the other side might be right.

But if you’re interested in saving the most lives and doing the least economic damage, you might be interested in a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which asserts strongly that what we’re doing now is counterproductive – and that there’s a better way forward:

Our MR-SIR model enables a tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy similar to those already developed in the context of the homogeneous-agent SIR models. For baseline parameter values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having stricter lockdown policies on the oldest group.

For example, for the same economic cost (24.3% decline in GDP), optimal semi–targeted or fully-targeted policies reduce mortality from 1.83% to 0.71% (thus, saving 2.7 million lives) relative to optimal uniform policies. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the most vulnerable group both reduces infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups. We also study the impacts of social distancing, the matching technology, the expected arrival time of a vaccine, and testing with or without tracing on optimal policies. Overall, targeted policies that are combined with measures that reduce interactions between groups and increase testing and isolation of the infected can minimize both economic losses and deaths in our model.

The authors of the study are Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov, Iván Werning and Michael D. Whinston. All are professors of economics at MIT, so I eagerly await the efforts of the Lockdown Left to destroy their credibility as they sought to do with Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi.

Even with a targeted lockdown like the one the MIT professors advocate, the economy would take a hit. By their estimate, we might lose 12 percent of GDP under this scenario, as opposed to the 24 percent or more we’re likely to lose with the more universal lockdowns most states have deployed thus far.

It’s seemed intuitive throughout this whole thing that it makes no sense to quarantine healthy people. The rejoinder to that basic observation has been that, with the coronavirus, it’s too hard to know who might be a carrier because asymptomatic people can infect others. Ergo, we lock down everyone, and in the process commit economic suicide while inviting all the other consequences of such a move – alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, depression, family separation and so much else. (Remember when the left was up in arms about “family separation”?)

But does it really make sense to quarantine healthy people because some of them might be asymptomatic carriers? Is it really more effective than simple safety precautions like distancing, disinfecting and the use of masks and gloves?

Now that the curve has clearly flattened, which we were told was the initial objective of the lockdown, there is no reason not to trust people to willingly engage in the behaviors we’ve all become very familiar with by now. Over the short term, you would see more infections this way than you would keeping everyone locked down. But it would be statistically insignificant, and if you continue to shelter the highest-risk populations, the death rate from these infections would be exceedingly low.

What’s more, you further the goal of herd immunity, the lack of which is what made this novel coronavirus such a big problem in the first place.

I’m sure someone will come up with a reason not to believe these MIT professors, just as they come up with reasons not to believe emergency room doctors. Keeping everyone locked down for as long as possible serves the interest of politicians who get off on the power, and who like the idea of dangling a mandatory vaccine as the only thing that can allow us out again.

But if you can look and listen past the social media shamers with their #StayTheF***Home hashtags, you might consider there are better ways of doing what we’re trying to do.

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