A yet-to-be-peer-approved article by three economists kicks off the debate once again, claiming that COVID-19 quarantines have hardly reduced deaths, but are at a huge cost to society.
While this research is important to quarantine opponents, many independent public health experts (health professionals, not economists) highlighted the problems in the study and said the findings should be viewed with great skepticism.
Commenting on different parts of the article, the scientists described this report in many different ways, from “strange” and “problematic” to “fundamental to flawed.”
Economists from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Institute for Global Health and Business Studies, came to their findings by conducting a meta-analysis of 34 previously published studies. The controversial report, which has yet to be peer-reviewed or officially published, concluded that the first stay-at-home quarantines in the US and Europe reduced COVID-related deaths by just 0.2 percent. They also argued that closing non-essential workplaces was “ineffective, only reducing the COVID-19 death rate by an average of 2.9 percent.” The article states that quarantine measures bring “enormous economic and social costs”.
However, many scientists question the selection of studies used in this meta-analysis, as well as how much “weight” the researchers gave to some studies. First of all, it is noted that this article ignores research on disease transmission, focusing instead on other statistical analyzes of mortality used by economics.
If you’re researching a virus and how it kills people, disease transmission is certainly a pretty important piece of data to consider. For example, it is very important to understand that calls to stay at home will have a delayed effect: Hospitalizations and deaths will not decrease as soon as the quarantine begins, but it will be possible to decrease within two or more weeks. This study fails to recognize this important problem, experts argue.
Associate Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, Dr. Seth Flaxman: “It’s like asking a group of new smokers, wanting to know if smoking causes cancer: Did you get cancer the day before you started smoking? What about the next day? Frankly, if we did that, we would conclude that smoking has nothing to do with cancer, but We would have ignored basic science,” he says.
Flaxman continues: “The science of disease and its causes is complex and contains many surprises to us, but there are appropriate methods and inappropriate methods for studying it. This study deliberately excludes all studies that rely on epidemiology – that is, the science of disease. ”
The article also has some issues with the definition of “isolation”, which the researchers define as any “non-drug forced intervention”. Samir Bhatt, Professor of Statistics and Public Health at Imperial College London, said: “This will make the policy of wearing masks a quarantine. It is strange that a meta-analysis used a definition that contradicts the dictionary definition.”
It should also be noted that no two countries, where different governments have taken significantly different approaches, have been quarantined in the same way.
Many scientists agree that social restrictions are effective in helping slow the transmission of COVID-19, but perhaps not as effective as initially thought. However, measuring the effects of quarantine is extremely difficult and requires complex investigations…
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