The lockdowns? Economic disasters and few health benefits
Numbers, comparisons and insights on the pandemic and lockdown. Giuseppe Liturri's analysis
Are the measures restricting certain economic activities and personal freedoms effective for the purpose of containing infections, pressure on the health system and victims? And if so, how much?
And an overall analysis of the costs incurred by the community on the first front leads to the conclusion that the benefits obtained on the second front are actually higher?
A month ago, the prestigious newspaper Wall Street Journal began to sow some doubts in the granite certainties, which, in two editorials, headlined: " The lockdowns were not worth it " and " Lessons from a long year of Covid" . The first argued that the lockdowns have had modest effects on containing the epidemic and enormous disastrous effects on the economy and on people's lives. “ No government has yet produced a cost-benefit analysis to justify the restrictive measures, because they know what the result would show” , concluded the author Philippe Lemoine. In the other editorial, unsigned and therefore directly attributable to the editorial direction of the newspaper, it was stated that " the lockdown made the pain of the pandemic far worse than necessary " and concluded that the " lockdown is an ideological battle whose excesses we will pay for generations ”, referring to the damage related to closed production activities, the accumulation of other untreated pathologies and the substantial closure of all school activities.
Corriere della Sera even arrived on Friday 9, which until then had wasted rivers of ink in acting as a sounding board for the mantra of closures without ifs and buts, making a comparison between the data of Lombardy and those of the autonomous community of Madrid. On the one hand curfew and red zones, on the other all open until 11pm, albeit with mobility restrictions between some municipalities, and data of victims and infections even slightly lower in Spain than in Italy.
But these international comparisons lend themselves to a thousand distinctions, because the variables involved that condition the final outcome are very numerous. Demographics, characteristics of the health system, type of production activities involved in the lockdown. In short, it is difficult to have a perfect “counterfactual” – as experts identify a situation comparable to the one to be examined in order to grasp the differences – and it is easy to make the mistake of considering one event to be the effect of another only because it occurred later. The classic “ post hoc ergo propter hoc ”.
This risk is lower if we refer to the research published on April 2 by the newspaper El Pais . In that article we talk about the "economic miracle" and the hard battle waged by Mrs. Isabel Diaz Ayuso, President of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, not to destroy the economy and, at the same time, not to jeopardize health. While maintaining strict measures relating to the movement outside the Community and some municipalities with particularly high rates of contagion, hotels, restaurants and other recreational and cultural activities have not suffered any restrictions, except for the hour limit of 11 pm. Ayuso has become the idol of hoteliers and restaurateurs. Its supporters highlight the fruits of its commitment to maintaining a balance between economy and health: more jobs, happy hoteliers and consumers, and a breath of fresh air in the midst of general catastrophe.
But there is more. The limits to move outside the Autonomous Community – a rather large administrative entity that includes Provinces and Municipalities – have led residents to pour their entire spending capacity within the regional perimeter. So instead of traveling to exotic destinations or to London, the people of Madrid crowded terraces and clubs especially during the Holy Week.
" Isolation is profitable, " headlined El Pais . Consumption with credit cards increased between December and February by almost 35% compared to the same period of the previous year, according to data from the BBVA bank. While the rest of Spain remained at a 5% increase. A broader survey by the National Statistics Institute sees retail trade in the Community of Madrid down 1.5% in February compared to the same month in 2020. A miracle compared to the national average of -9.4% and by far the best compared to all other Spanish Autonomous Communities.
All this despite the fact that Madrid suffered from the substantial shutdown of the Barajas airport, which accounts for 10% of the regional GDP, and the stop to congress activity, in which Madrid is the third city in the world, with obvious repercussions on unemployment. . But, thanks to the Ayuso measures, the Madrid region presents, after the Balearic Islands, the best data for the reduction in layoffs.
Has all this led to a massacre from a health point of view? Apparently not. The trend of cases as of April 16 in the Community of Madrid is largely comparable to that of the other regions, with new cases in the last 14 days at 372 per 100,000 inhabitants, certainly higher than the national average of about 213 cases, but certainly manageable. and similar to that of other regions such as Navarre and the Basque Country.
Just to have a term of comparison, in Puglia, the red zone since 12 March with non-food shops closed, the equivalent figure stood at 543 cases on 13 April, with the provinces of Bari, Foggia and Taranto between 600 and 700 ( foundation data Gimbe ). Not to mention the victims: since the beginning of March, one day in Italy is enough to record those that Spain has in an entire week. For days, more victims have been registered in Puglia than the whole of Spain.
Numbers that should make us think, especially politicians, from which it would be legitimate to expect a skilful analysis of all the data relating to the effectiveness of the measures they have adopted and a wise reconciliation of costs and benefits relating to all effects, none excluded. , of their choices.
Someone, especially in Puglia, should explain why, after four weeks of destruction of the retail and catering trade and with semi-deserted schools, there are more than double infections in the Madrid region, which has everything open until 11pm?
We voted them precisely for this, otherwise it would be enough to leave the government of the country to a technical-scientific committee with their algorithms. Indeed, only the latter would suffice.
(updated and expanded version of an article published in the newspaper La Verità)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/lockdown-pandemia/ on Sat, 17 Apr 2021 16:22:35 +0000.