Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: "We Will Never Do Any of These Lockdowns Again"

DeSantis had the brilliant idea, which did not occur to the Democrat governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, of protecting people in nursing homes, instead of seeding the nursing homes with disease vectors to kill them all.

Video below.

Meanwhile, a study reported in the Wall Street Journal says that lockdowns did not slow the spread of coronavirus, but only caused damage to our economy and our childrens' education.

And caused a few suicides along the way, I'm sure.

Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health--first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in. Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn't contain the disease's spread and reopening it didn't unleash a second wave of infections.

Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well-documented long-term public-health consequences beyond Covid, imposing them appears to have been a large policy error. At the beginning, when little was known, officials acted in ways they thought prudent. But now evidence proves that lockdowns were an expensive treatment with serious side effects and no benefit to society.

TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project. We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a "Social Distancing Index."

Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown--which range from April 5 to April 18--it 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--the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts--had the heaviest caseloads.

It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.

Never Do Any of These Lockdowns Again"&bodytext=DeSantis had the brilliant idea, which did not occur to the Democrat governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, of protecting people in nursing homes, instead of seeding the nursing homes with disease vectors to kill them all....&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 02:00 PM

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