By: John Fund – nationalreview.com – April 11, 2022

Just as you suspected all along.

The report card on how individual states handled the Covid pandemic is in. States that avoided draconian lockdowns and practiced common sense fared well. States with breast-beating moralizers as governors — New York’s Andrew Cuomo, California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker, and New Jersey’s Phil Murphy — were on the bottom of the heap even though the media celebrated their lockdowns at the time.

The study was by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, which publishes a news digest that I contribute to. Its authors include Casey Mulligan, a professor at the University of Chicago and the chief economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2018 to 2019. It has been published as a working paper by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research.

Its analysis found that 13 Republican-led states were among the top 15 in the study. It examined three metrics: (1) health (the death rate in each state from Covid, adjusting for co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes); (2) the economy (unemployment and growth of output in each state); and (3) education (number of days that schools remained open).

“We hope the results of this study will persuade governors not to close schools and businesses the next time we have a new virus variant,” Stephen Moore, co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, told me.

The main takeaway? Strict lockdowns of businesses were a catastrophic mistake and even worse was the shutting down of schools. The enactment in many states of stringent travel, vocation, and dining restrictions had no correlation with lower death totals.

Take Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis was roasted for not locking down during Covid, and irresponsibly called “Governor Death Sentence” for supposedly putting the health of millions at risk.

The actual numbers show that Florida, which has a much larger senior population, ranks sixth out of 50 states. Recall that when the Sunshine State decided, relatively soon after the first lockdowns, to open up, most of the commentariat derided the decision as cruel and destructive.

The study puts Florida’s death rate as 28th out of 50, almost the same as the death rate in California, which had far more stringent lockdowns and school closures. But Florida ranks third for the least education loss and 13th in economic performance. California ranks 47th overall because its shutdowns crushed the economy (40th) and in-person schools (50th).

“Masking kids and keeping them out of schools set back kids’ academic and social development for years, and we knew very early on that kids would likely not suffer severe illness from Covid, yet liberals fought to keep kids out of schools, which went contrary to the very science they claimed to be following,” stated CUP president Phil Kerpen regarding the study.

New Jersey, New York, and California were among the worst in all three categories — mortality, the economy, and education. Utah, Nebraska, and Vermont were leaders in all three categories.

The conclusion of the study is that it was a tragic mistake to depart from previous pandemic policies, which had focused on protecting the most vulnerable, and instead roll out the experimental strategy of forced mass lockdowns of the healthy.

The government’s most effective role during the height of the pandemic was racing to find vaccines and treatments and giving citizens the most accurate and up-to-date information about risks and how to keep themselves, their families, their employees, and their customers healthy.

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Source: Study: Coronavirus Lockdowns Failed Policies | National Review