Covid-19: lockdown study by economists is met with skepticism by experts

Covid-19: lockdown study by economists is met with skepticism by experts

According to a study, the corona lockdowns have prevented little or no deaths. Experts are harsh on the analysis.

Experts have criticized the study by three economists on the allegedly very small impact of lockdown measures on the number of deaths in the corona pandemic.

The core statement that lockdowns prevent no or hardly any deaths is “not tenable” from the point of view of the head of the Institute for Health Services Research and Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Marburg, Max Geraedts.

The authors Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung and Steve H. Hanke describe their paper as a so-called meta-study, which summarizes the data from around 30 individual studies and working papers as a kind of overview. There is a wealth of scientifically high-quality studies, “but they were not taken into account on the basis of the selection criteria chosen by the authors,” said Geraedts of the German Press Agency (dpa).

In their paper, Herby and his colleagues come to the conclusion that state-regulated measures worldwide have had little effect compared to recommendations and voluntary changes in behavior by the population: In the first corona wave in spring 2020, the studies examined showed that the Covid -Death rate reduced by prescribed regulations by only 0.2 percent.

The economist Andreas Backhaus from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich analyzed that some of the individual studies examined were “not overly convincing”. However, they received “a very high weight in the meta-analysis, so they drive the overall result,” he tweeted about the US paper.

The study by Herby and his colleagues was not published in any journal, but was published by one of the authors on the homepage of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics at the end of January. “In this way, the authors avoid peer review, one of the most important quality assurance measures in science,” said virologist Friedemann Weber from the University of Giessen. “Self-publishing studies is absolutely unusual and unscientific.”

Source: Stern

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