Climate change and Covid Redux

April 13, 2022. I made mention of this uncanny contrast and compare of public policy on climate change and Covid more than a year ago, see here and here. Today's Wall Street Journal generally echoes my claims, i.e., the policies were worse than the virus.

What Climate Change Has in Common With Covid - WSJ.pdf

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Key opening graphs:

Covid and global warming, two of the century’s biggest issues so far, have an unappreciated similarity: Both have triggered extreme overreactions by policy makers. The most harshly restrictive Covid policies have recently collapsed. With any luck, we’ll soon be able to say the same about over-the-top climate policies.

Governments often go overboard when responding to new threats, and policy makers’ response to Covid mirrored their continuing overreaction to global warming. In both cases they have failed to pursue mitigation strategies that minimize total harm to society. The initial policy response to Covid caused social and economic harms that, in the aggregate, proved worse than the disease itself. Likewise, discussions about the total harm from rising global temperatures often ignore the costs associated with preventing warming.

Were this not enough, this "final report" on states' responses to the Coronavirus reaffirms the folly of lockdowns and school closings to supposedly reduce the infections, hospitalizations and mortality rates -- "two weeks to flatten the curve" that has extended more than two years -- at the expense of GDP, mental health, jobs, labor force participation, small business closings, loan defaults, empty buildings and stable prices, i.e., prosperity. Full report follows immeditaely below, followed by the introduction to the report, with its key graphic summary of states' performance.

https_s.wsj.net_public_resources_documents_NBERcovidstudy.pdf

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Introduction

Modern economies like the United States spend considerable resources on health, ranging from hospitals to drugs, to device manufacturing to at-home care. With health very high among the American population’s priorities, it is no surprise that government officials and most citizens were willing to sacrifice income and some of their daily routines and normal freedoms in order to significantly reduce the burden of this new disease.

The COVID-19 pandemic was distinct from other previous health pandemics in the degree to which we saw government interventions in the economy and suspension of individual freedoms – including policies such as lockdowns, curfews, mask and vaccine mandates, mandatory business closures, school shutdowns, and so on.

After the first several months of the pandemic, decisions about the most effective policies to balance health risks and allowing businesses to stay open and workers to go to work, as well as keeping schools, stores, churches and parks open and under what conditions were left to the 50 states. The purpose of this paper is to measure and compare the different economic and health trajectories across the 50 states and DC.

Our measures fall into three categories: the economy, education, and mortality. For economic performance we used two measures: unemployment and GDP by state. For education we used a single metric: the Burbio cumulative in-person instruction percentage for the complete 2020-2021 school year, with hybrid instruction weighted half. For mortality we used two measures: COVID-associated deaths reported to the CDC and all-cause excess mortality.

Of course, even without a pandemic, states populations are heterogeneous and their economies emphasize different industries. And because the pandemic had a much more negative effect on economic output in some industries (such as entertainment, energy production, mining, hotels and food), we adjust unemployment and GDP changes for industry composition. We adjust COVID mortality (through March 5, 2022) for age and “metabolic health,” by which we mean the pre-pandemic prevalence of obesity and diabetes – as these are highly correlated with higher death rates from the virus. Economy and schooling are positively correlated (correlation coefficient = 0.43), which suggests a relationship between the willingness of the population (or its politicians) to resume normal activity in business and school. MT, SD, NE, and UT are the states highest on the economy score and also among only seven states to exceed 85 percent open schools. The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero, which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so.

We should note that Hawaii, as an isolated island, stands out as a special case. It ranks last on the economic index and sixth from last on schooling. As of March 2022, it ranks first on health. Understood in the context of island nations such as Australia and New Zealand, the experience of HI suggests that island locations can, by sustaining significant economic losses, reduce mortality for a year or more. (Australia and New Zealand saw higher outbreaks in later stages of the virus spread.) Interestingly, Maine opened its schools at almost triple the rate as Hawaii did and was able to achieve a health score almost as high.

The economy and education components were likely influenced by decisions made by policymakers, but it is unclear if that is the case for the mortality component. One possible exception is nursing home policies, which may explain why several states, especially New York and New Jersey, performed poorly on mortality metrics. A recent comprehensive global review by Heneghan, et. al. (2021) concluded that COVID-19 disproportionately occurred in nursing homes. Because the states that were transferring COVID patients from hospitals to nursing homes also tended to systematically underreport nursing home deaths so this is a difficult question to examine quantitatively.

Using other methods, several studies have also found little health benefit of closing schools or businesses. Several studies find low COVID-19 transmission rates in schools. Herby, Jonung, and Hanke’s (2022) metaanalysis finds that “lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.” Mulligan (2021b) finds that in-person workplaces were often safer, in terms of COVID transmission per person per hour, than households were due to the additional prevention efforts made in workplaces. Several other studies have found that efforts to reduce COVID mortality had costly unintended consequences.

In addition to calculating category-specific indices, we also calculated a single combined score that equally weights the z-scores of the three components and then transforms to a 0-100 scale.