Six Years After '15 Days To Slow The Spread,' The Data Proves COVID Policies Were A Historic Failure

It's now been six full years since "15 Days to Slow the Spread" changed the world. 

In one of the worst policy decisions in US history, the expert class, led by Anthony Fauci, advised President Trump to shut down the country to stop a highly infectious respiratory virus. This decision was made in part due to misinformation from the World Health Organization, which had just breathlessly reported that 3.4 percent of people who got COVID would die. The actual number was closer to 0.25-0.35 percent, and highly age stratified. Off by just 93 percent, but who's counting? 

China had claimed it had stopped COVID in its tracks, after posting videos of residents supposedly falling down on the street dead from a respiratory virus. Somehow, none of this prevented outsiders from trusting information coming out of China. 

Then 15 days turned into 30 days, turned into 45 days, turned into years of rolling lockdowns. A whole host of other policies followed; mask mandates, vaccine passports, 25 percent capacity limits, curfews, outdoor masking, double masking, triple masking, closing beaches, skate parks, schools, visitation limits, nurses doing choreographed TikTok dances while lecturing the public…you name it, we did it.

Presumably, with all these restrictions, there would be some evidence or data showing that these policies had some level of effectiveness in reducing the most important metric: COVID-related deaths. Right? And yet, six years later, what do we have? Nothing. And zero accountability for the world-changing fallout that happened as a result.

The Lincoln Memorial as lights surround the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during a Covid-19 memorial to lives lost on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Jan. 19, 2021. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions Made No Impact On COVID Deaths

Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions cover the vast majority of our COVID policies, from lockdowns to mask mandates to business restrictions and school closures. Essentially, the restrictions imposed because "experts" told us they would prevent the spread of the virus and "save lives."

If that were true, it would be easy to identify, right? Surely, some of the most draconian curbs on individual liberty and freedom in the modern world must show up in the data, somewhere, no? 

Well, researchers studied this question, using global COVID outcome from Our World in Data, and information on policy from the University of Oxford to compare outcomes in a sample covering 98 percent of the world's population. This examination covered a significant time period when restrictions were most widespread and likely to have an impact, July 2020-September 2021. And importantly, they focused on COVID-related deaths, not infections. 

As they explain, "Although studies on infections provide important insights on how NPIs affect the disease dynamics, they cannot adequately evaluate the main aim of avoiding fatalities. Furthermore, underreporting of infections may be more pronounced than for fatalities.  

"Second, former investigations based on data of the first half of 2020 may be subject to underreporting and missing timeliness of reporting during the first viral outbreak. Third, the identification of robust treatment effects of NPIs is difficult based on the first wave because of the low variation in treatment type and treatment timing across countries in early 2020."

To find an answer to the all-important question, how effective were NPIs at saving lives, they applied a "generalized synthetic control (GSC) method" to each individual intervention, while also "controlling for the remaining NPIs, weather conditions, vaccinations, and NPI-residualized COVID-19 cases. This mitigates the influence of selection into treatment and allows to model flexible post-treatment trajectories."

Put simply, this methodology allowed them to avoid the pitfalls that come from cherry-picking data and selection bias. 

So that's how they did it and how they avoided incorporating bias into the data. But what were the results? To put it mildly, quite literally not one of the non-pharmaceutical interventions we tried had any impact whatsoever on COVID deaths.

"We observe that none of the strictly implemented NPIs under investigation had a substantial and consistent effect on COVID-19-attributed deaths over time," they write. "None of the post-treatment trajectories differs significantly from the null-line."

Just read that again. None of the policies had a substantial and consistent effect on COVID-attributed deaths over time. This is from July 2020-September 2021, the time period when the vast majority of the world was getting infected with COVID and subject to non-pharmaceutical interventions. And none of them worked. They weren't done excoriating our moronic response to the pandemic.

"Even when comparing the post-treatment trajectories to the linear extrapolation of the 35-days pre-treatment period, only strict stay-at-home requirements produce borderline-significant differences. We only observe a tentative change in the trend of COVID-19-related deaths starting around 30 days after strict stay-at-home rules have been introduced, but this does not exert a statistically significant effect. Similarly, we observe a tentative change in the trend of COVID-19-related fatalities 30 days after workplaces have been closed. However, the effects are not statistically different from zero."

Again, to put it simply, there is no statistically significant effect on COVID deaths, even from stay at home orders or closing workplaces. Whatever marginal change in outcomes existed, it was not functionally different from zero. Nothing. Not masks, not lockdowns, not school closures, not business closures. Zero impact or benefit whatsoever. 

As the researchers summarized, "We do not find substantial and consistent COVID-19-related fatality-reducing effects of any NPI under investigation."

It doesn't get more crystal clear than that. And here's how this data looks visually. The dashed line in these images reflects a predicted outcome if the government policy had no benefit. A beneficial outcome would lead to the solid black line dipping below the dashed projection. Essentially, if these policies worked, there would be a consistent trend below the dashed line. Instead, what do we see? No impact whatsoever.

Mader S and Rüttenauer T (2022) The Effects of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions on COVID-19 Mortality: A Generalized Synthetic Control Approach Across 169 Countries. Front. Public Health 10:820642. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.820642

In fact, just look at the section on "Masks." Within 180 days of incorporating masking requirements, over 169 countries, COVID-associated deaths were actually higher than the dashed, "no intervention" line. Does that mean masks made things worse? Not necessarily. But it absolutely means they didn't make things better. 

Again, it's been six years since the start of these policies. If there were any high-quality data or evidence to say that NPI's worked, we'd have seen it by now. Instead, all available legitimate research has found that every single policy we tried, literally all of them, made no difference to the most important COVID outcome. Everywhere on earth. It's impossible to fail more spectacularly than this. Not even accounting for the horrific ancillary negative impacts of these policies. And the best part is? There's been no accountability for anyone, no apologies, no admitting mistakes. 

Six years later, everyone's content to act like none of this ever happened. A historic atrocity.