Mary Wilson
Well-known member
Restrictions on social contact stemmed disease spread, but weighing up the ultimate costs and benefits of lockdown measures is a challenge.
07 September 2022
Dyani Lewis
In March 2021, a doctor in Brazil named Ricardo Savaris published a now-discredited research paper that went viral on social media[SUP]1[/SUP].
It had been a year since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to apply the desperate measures collectively known as lockdowns — cancelling sporting and cultural events, closing retail outlets, restaurants, schools and universities, and ordering people to stay at home. At the time, countries were once again dialling lockdown policies up or down, as the Alpha variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 surged in different places.
Lockdown measures did what they were supposed to. When they were enforced rigorously enough to reduce people’s social contacts sharply, they shrank COVID-19 outbreaks; several studies had demonstrated this.
But Savaris, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, tried a fresh analysis together with three colleagues (who worked in statistics, computer science and informatics). They compared 87 locations around the world, in pairs, to see whether a lower rate of COVID-19 deaths correlated with greater time spent at home, assessed using anonymized cellphone data released by Google. In most cases, their paper in Scientific Reports concluded, it didn’t.
The paper was highlighted by prominent lockdown sceptics and some news sites and swiftly gained notoriety. “The findings were quite remarkable, on the face of it,” says Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. As he and others would show, the results were wrong, because of errors in the paper’s choice of statistical methods.
Within a week, Scientific Reports added an ‘editor’s note’ to the paper, alerting readers to criticisms. Nine months later, the journal published two letters[SUP]2[/SUP][SUP],[/SUP][SUP]3[/SUP] that laid out the paper’s errors. A week after that, it retracted the work, although neither Savaris nor his co-authors agreed with the retraction. (Scientific Reports is published by Springer Nature; Nature’s reporting is editorially independent of its publisher.)
The retracted paper is not the only one to contend that lockdowns failed to save lives. But these analyses are out of step with the majority of studies. Most scientists agree that lockdowns did curb COVID-19 deaths and that governments had little option but to restrict people’s social contacts in early 2020, to stem SARS-CoV-2’s spread and avert the collapse of health-care systems. “We needed to buy ourselves some time,” says Lauren Meyers, a biological data scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4
07 September 2022
Dyani Lewis
In March 2021, a doctor in Brazil named Ricardo Savaris published a now-discredited research paper that went viral on social media[SUP]1[/SUP].
It had been a year since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to apply the desperate measures collectively known as lockdowns — cancelling sporting and cultural events, closing retail outlets, restaurants, schools and universities, and ordering people to stay at home. At the time, countries were once again dialling lockdown policies up or down, as the Alpha variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 surged in different places.
Lockdown measures did what they were supposed to. When they were enforced rigorously enough to reduce people’s social contacts sharply, they shrank COVID-19 outbreaks; several studies had demonstrated this.
But Savaris, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, tried a fresh analysis together with three colleagues (who worked in statistics, computer science and informatics). They compared 87 locations around the world, in pairs, to see whether a lower rate of COVID-19 deaths correlated with greater time spent at home, assessed using anonymized cellphone data released by Google. In most cases, their paper in Scientific Reports concluded, it didn’t.
The paper was highlighted by prominent lockdown sceptics and some news sites and swiftly gained notoriety. “The findings were quite remarkable, on the face of it,” says Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. As he and others would show, the results were wrong, because of errors in the paper’s choice of statistical methods.
Within a week, Scientific Reports added an ‘editor’s note’ to the paper, alerting readers to criticisms. Nine months later, the journal published two letters[SUP]2[/SUP][SUP],[/SUP][SUP]3[/SUP] that laid out the paper’s errors. A week after that, it retracted the work, although neither Savaris nor his co-authors agreed with the retraction. (Scientific Reports is published by Springer Nature; Nature’s reporting is editorially independent of its publisher.)
The retracted paper is not the only one to contend that lockdowns failed to save lives. But these analyses are out of step with the majority of studies. Most scientists agree that lockdowns did curb COVID-19 deaths and that governments had little option but to restrict people’s social contacts in early 2020, to stem SARS-CoV-2’s spread and avert the collapse of health-care systems. “We needed to buy ourselves some time,” says Lauren Meyers, a biological data scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4