![united states lockdown united states lockdown](https://images.theconversation.com/files/326508/original/file-20200408-98792-rgjd13.jpg)
#United states lockdown full#
The exceptions came from lightly populated rural states that did not experience massive outbreaks, so most of the country’s population was, in effect, under full lockdown. Over the next few days some 43 out of 50 states imposed lockdown policies. response increased from 8.33/100 on March 1st to 52.31/100 on March 16 th, the day that President Trump embraced lockdowns on the advice of the now-discredited Imperial College model of Neil Ferguson. To the contrary, the United States locked down at almost the exact same moment as most of Western Europe. Quite simply put, there’s no evidence in the index for either of these assertions. So how does the US stack up against other developed countries that locked down? Were we behind the curve in responding to COVID, and did we reopen too early as the current media narrative claims? The stringency index also tracks how these policies change over time, as countries impose greater restrictions or begin to reopen from their previous lockdown state. These include school and business closures, event cancellations, restrictions on large gatherings, internal and external travel restrictions, and shelter-in-place or lockdown-style attempts to confine residents to their homes. Points are awarded for the familiar suite of nonpharmaceutical policy interventions, adopted in the name of counteracting COVID. Among their trackers is a government “stringency index” that “records the strictness of ‘lockdown style’ policies that primarily restrict people’s behaviour.”Īs described on the project’s website, the stringency index assigns scores on a 0 to 100 point scale to capture the severity of a country’s responses. To assist in answering that question, we may turn to a helpful tool created by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government that allows cross-country comparisons of the COVID policy responses.
![united states lockdown united states lockdown](https://www.aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/closedusa-800x508.jpg)
It’s a convenient narrative for justifying the reimposition of lockdowns, as well as politically chastising anyone who questioned their efficacy in the first place. By contrast, the United States allegedly waited too long to lock down, did so ineffectively, and “ rushed to reopen” before the virus was under control. As the United States experiences a surge in COVID-19 outbreaks with most of it concentrated in regions that avoided the earlier wave that struck the Northeast back in March and April, the media has adopted a new explanation to continue its longstanding rationalization of society-wide lockdowns.Īs the argument goes, most European states (including those that were harder hit than the US) followed a “responsible” pattern of quashing the virus through heavy-handed lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, and only began the reopening process when its data-driven models said it was safe to do so.