Professor John Gibson of the School of Accounting, Finance and Economics at Waikato University has released a couple of interesting posts on NZCPR (here and here) highlighting his research into the NZ lockdowns.
Below I’ve reproduced the three figures from his data, which can be found here.
These charts are fascinating. While there was a fall in mortality as a result of the lockdown, Gibson’s figures show this to be a short-term effect. However, “A winter of no excess mortality was followed by four months of excess mortality totaling about 1200 deaths (ca. four percent of annual deaths). The surge in deaths was concentrated on the elderly so public health interventions only slightly postponed death.“
In a follow-up article, Gibson points out that the lockdowns have other long term effects on health. This is something that short-sighted politicians might not be able to grasp. He points to Canadian economist Douglas Allen who apparently concluded that lockdowns will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures. In 2020, our output was 5% less than expected due mainly according to Gibson to our responses to COVID-19. This implies a life expectancy loss of 0.9%. Check out his research on this here. Essentially, a fall in GDP is equivalent to lower life expectancies. So the economy matters too!
I’ll leave you with two quotes from his article.
If real GDP ultimately falls 10% below what was expected pre-Covid (e.g. if Level 4 lasts as long as in 2020), and if we apportion half of this to the unusually harsh NZ response (rather than to overseas factors), then our politicians and health bureaucrats will have presided over a fall in life expectancy where there are two million fewer life years than would otherwise be expected. If this loss was full concentrated on a select group, it is equivalent to 46,000 deaths.
In case one doubts these calculations, note that the Treasury long-term fiscal forecasts released recently show future life expectancy is almost two years below what they had previously forecast in 2016.
It’s not as simple as ‘lockdowns save lives.’