Was the Wuhan Flu shutdown worth it?

According to the American Institute for Economic Research, the answer was no.

After 100 days, we are in a position for some preliminary analysis of the performance of locked down states versus those that did not lock down. AIER has already published the evidence that lockdown states had higher rates of unemployment.

The Sentinel, a nonprofit news source of the Kansas Policy Institute, confirms our research by reporting the following data: locked down states have overall a 13.2% unemployment rate, while open states have a 7.8% unemployment rate.

Alberta's unemployment rate in May was a shocking 15.5% by the way, and we were one of the lesser lockdown provinces.

In terms of health, locked down states have nearly four times the death rate from COVID-19.

So that's two negative aspects of the lockdown.

To be fair, as I noted elsewhere COVID isn't over so you can't just say "place X did better than place Y". The lockdown states will have smaller 2nd/3rd/9th waves and therefore may have gotten most of the deaths out of the way early, and the other states will catch up and surpass them. Let's still keep in the back of our head perhaps the most critical COVID issue that nobody looks at:

COVID-19 transmission rates increase along with your likelihood of dying.

Seriously, that one single aspect of the Wuhan Flu (if true) explains almost everything we've seen around us.

To be sure, many mitigating factors may exist. Open states may have had fewer long-term health facilities housing people with low life expectacies; in every state, these account for roughly half of all deaths from COVID-19. In fact, “deaths among a narrow 1.7% group of the population are greater than deaths from the other 98.3%.”

Population density between the states also varies and that could have been an explanatory variable. The open states also lacked governors who mandated that nursing homes accept active COVID-patients. Earlier this month, we published some more detailed research “Unemployment Far Worse in Lockdown States, Data Show” by economist Abigail Devereux who found similar results.

A routine trope in the media is that people who oppose lockdowns are pushing freedom and wealth over safety and health. But as we can see from this clean examination of the results, the open states experienced less economic pain and less pain from the disease itself.