To distract myself from the sting of living under martial law, I have some graphs for you analyzing the effectiveness of lockdown measures.

I get quite annoyed at the reporting on these issues. When any rate declines, it is attributed to the success of “social distancing.” When the death toll skyrockets in New York but stays low on the West Coast, it’s because those brilliant Progressives in Washington and California acted in a timely manner. (While the brilliant Progressives in Albany and NYC, apparently, failed to do so, but that is somehow President Trump’s fault.)

I think that I’ve been quite consistent and scientific about this. I acknowledge that, in theory, lockdown measures should slow the spread of COVID-19. We don’t know by how much, and we don’t know how the disease would have progressed absent the lockdowns. It is possible that we acted pretty early. It’s possible, actually, that acting too early might be a bad thing because it could cause a larger second wave. It is possible that we acted pretty late, and the virus was quite widespread before the lockdown, in which case the lockdown would have little effect.

The situation is complex, to say the least. And it’s complex even before considering the Good Bug/Bad Bug hypothesis that I advanced yesterday (it was not an original hypothesis, but I don’t think that it had been previously discussed here).

Evaluating the effectiveness of lockdown measures is difficult. However, if the are effective, this should be evident in the graphs that I have been so diligently preparing, and posting, and pondering like a message in a bottle.

Here’s what we should see. Around a week after the initiation of a lockdown, there should be a noticeable decline in reported cases. There will be a kink in the graph, whatever the graph may be. The two places where such a kink should be most evident are: (1) my graphs of the percentage daily growth in reported deaths/cases, and (2) the logarithmic-scale graph of total reported deaths and cases.

I don’t expect a perfectly sharp change in the graph. The effect may phase in over a few days. I expect a lockdown to affect reported cases after about a seven-day lag, and to affect reported deaths after a 21-day lag, based on the reported progression of COVID-19. It might be a little shorter or longer, but these estimates give us an idea of where to look.

So I looked, and I didn’t find. As I go through this data, I’d like you to ask yourself: do you see something that I don’t see?

I. New York, Washington, and California

I decided to focus on these three states, because they will exemplify the East Coast/West Coast distinction, and because I’ve actually read criticisms of New York for having failed to act quickly like those oh-so-brilliant West Coast Progressives out in California and Washington. I am very skeptical of such claims, but I do believe that I can put those biases aside and perform an objective analysis. After all, while I might not like giving credit to the likes of Gavin Newsom, I would like the idea of heaping condemnation on Andrew Cuomo and Bill DeBlasio.

I don’t see any reason in the data for NY to have acted before CA, and it actually suggests that WA should have acted first. Here is the situation through March 18:

This is reported cases per 100,000, through March 18. Through around March 13, there’s very little difference between NY and CA, and WA is by far the highest. Remember that reports lag by a day (at least), so the decision-makers wouldn’t have know the daily figures shown on this graph until the next day.

The death counts were extremely low. On March 13, NY had zero reported deaths, CA had 4, and WA had 37 (but almost all of them were from that one nursing home, remember?). Even on March 18, NY had just 21 deaths, CA had 17, and WA had 66.

If anything, WA should have acted first — which it did not. Yet since the death toll (so far) has been much higher in NY, people credit WA with wise, Progressive “social distancing” policies.

It’s hard to figure out the precise timing of the lockdown in various locations. In these three states, it was generally between March 13 and March 23, with different measures adopted at different times, and some localities acted separately. There were things like restaurant closures, and school closures, and ultimately shelter-in-place orders. The timing of the school closures is challenging, as some school districts closed before the governor ordered it, and the schools were probably on spring break anyway in the relevant period (and perhaps the spring breaks were scheduled for different weeks in different school districts, as in Arizona). My summary is:

• The NY lockdown was implemented around March 16-20. The schools in NYC were closed on March 16, and the lockdown order issued by the governor on March 20.
• The WA lockdown was implemented around March 15-23. Restaurants were closed on March 15, schools on March 17, and the lockdown order issued by the governor on March 23.
• The CA lockdown was implemented around March 13-19. The schools closed on March 13, some counties locked down starting on March 16, and the lockdown order was issued by the governor on March 19.

With some local variations, NY acted one single day after CA, and actually acted three days before WA.

Now let’s look at effectiveness. Remember that we’re looking for an effect on reported cases around March 26-30, and an effect on reported deaths around April 9-12. (Notice that this means that we wouldn’t yet expect to see any effect at all on reported deaths yet, but maybe my estimate of the lag time is wrong, so we’ll at the death figures anyway.)

This is the three-day moving average in the daily percent growth of reported cases, by state:

Look carefully at March 26-30 on this graph. Do you see any sudden downward departure? There are none. The graphs appear to continue just about as before, except for that modest increase in WA on Mar. 26-28, after the lockdown went into effect.

Here is the graph of total reported cases (per 100,000), in logarithmic scale. Remember that the scale on the y-axis varies in this scale, and that “exponential growth” appears as a straight line in this scale.

Again, look carefully at this graph around March 26-30. Do you see any sudden changes? Do you see any departure from the prior trend line at all? This downward curve is precisely what we would expect without a lockdown order — and precisely what was happening prior to the lockdown orders, with one exception. You can see that upward curve in NY around March 16-19. It stops on March 20 — the very day of the lockdown order in NY, before it could possibly have had an effect.

I submit that there is no evidence in this data that the lockdowns had any effect. And it should be there if they were effective.

Here are the same graphs, for reported deaths. Remember that the lag between lockdown and the hypothetical reduction in deaths is longer, probably around 3 weeks. First, the three-day moving average of the daily percentage increase in reported deaths:

We’d be looking for some significant change in the past few days, perhaps the past week. I don’t see anything, do you? There’s actually a minor uptick in California, but I wouldn’t make anything of such minor daily variations. The general trend lines are down, especially in New York (which is great news). But the bulk of this decline happened before we would expect the lockdowns to have any effect, and there is no kink in the trend lines that would indicate that the lockdowns helped.

Here is the final graph for these three states, total reported deaths in logarithmic scale:

There is no change in these trend lines. Nothing to indicate that the lockdowns reduced the number of deaths.

I’m going to finish with data from Europe, specifically focusing on Italy and Spain. Italy’s nationwide lockdown was on March 10 (two days earlier in Lombardy), and Spain’s was effective on March 15. For reported cases, we’d expect an effect around March 17 in Italy and March 22 in Spain. Here is the graph of the three-day moving average of the daily increase in reported cases:

Look carefully around March 17 (Italy, blue) and March 24 (Spain, green). Again, there is no notable change in the trend line. In fact, it went upward in Italy from in the days after March 17, but it looks like normal daily variation to me.

Here are the total reported cases in logarithmic scale:

Once again, there is no noticeable change in the trend line here. No evidence that the lockdown was effective at all.

I’ve reached a difficult point in this post, at which I sometimes find myself in the practice of law, when arguing to a judge or a jury. It’s a particularly difficult decision to make when talking to a judge or jury, because once I say I’m done, I don’t get another chance. It’s similar to the decision that a football coach faces when he decides to stop running up the score, though at least the coach has a chance to change his mind later. I think that I’ve presented quite overwhelming evidence, and to mix my metaphors, I imagine that you, dear reader, might get annoyed if I keep beating that poor, dead horse. But I can’t resist two more blows.

Here are the same two graphs, for Italy and Spain but for the data on reported deaths:

Remember that if the lockdowns were effective, we’d expect to see this around March 31 in Italy and around April 3 in Spain. I see no change. My apologies to that poor horse.

I would be happy to consider any alternative evidence. I think that this is a powerful case that the lockdown measures have not had a noticeable effect on the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic in these jurisdictions.

ChiCom delenda est.