Ah yes. that paper

For anyone interested. What it does is look at what relationship there is between, on the one hand, the growth of covid (in the spring of last year), and on the other, things like lockdowns.

What they find is an apparent 'positive' impact of lockdowns on coviud growth.

but .... there is a very good reason for that. Lockdowns are imposed *in response to* higher growth of covid. So of course there's a positive relationship between growth rate and lockdowns.

They actually admit this in the paper - they say that as long as lockdowns aren't just randomly brought in - which of course they're not - then their results are biased.

In economics that paper would never even have been published. God knows why it was in that field.

Posted By: Tricky Hawes, Jan 14, 15:29:57