We Locked Down Because We Could. Thanks, Zoom

Stanford Professor of Health Policy and Great Barrington legend Jay Bhattacharya has written a piece in Spiked where he argues that, while there were doubtless multiple factors that drove the world to lockdown in spring 2020, a key one was remote-working technology like Zoom that, for the first time, made extended periods of isolation economically viable. Here’s an excerpt.

One of the central mysteries of the pandemic is why countries worldwide simultaneously decided to jettison a century of experience managing respiratory-virus pandemics, usually with an approach akin to the focused-protection model proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration, in favour of lockdowns and school closures. While the cause is undoubtedly multifactorial, one of the underappreciated enabling factors is the availability of technologies like Zoom, which made lockdown economically manageable for one crucial subset of the population – the laptop class.

While video-conferencing technologies have been around for decades, it is only in recent years that they have matured to the point where white-collar, ‘knowledge economy’ workers could possibly conceive of using them to support a rapid and long-lasting shift from in-person to remote interactions.

In the first decade of the 21st century, while video-conferencing services like Skype did exist, they required broadband internet services that were not universally available even in developed countries. Those services were not designed for large companies or schools to deploy at scale while maintaining adequate security. Skype, from my own experience, was often glitchy for video, performed poorly when more than two people were calling in, and did not integrate seamlessly with calendar systems, which is essential to schedule meetings.

Online educational offerings were also available but typically consisted of poorly produced YouTube videos with little opportunity for direct and immediate instructor feedback. Similarly, you could call up for home delivery of food from pizza joints, but only a select few other restaurants offered this service. There was no DoorDash, Uber Eats, or other similar food-delivery services. The range of offerings on Amazon was paltry in comparison with today.

By 2020, all that had changed. A new array of online technologies and products, which enabled people to work, shop and order in using their computer or phone, allowed the laptop class to go into lockdown relatively comfortably. But this was not the experience of others, for whom lockdown brought significant pain.

Even today, with all these technological developments, the reality is that remote work cannot replace in-person work for most jobs worldwide. When the pandemic hit, about a third of American workers switched from in-office to remote work. University of Chicago economists Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman analysed a comprehensive database of job requirements in the US at the time, finding that only 37% of American jobs had conditions that could permit them to be moved online with minimal impact on job productivity. The laptop class is also undoubtedly much smaller in poor countries.

How did workers outside the laptop class fare during the lockdowns? Not very well, according to research published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research in December 2021:

[T]he Covid-induced shift to remote work has devastated the service economy that had catered to elite workers’ needs. Urban neighbourhoods with more high-skill-service residents have seen larger population outflows and higher work-from-home numbers throughout the pandemic, as well as larger declines in visits to local consumer-service establishments and sharper drops in residents’ spending on consumer services. Low-skill consumer-service workers in big cities lost more hours per worker than their rural counterparts.

In poor countries, lockdowns, which were recommended to them by the World Health Organisation, impoverished tens of millions of people. They caused mass unemployment and disrupted food production, “pushing tens of millions more people” in the developing world into hunger. Indeed, in July 2020, the United Nations reported that 10,000 children per month were dying from starvation brought on by supply-chain disruptions. The devastating trend of significantly higher starvation-related deaths in developing countries will likely continue due to the ‘aftershocks’ of lockdown policies.

Prof. Bhattacharya notes that things were very different in 2009 when Swine Flu appeared – though not for a lack of alarmism from the usual suspects.

When swine flu hit in April 2009, public-health agencies raised the alarm. H1N1 influenza, the virus that causes swine flu, shares affinity with the virus that caused the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide. The World Health Organisation’s first officially published estimates of the case-fatality rate in May 2009 – derived from observations in Mexico and the United States – reported case-fatality rates as higher than two out of 100. Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College crew published their usual panic-mongering simulation model in a top medical journal. Unlike Covid, where over 80% of the deaths have been among people over 65, swine flu preferentially killed non-elderly people. Eighty per cent of the deaths globally were among people under 65, including children.

The statements from public health during the early days of H1N1 mirrored those from the early days of Covid. Mexico cancelled football matches and briefly kept kids home from school. In the U.S., local public-health officials pushed hard to close schools, but came away frustrated because most school districts refused.

Public-health bodies – full of grand ideas from pandemic-planning exercises following the 2006 avian-flu scare – wanted tough measures, but they didn’t get them. The question is, why not? What materially differed between 2009 and 2020?

Prof. Bhattacharya suggests that Zoom and similar technologies were critical in 2020 to inducing businesses, schools and other organisations to comply with the calls to close in-person operations.

Undoubtedly this played a part – though to my mind the Chinese precedent in Wuhan (endorsed by the WHO) was arguably more significant, particularly when added to the ICU scare in northern Italy in early March, the first Western region to apply the brutal Chinese ‘remedy’.

Prof. Bhattacharya concludes: “The frightening corollary is that – unless there is concerted political action to prevent it – the next time there is a highly infectious, potentially dangerous respiratory virus afloat, we will lock down again.”

Well, indeed.

Worth reading in full.