Were the lockdowns a bad idea? Fifteen months ago (November 2020), I wrote a commentary about the radio interview I did with Dr. Jay Richards about the book, The Price of Panic. He and two other authors wrote it to set the record straight. It was filled with lots of facts, figures, and graphs. It demonstrated that the human cost of the emergency response to the pandemic far outweighed the benefits.

Earlier this month, a paper from Johns Hopkins University documented the same costs with few benefits. The meta-analysis compared several dozen studies on the impact of lockdown measures. The authors concluded that “lockdowns have had little or no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

Some studies actually found the lockdowns increased COVID-19 mortality. Forcing people to “shelter in place” put infected people (asymptomatic) in homes where they would “infect family members with a higher vital load causing more severe illness.”

And the study also documented the costs that included “reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy.”

Even before I did the book interview fifteen months ago, many Americans (perhaps most Americans) knew the lockdowns weren’t working and doing what they were supposed to be doing. But political leaders in many states keep locking down their communities.

We can’t go back in time to change our response, but we should learn about what to do in the future. And during this election year, we should re-evaluate some of the politicians who locked down our communities and created so many economic, educational, and emotional problems.