100,000 Models Show That Not Much Was Learned About Stopping the Covid-19 Pandemic

June 17, 2024

(STAT News) – We studied many hypotheses about Covid-19 policy impacts, without fear or favor. To do this, we used major sources of global data, including the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 Government Response Tracker and the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 dashboard, on the use of any of 19 government responses in 181 countries in 2020 and 2021, and examined their relationship to four Covid-19 outcomes: cases, infections, deaths, and excess mortality. We modeled the policy effects in nearly 100,000 different ways, representing nearly 100,000 theories, each a flavor of a question about the effects of government responses to Covid-19. “Did stay-at-home policies flatten the curve?” or “Did closing schools decrease the spread of infections?” were among the hypotheses we tested. Each one of those relationships and theories are openly available. (Read More)