Four years ago this week, the government initiated unprecedented federal lockdowns of the economy to combat Covid. A just-released comprehensive CTUP study of the academic evidence and dozens of peer-reviewed studies conclude that the ordered shutdown of our schools, churches, and businesses brought little health benefits while imposing multi-trillions of dollars of long-term societal costs.

These costs include a $6 trillion increase in government debt, hundreds of thousands of business bankruptcies, one to two years of lost schooling for young children, tens of millions of Americans out of work, and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from loneliness, depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, delayed hospital care in part due to the forced social isolation.

The lower wages to workers in the future from the educational losses could be in the trillions of dollars over the decades to come.

These costs exceeded by multiple times any health benefits from mandates and lockdowns.

States that didn’t shut down at all or quickly reopened had no different death rates on average than states that did.  But the non-lockdown states had much swifter recoveries than states that shut down for a year or more.

This chart from the study shows that the one country, Sweden, that did not surrender to panic and lockdowns had one of the lowest rates of all-cause excess deaths:

These are some of the conclusions by a first-of-its-kind retrospective study by CTUP and co-authored by four of the nation’s top experts on the pandemic – Dr. Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, economist Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Phil Kerpen, president of CTUP. The study concludes that many of the government policies had catastrophic social, educational, and economic consequences and that these mistakes should never again be repeated.

Their findings are here: