Study Reveals How Strict Government Covid Measures Hurt State Economies

A new report from the Georgia Center for Opportunity (GCO) revealed that Washington state’s draconian measures to battle the COVID-19 pandemic had a detrimental impact in terms of employment losses and recovery, without the drop in hospitalizations and fatalities politicians claimed it would.

As the virus spread across the United States in early 2020, state governments enforced economic restrictions like business and school closures, stay-at-home orders, gathering restrictions, and capacity limits at select businesses such as restaurants. The harshness of the directives differed from state to state, with Democrats predictably taking more extreme authoritarian routes.

The detailed report, “Assessing Each State’s Response To The Pandemic: Understanding The Impact On Employment & Work,” was released on December 3 and examines the severity of government responses to the pandemic using two separate indexes: the Abridged Oxford Stringency Index (AOSI) and the Government Severity Index (GSI).

Pandemic-Response-Impact-on-Employment-Work-December-2021

Erik Randolph, the GCO’s director of research and author of the report, told the Center Square, “Washington ranked #1 in the GSI but #14 in the AOSI, but more severe than either [Iowa] or [Minnesota]. The results suggest that [Washington] — that had one of the strongest pre-pandemic job growth (i.e., 2.6% per the 12 months prior) could have saved more jobs. The estimated economic impact for [Washington] is 46,700 for each SD movement.”

The abbreviation “SD” stands for “standard deviation,” which measures how dispersed data is compared to the mean.

An employment chart for Washington state shows the significant drop in jobs during the pandemic’s peak in the first half of 2020, instead of pre-pandemic projections and the subsequent slow return of jobs. However, Washington wasn’t the worst in terms of pandemic-related harsh measures.

In the first year of the pandemic, Washington outperformed some other states, including Hawaii, which ranked No. 2 in both indexes; New York, which ranked No. 3 in both indexes; California, which ranked No. 5 and No. 7 in the government and Oxford indexes, respectively; New Mexico, which ranked No. 7 and No. 1; and Connecticut, which ranked No. 10 and No. 8.

Conversely, the study found South Dakota ranked 49th and 50th in the government and Oxford indexes, respectively; North Dakota ranked 48th in both indexes; Iowa, 47th and 49th; Nebraska, 46th and 42nd; Missouri, 45th and 40th; and Oklahoma, 43rd and 46th as being consistently less harsh.

GCO’s vice president of communications, Corey Burress, stated, “Across the nation, we looked at each state and found that there does not seem to be a correlation between how severe a state shut down its economy and a reduction in hospitalization and death rates.”

Randolph noted, “Perhaps surprisingly, there is not [an] association (or correlation) with governmental actions and COVID hospitalizations or deaths.”

The study concluded that although outlandish government measures may have played a role in the number of COVID cases, they had little if any effect on the number of hospitalizations or deaths while still managing to destroy local economies.

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