But these analyses are out of step with the majority of studies. The retracted paper is not the only one to contend that lockdowns failed to save lives. ( Scientific Reports is published by Springer Nature Nature’s reporting is editorially independent of its publisher.) A week after that, it retracted the work, although neither Savaris nor his co-authors agreed with the retraction. Nine months later, the journal published two letters 2, 3 that laid out the paper’s errors. Within a week, Scientific Reports added an ‘editor’s note’ to the paper, alerting readers to criticisms. As he and others would show, the results were wrong, because of errors in the paper’s choice of statistical methods. “The findings were quite remarkable, on the face of it,” says Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The paper was highlighted by prominent lockdown sceptics and some news sites and swiftly gained notoriety. In most cases, their paper in Scientific Reports concluded, it didn’t. They compared 87 locations around the world, in pairs, to see whether a lower rate of COVID-19 deaths correlated with greater time spent at home, assessed using anonymized cellphone data released by Google. When they were enforced rigorously enough to reduce people’s social contacts sharply, they shrank COVID-19 outbreaks several studies had demonstrated this.īut Savaris, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, tried a fresh analysis together with three colleagues (who worked in statistics, computer science and informatics). Lockdown measures did what they were supposed to. At the time, countries were once again dialling lockdown policies up or down, as the Alpha variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 surged in different places. It had been a year since the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to apply the desperate measures collectively known as lockdowns - cancelling sporting and cultural events, closing retail outlets, restaurants, schools and universities, and ordering people to stay at home. In March 2021, a doctor in Brazil named Ricardo Savaris published a now-discredited research paper that went viral on social media 1.
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