https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4794767-covid-19-restrictions-savings/Stricter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the states that refused to institute them
Between 118,000 and 248,000 more Americans would have survived the pandemic if all states had followed some restrictions practiced in Northeastern states, according to findings published Friday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The most effective responses were mask mandates and vaccine requirements, the JAMA study found.
“COVID-19 restrictions saved lives,” the researchers wrote.
“The death toll was probably considerably higher than it would otherwise have been in states that resisted imposing these restrictions, banned their use, or implemented them for only relatively short periods of time.”
Vaccine requirements and mask mandates have been politically controversial and continue to cast a shadow on politicians in Washington.
But the JAMA research extolled these policies and said they should help guide public health response in future pandemics even as an uncontrolled rise in bird flu hits the West.
At first, there was little difference in COVID-19 response between red and blue states, the researchers noted.
For the first four months of the pandemic, most states pursued overlapping and nearly universal strategies like closing businesses and schools and imposing mask mandates.
About 57 percent of Texans supported the mask restrictions, according to polling from The University of Texas. Those numbers are roughly in line with the 62 percent nationwide who told pollsters at Pew that the lives saved were worth what nearly 70 percent acknowledged as a considerable economic costs.
