 Many Americans are losing patience with statewide shelter-in-place orders. We don't have months or weeks. You know, businesses are hurting. County Supervisor Jim Desmond has been fighting a losing battle to reopen businesses in San Diego. Who's hurt the most in this are the poor people. The people that rent, the people that work in the hospitality sector, in the restaurant. A lot of single moms. We had a meeting the other day. We had people on the phone crying saying, hey, I got a kid to feed. Several southern states in Colorado have started lifting or significantly loosening orders. When you close somebody's business down and take the livelihood, and they are literally at the face of losing everything, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Other governors are holding firm. But if we pull back too quickly, those numbers will go through the roof. Let's go from essential now. Question not what is essential, but what is safe? There's no date. If there's a date, then we're denying the facts on the ground. We're denying the reality of the spread of the virus, which is dynamic. Have the lockdown saved lives? There's a debate over how to analyze the data. Lockdowns just don't alter behavior all that much. Economist Lyman Stone says there's no correlation between the timing of statewide or regional shelter-in-place orders and a decline in the COVID-19 death rate. We can basically build a theory and assert that the world obeys our theory and just go looking for any scrap of evidence that supports it. Or we can start by looking at what are the trends we actually observe. Stone looked at the date governments such as France issued shelter-in-place orders compared to the total daily deaths 20 days later. The minimum amount of time it would take for exposure to the virus to lead to a death. In every case, he found the decline came long before the 20-day threshold. Lyman says that according to the data, voluntary social distancing is effective. People were already socially distancing before the lockdown. Social distancing works. So we have a couple different data sources that basically track your cell phone, which is a little bit creepy. And what we can see is that policy choices like shelter-in-place orders had almost no impact on when people began to socially distance. California was able to lower their caseload significantly and the number of deaths by quite a bit by putting this regulation in place. Economist Andrew Friedson co-authored a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research that concluded California's lockdown was effective and may have prevented more than 1,600 COVID deaths. California's location where this could have gotten really bad really quickly. Essentially what we did is we took a weighted average of other states based on characteristics of those states that make them look like California. We looked at states that had similar growth rates to California and said, okay, of the states that did not put on a shelter-in-place order within a certain number of days and then compare that to what happened in California. The funny thing is that they find that their shelter-in-place order reduced deaths beginning four days after it was implemented, which means that you must assume that a considerable share of COVID cases die four days after infection. The problem is that's not even long enough for the incubation time. In part, they're absolutely right that individual behavior and social distancing behavior started to change before these lockdowns changed. What the shelter-in-place order did and what our paper estimates is that there's this additional bump that you get from forcing the part of the population that's not going to comply to comply with the legal weight. What makes these numbers particularly slippery is that it's difficult to know how many of the job losses are temporary and come back when the disease is defeated or come back when the order is lifted. It's also unclear how many of these lives saved are just deaths that are delayed. I think the job of the economist is to tell you what the trade-off is and then the job of the policymakers to decide what them and their constituents are comfortable with. Stone says what did likely flatten the curve was, in fact, information declaring public emergencies correlated with increased voluntary social distancing and the closure of schools and cancellation of large gatherings also appear to have slowed the spread. He says that instead of shelter-in-place orders, the rest of the world should learn from the approach taken by Hong Kong which never issued a shelter-in-place order and has just four documented COVID deaths. We should not hesitate to pull the trigger on closing borders. Second, mask early, mask often. Everyone should wear a mask and they should do so as soon as you know that you have a threat of a pandemic. Information is the most powerful tool getting people to understand the risk and protect themselves. But after that, centralize quarantine. Anyone who is a positive test in any close contact of a positive test, we need to isolate them. The majority of U.S. states have now significantly modified their shelter-in-place orders. Even California, which never came close to seeing its hospitals overrun, began allowing more retailers to reopen for curbside pickup on May 8th but remains committed to a largely top-down technocratic approach. Unfortunately, life comes with some risks. I think we're at a point. We're showing we're declining in numbers. To me, it looks like the goalposts keep moving back. You know, we shut these businesses down in a day. Why is it taking us so long to open them back up? I understand we want to be safe. We want to be prudent. But we need to start.