Strict mask, vaccine rules could have saved up to 250,000 lives, says new study

Tighter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in states that refused to institute them, although efforts to close nursing homes and schools likely did more harm than good, a new study finds.

Between 118,000 and 248,000 more Americans would have survived the pandemic if all states had followed some of the restrictions practiced in Northeastern states,according to discoveriespublished 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 likely considerably higher than it would have been in states that resisted imposing these restrictions, banned their use, or implemented them only for relatively short periods of time.”

Vaccine requirements and mask mandates have been politically controversial and continue to cast a shadow over politicians in Washington.

But the JAMA investigation extolled these policies and said they should help guide the public health response in future pandemics, even when an uncontrolled increase in bird flureaches the West.

At first, there was little difference in the COVID-19 response between red and blue states, the researchers noted.

During the first four months of the pandemic, most states pursued overlays andalmost universalstrategies such as closing businesses and schools and imposing masks.

About57 percent of Texanssupported mask restrictions, according to a University of Texas poll. These numbers are roughly in line with the 62 percent nationwide. who told Pew researchersthat the lives saved were worth what almost 70 percent recognized as considerable economic costs.

But in mid-2020, as right-wing groups fomented opposition to these restrictions, conservative governments in states like Texas responded by banning mask mandates.

As late as 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) was telling conservative talk show hosts that he would keep his pandemic-derived emergency powers in place until state lawmakers “codify my executive orders prohibiting mask mandates, that prohibit forced vaccinations and things like that.” like this,” The Texas Tribune reported.

The cost of these reactions in conservative states was tens or hundreds of thousands of additional deaths — a cost that would have been even worse if all states had followed suit, the JAMA researchers found.

If all states had followed more lenient practices in the Southeast or Texas, about 200,000 people would have died, the study concluded.

At its most dramatic, Mississippi — the state with the weakest restrictions — saw five times as many deaths per capita as Massachusetts, a state with one of the strongest restrictions, the study found.

The findings highlighted that not all interventions were equally useful; especially when it comes to closing public spaces, the costs may have outweighed the benefits. Up to three-quarters of the lives saved by restrictions could be attributed to just two practices – masks and vaccines.

In contrast, the researchers found, the benefits were weaker in the case of school closures, which harmed students’ lives.Social developmentIt isTest resultswithout obtaining many benefits in reducing the mortality rate.

For high-poverty school districts, this disparity was particularly stark. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that low-income districts who went remote in the 2020-21 school year, for example, “will need to spend nearly all of their federal aid on academic recovery to help students recover from pandemic-related performance losses.

The data suggests that school closures “may have been pursued too aggressively in some states,” researchers found.

On the other hand, requiring students and teachers to wear masks was “probably more effective and imposed lower costs.”

Another area where researchers argued that the costs of restrictions likely outweighed the benefits was social isolation for nursing home residents — which appears to have saved people from dying from COVID-19 but caused them to die.more likely to die in general.

The researchers acknowledged that simply saving lives “was not necessarily enough to justify imposing restrictions because they also imposed a variety of costs,” although they noted that some of them – such as “loss of freedom” – were difficult to quantify.

But when using accepted actuarial numbers for the monetary value of a life – since around US$5 millionforaround US$12 million— found that the lives that could have been saved by stronger restrictions were on the order of $1.2 billion to $5.2 billion.

This is equivalent to between 6% and 22% of the 2021 gross domestic product.

This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story