Did more restrictive policies succeed in reducing death and serious illness? As states began reopening in April 2020, there was much doomsaying. “Models Project Sharp Rise in Deaths as States Reopen,” read a New York Times headline on May 4, 2020. The Washington Post published an interactive feature allowing readers to gauge how many people would be infected if restrictions were lifted all at once, in two weeks, or in a month. An article in the Atlantic called Governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen Georgia an “experiment in human sacrifice.”
In fact, policy differences did not show up in different pandemic outcomes in our analysis. Reopening did not trigger immediate viral resurgence. As of April 2021—with vaccines available to all adults and restrictions eased everywhere—Republican and Democratic states had maintained measurably distinct pandemic policies for almost a year, but there was barely any difference in their per capita mortality. (See Figure 2 below.) This fact—easily discernible from CDC data—appears to us to have prompted little reflection in mainstream news outlets. Governors with widely divergent approaches to restrictions claimed credit for a job well done, enjoyed public approval, and won reelection at high rates. Republican and Democratic states did eventually diverge in morbidity and mortality, but only after the vaccine rollout. By January 2023, Republican-leaning states, with lower vaccination rates, suffered nearly 30 percent higher mortality than Democratic-leaning states.
Our analyses of both policy effects and vaccine effects control for differences in state populations, including age (percent over sixty-five), obesity, urbanization, and insurance coverage. States with higher vaccine uptake fared better on mortality, but NPI variation does not correlate with variation in outcomes. States with longer school closures did not fare better, nor did states with longer stay-at-home orders or more stringent pandemic restrictions. Other research has come to similar conclusions, including a major study published in the Lancet in 2023. Although this study finds an association between restrictions and lower infection rates, as well as between vaccine mandates and lower mortality, it does not find that mask mandates, restrictions on gatherings, or closures of bars, restaurants, schools, or universities were associated with lower COVID-19 mortality.