According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (look it up) stricter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the states that refused to institute them, though efforts to close nursing homes and schools likely caused more harm than good. The most effective responses were mask mandates and vaccine requirements.  Pretty simple, huh? All interventions weren’t equally helpful, and when it came to closures of public spaces, the costs outweighed the benefits. Benefits were weakest for school closures, which hurt students’ social development and test scores without achieving much benefit in reducing the death rate. Another area where the costs of restrictions outweighed benefits was social isolation for nursing home residents — which seem to have saved people from death by COVID-19 but caused them to be more likely to die overall. No reason to go on living? Impressively, the researchers acknowledged that simply saving lives was “not necessarily sufficient to justify imposing restrictions because they also imposed a variety of costs.” Wow! One of the main reasons that more conservative states started to resist mandated restrictions, in my opinion, was not only the fact that they were “mandates,” which by their very nature breed rebellion, but also that the official story was not universal and consistent — it kept changing, which erodes trust in the system. THAT, in my opinion, was the biggest problem. I only hope we learned something from all of this — for the next one. But I doubt it. Arthur Saginian Santa Clarita The post Arthur Saginian | Looking Back on COVID Restrictions appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.