"Introduction
... [T]he global responses to COVID-19 were a defining health policy experience. The swiftness of global responses, their extensiveness, and direct implications for billions of people’s lives were historically unique...
No government studied its responses directly with trials or experiments...
Definitive studies of government response impacts on the virus’ spread and disease burden would be enormously helpful for present decisions and future pandemic planning. The dearth of prospective and randomized studies means that, likely, no single study may settle this question...
Discussion
In this study, we perform a multiverse analysis of nearly 100,000 ways of probing the relationship between COVID-19 government responses and outcomes in 181 countries... In this study, we found no clear pattern in the overall set of analyses or in any subset of analyses. We are left to conclude that strong claims about the impact of government responses on the COVID-19 burden lack empirical support...
This comprehensive analysis of government responses and COVID-19 outcomes fails to yield clear inferences about government response impacts. This suggests that strong notions about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of government responses are not backed by existing country-level data, and scientific modesty is warranted when learning from the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic."
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