Back during the pandemic, when the New York Times and other major outlets wanted to compare different states’ and nations’ COVID-19 responses, they leaned on Oxford University’s COVID Government Response Tracker.

For instance, here’s a very lengthy August 2020 piece about how the United States did worse than other countries because of our insistence on individual liberty. Here’s another piece from November 2020 saying, “States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks.” Its measure of “few restrictions” was Oxford’s “Government Response” index.

COVID-19 came in waves that hit different parts of the country at different times and in different magnitudes. It’s only natural that now, with the pandemic over, we should go look at the whole picture. Using the Oxford index, we should ask how the strictness of state government responses correlated with health outcomes and with other outcomes.

That’s exactly what one health-policy research institute did . What did they find?

Stricter lockdowns didn’t significantly improve health, but they did impose measurable harms on the economy and education.

“More severe government interventions, as measured by the Oxford index, did not significantly improve health outcomes,” the scholars at the Paragon Institute concluded. At the same time, “the severity of the government response was strongly correlated with worse economic … and educational … outcomes.”

U.S. residents perceived this in real time and voted with their feet. They, on net, moved from stricter lockdown states to freer states despite the constant media warnings that freedom meant death.

The study’s index of health outcomes included COVID-19 deaths (adjusted for age and pre-existing conditions) and a broader measure of all-cause excess deaths.

The strictest lockdowns in the country, using the Oxford index, were in New York, Hawaii, California, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. Hawaii had very good health outcomes, Rhode Island and California had middling outcomes, while New York and the district had worse outcomes than average.

The least locked-down states were South Dakota, Utah, Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri. South Dakota had health outcomes almost as bad as New York and Washington, D.C., while Utah had good outcomes, and the other three were average.

The more locked-down states did slightly better on deaths than the less locked-down states, but only slightly.

Meanwhile, the more locked-down states had far greater dips in GDP and far higher unemployment. They also had much broader and longer school closures.

The lockdowns were a panic reaction in March 2020. Governors and mayors all over the country imposed these measures at the instruction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former President Donald Trump. Pretty soon, some local leaders (mostly Republicans) began to loosen the rules, eliciting cries that this amounted to murder.

Through the 2020 elections, most of the major news media played along, taking it for granted that opening schools and restaurants would kill people. Now that viewpoint has been demolished by the facts. Meanwhile, the harms of the lockdown become more apparent every day, with learning loss, crime waves, and depression running through our youth.

President Joe Biden should show leadership and give a series of speeches declaring that the United States will never again lock down. This awful experiment has proven the failure of lockdowns. Without blaming those who locked down early, Biden should explain what we’ve learned and hammer home the depth of our mistake.