COVID-19

COVID-19, Hygiene Theatre, Masks, and Lockdowns: “Solid Science” or Science Veneer? is the latest installment in the Institute’s essay series on the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay examines whether government policy responses followed the science and evidence extant at the time of COVID’s emergence and progression through the population, or whether governments followed the science selectively to create more of a veneer of science than a solid policy foundation.

The Forgotten Demographic: Assessing the Possible Benefits and Serious Cost of COVID-19 School Closures on Canadian Children is a new study that finds prolonged COVID school closures imposed across Canada from 2020 to 2022 will impose life-long costs on affected children, despite evidence available to policymakers early on that closures wouldn’t slow the transmission of COVID-19, including learning loss, increased inequality, and a spike in mental health problems.

Public and Private Sector Job Growth in the Provinces during the COVID-19 Era finds that from February 2020 to June 2023, in all ten provinces, the rate of job growth was faster in the government sector (including federal, provincial and municipal) than in the private sector (including the self-employed). Nationally, the number of government-sector jobs increased 11.8 per cent over that time period, while the number of private sector jobs increased only 3.3 per cent.

On COVID, We Fought the Last War. And Lost is the latest installment in the Institute’s series on the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay, by Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, documents how much of the government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were inspired by practices used to combat the HIV pandemic decades earlier. But because the two viruses are so different, these HIV-inspired policies were entirely unsuited to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.