A good reason

All countries have reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic with policies aiming to contain the spread of the virus within their territory. Most countries have done so by severely limiting basic freedoms of their inhabitants. The English word “lockdown” has been used in many languages to refer to very different types of locally unprecedented policies. At… Continue reading Terminology

A Good Reason is an independent research project with the aim of critically documenting stay-at-home policies in Europe. At the same time, A Good Reason wants to raise awareness of the undesired effects of stay-at-home orders as well as of ethical objections to them. The information on this website shall contribute to both research and… Continue reading Mission Statement

There are several projects tracking government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic using public sources. One of the largest of these projects is the CoronaNet Research Project. Over 500 research assistants worldwide contribute to this comprehensive dataset comprising of over 100,000 entries as of February 2022. “A good reason” was inspired by the CoronaNet project: I… Continue reading Other policy trackers

For the following maps I classified all European countries in different categories, based on the data I collected on stay-at-home restrictions. Countries are classified according to the strictest restrictions that were in place during the covered time. I treated the first wave of the pandemic separately because many countries changed their stay-at-home policies after the… Continue reading Data summary

To make an assessment whether the benefits of a policy outweigh the costs, we need to know both, or at least, we should be able to make an educated guess. When I started this research, I was prepared to argue why I think lockdowns are morally wrong and probably not cost-efficient despite their supposedly unquestionable… Continue reading Effectiveness of stay-at-home orders

In an earlier post, I asked whether stay-at-home orders were successful in reducing Covid-19 mortality and preventing the collapse of hospitals. To be able to compare costs and benefits of policy interventions, we need to understand both. This post shall shed light on the costs of lockdown measures, especially those health-related costs. As before, I… Continue reading Costs of lockdown

In earlier posts I laid out how inconclusive the evidence for the benefits of lockdown measures is and how varied and hard to quantify their costs are. With everything written in mind, I assume the costs of lockdown policies outweigh the benefits by large. But firstly, this is just my amateurish assumption that might be… Continue reading Ethical and cost-benefit considerations

In the last post, I pointed out that lockdowns do not only broke with the self-concept of liberal societies, but they also failed to pass any cost-benefit assessment. So, if lockdowns were such a terrible policy: Why did nearly all countries resort to some type of “lockdowns”? To avoid any disappointment: I don’t know. In… Continue reading But then… why?