Americans complied with coronavirus lockdowns, helping to curb pandemic, new CDC study finds

WASHINGTON — Virtually everywhere across the United States, people followed directives this spring to stay home to avoid contracting — or spreading — the coronavirus, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found, in contrast to media accounts of noisy demonstrations in favor of “opening up” locked-down states. 

And medical researchers say that compliance helped reduce the spread of the coronavirus, which has killed 186,000 Americans. 

While the CDC did not explicitly endorse a new round of lockdowns — though others have in recent weeks — it did say that its new findings, which clearly endorse the practice, could help inform decisions as the nation continues to battle the pandemic.

 That isn’t likely to please President Trump, who has maintained that lockdowns do more harm than good.

The findings, which looked at county-by-county lockdown orders, offer a counter-narrative to the widespread images of anti-lockdown protesters crowding statehouses in Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere. Those images seemed to suggest there was a high degree of resistance to the lockdowns. Trump encouraged those protests and told governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democratic nemesis of the president, to move more quickly to open their states back up to economic and social activity. ...

“TSome thought at the time that media coverage focused too intensely on the protests, ignoring the millions of Americans who complied with the measures. That compliance, the CDC concluded, was evident in nearly 98 percent of surveyed counties.  And though the effect of locking down is still being studied, full national lockdowns in different countries “were significantly associated with increased patient recovery rates,” according to a Lancet study published last month.  ...