Not that face masks make up the entirety of pandemic theater. Political figures ordered businesses and schools closed (while exempting themselves from inconvenient rules), restricted travel, and savaged anybody who objected. But the evidence suggests these authoritarian measures impose high costs in return for little benefit. A new working paper covering state-level pandemic policy published by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that closing businesses and schools increased unemployment and reduced GDP without reducing deaths from COVID-19.

“The correlation between health and economy scores is essentially zero, which suggests that states that withdrew the most from economic activity did not significantly improve health by doing so,” wrote authors Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, and Stephen Moore and Phil Kerpen of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. (Hawaii is an exception, suggesting to the authors “that island locations can, by sustaining significant economic losses, reduce mortality for a year or more.”)

The study largely replicated findings in an earlier paper by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke that lockdowns in Europe and the United States were ineffective.