A professor said there is “no empirical evidence” to indicate government-imposed lockdowns have been successful in combating the spread of the coronavirus.

Wilfred Reilly, who is a professor at Kentucky State University, posted a piece last week on the Spiked website that examined the effectiveness of various strategies federal and state governments have implemented to contain the outbreak.

The author of Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War and Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About acknowledged that only a "small pool" of people have received testing for the coronavirus, which gets to the heart of the empirical evidence issue. Nearly 5 million people have been tested in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, which would be about 1.5% of the U.S. population.

Health experts argue there needs to be more widespread testing, even as some states begin to reopen their economies, and warn that protests against stay-at-home measures that are designed to be preventative could "backfire."

Still, Wilfred defended his assessment, saying, “It should not be taboo to discuss these facts."

Wilfred said he looked at coronavirus infection data and considered state statistics such as population, population density, median income, median age, and diversity of each state. He said he found no evidence proving “lockdowns are a more effective way of handling coronavirus than well-done social-distancing measures.”

“The most basic way to test this thesis is by direct comparison," he said. "As of 6 April, seven U.S. states had not adopted shelter-in-place orders, instead imposing social-distancing restrictions such as banning large gatherings and mandating six-foot spacing gaps and maximum customer limits inside all retail stores."

Wilfred compared seven states that opted not to enforce strict lockdown measures and looked at the data showing the number of infections and deaths from the virus and then averaged them out. Compared to the rest of the country, Wilfred argued these numbers hold up "fairly well." Wilfred considered how states such as New York and California have a much higher population density than some states that did not impose strict shutdowns, including South Dakota and Wyoming.

“An advocate of lockdowns could object that the social-distancing states are little places, located in America’s ‘flyover land,’” Wilfred wrote. “While this charge might be based as much on bias as reality — Utah, Nebraska, and South Carolina are sizable places — the next step of my analysis was to adjust for population, using a standard deaths-per-million metric. In alphabetical order, the seven social-distancing states experienced 12, 19, 11, 12, 8, 7 and three deaths per million — for an average of 10 deaths per million when you exclude South Carolina and 12 with South Carolina included.”

Wilfred acknowledged that no single analysis is truly conclusive. He encouraged others to “re-run” his model, which he acknowledged was "limited to five independent variables due to the small number of state-level observations available," to come to their own conclusions. "The more data, the better," he wrote.

The professor is joined by other skeptics of lockdown measures, which are meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus, who raise concerns about infringement on civil liberties and the economic toll they bring. An article last week from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, made the case that lockdowns "don't work."

On the other side of the debate, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico magazine, called the idea that lockdowns don’t work “absurd.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said the U.S. should double coronavirus testing before reopening the country so health experts can get a clearer idea of the scope of the pandemic.