Lockdowns did not save lives in the United States
A study in The Lancet comparing pandemic policies in their outcomes in America's 50 states
A paper from last year in the Lancet showed no impact of lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates, or stay-at-home orders on deaths from COVID19 in America, instead finding only downsides to these policies.
This is consistent with most of the scientific literature.
Update:
It has been brought to my attention that pro-lockdowners are emphasizing the graph from the paper showing cases instead of deaths.
This makes no sense to me. Why would the graph on cases take priority over the one on deaths?
It hadn't even occurred to me to present the data in that way.
Protecting people against death is what matters, especially since we now know that Long COVID is rare.
What the pro-lockdowners are saying is that the effect of lockdowns is only seen in cases, not deaths, because other factors are obscuring their impact on deaths.
But does that not suggest that lockdowns have a very marginal benefit, in the big scheme of things, if their benefit can be so easily lost when overwhelmed by these other factors?
Does it not suggest that these other factors are the ones we should be focusing on?
In any case, here is the graph showing cases. It's not the one that should be used for evaluating the effectiveness of mandates, in my opinion. But here it is for completeness.
Covid was the regular flu
Of course the case reductions are seriously confounded as well.
Google mobility data from the UK showed that mobility was reduced by around 50% before lockdowns began (https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/19/how-much-did-lockdown-affect-uk-mobility/)
People were told to work from home if they could, not to go out, and generally lie low. Which by and large they did, similar observations were seen throughout the West (including in Sweden where they just avoided the lockdown part but still saw significant voluntary reductions in mobility.
The lockdowns are always treated (particularly in the impressive looking modelling charts) as if they took population mobility from 100 to -80, when in fact they really took mobility from - 40/50% to -70/80%.
This might explain why the lockdowns don't correspond with the declines in death, much of the case reduction already occured before lockdowns, confounding their supposed effect.
Equally it means lockdowns may not even have the effect on cases the lockdowners believe as significant amounts of those effects were probably the result of voluntary actions (confounding).
Of course the lockdowners and the modellers that support them live in an ignorant binary world that ignores chaos theory completely.
It would be valuable if epidemiologists took a little time to understand the implications of chaos theory on interventions in systems that display chaos (like pandemics) and the further implications that has on their ridiculous modelling (that it has no predictive power whatsoever).