More plots for your consideration, focusing on W. Europe. The first looks at Oxford lockdown stringency. Did it affect the maximum daily deaths/million? The maximum stringency certainly did not for these 18 countries. In fact there is a weak correlation in the wrong direction. 1/ 
Meaning that the countries with harshest lockdowns had higher max daily deaths/M. Digging further, let’s look at the first day each country saw significant fatal infections. I lagged reported deaths (7d ma) by 25 days to approx day of infection. Then... 2/
I plotted the first day of 2020 where infections lead to 0.5 deaths/M. Note that the earlier the pandemic began ramping up in a country, the worse the max daily deaths/M. Not a bad R^2. 3/
Next I looked at epidemic “takeoff rate.” You may have seen my earlier plots tracking deaths by date of infection. Here is the UK. The early linear section represents 25% exponential growth before the Gompertz curve goes linear and noses over. So 25% was the UK’s takeoff rate 4/
But Norway for example only had a takeoff rate of 15%. 5/
How did takeoff rate affect the peak daily deaths/M? Pretty significantly it would seem. And note that the takeoff period for most countries was well before any significant lockdown. The higher the takeoff, the higher the peak D/M with a fairly tight quadratic relationship. 6/
So what does this tell us? Max lockdown stringency again appears not to be a deciding factor in outcome. But countries that were infected earlier and had a higher epidemic takeoff rate fared worse. Lockdown or no. Sweden is in there and these factors describe its outcome well 7/
...even though it had the mildest lockdown. Why did some countries get it bad early on? Sweden’s Dr Tegnell says that those countries got an early heavy dose all at once before anyone was aware, too late for most measures other than hygiene and protecting the vulnerable. 8/
Interested in constructive discussion. This is what I see, maybe you see something else. But in my mind (and the WHO’s at one time) once a virus is spreading, lockdown is futile. /end
