Thread by @GidMK

People ask this question a lot, and I think it's actually worth an answer, so my thoughts:

Have lockdowns caused large numbers of excess deaths? 1/10

https://twitter.com/kknnaabb/status/1370949787084746752

2/10 The MAJOR caveat here is that we are only looking at short-term impact. Long-term impact is going to take a while to assess

3/10 What would we expect to see if lockdowns caused large numbers of deaths?

Well, lots of COVID+lockdown would = many deaths, and no COVID+lockdown would ALSO = many deaths

4/10 If COVID was relatively safe, and lockdowns harmful in the short term, we'd also expect to see that lots of COVID and NO lockdown would be associated with FEW deaths

5/10 The first situation (COVID+lockdown) is obviously associated with many deaths. Tons of examples across the world to look at using this excellent paper on excess mortality medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

6/10 However, when we look at NO lockdown, and lots of COVID, we see a similar issue. Lots of excess mortality that is probably down to the virus itself

7/10 As for places WITH lockdowns and little/no COVID?

Well, the numbers look very different. Few excess deaths if any at all

8/10 These numbers are pretty similar across different investigations of excess mortality - in fact, it appears that lockdowns where there's NO COVID are associated with ~fewer~ deaths that expected

9/10 This doesn't mean that lockdowns work, or that they're perfect, or any such nonsense

It doesn't even mean that they definitely don't kill people (remember, short-term)

10/10 It DOES mean that the best current evidence suggests that lockdowns in and of themselves are not associated with detectable increases in mortality

They may even REDUCE deaths overall

11/10 Small addendum - lockdowns could still be bad if they saved lives, the point here is that we are completely lacking the evidence that we'd expect to find if lockdowns caused many deaths as some claim