Interesting that New Zealand and Australia were excluded from the study. Both had hard lockdowns and both eliminated the virus and are largely back to normal life. Makes me suspect the data was cherry picked to fit a desired outcome.
I spot-checked the first link:<p><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484" rel="nofollow">https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13484</a><p>The argument is the same well-hashed "Sweden is a counterexample" with mathematical window dressing. Bonus points for chopping the Sweden dataset before the big spike in Swedish cases even though the paper was published after the spike and is still being held up as a flagship example half a year after <i>that</i>.<p>Like the other anti-lockdown papers I've spot checked, I'm not impressed.
One thing I noticed here in California is that the societal behavior followed its own curve independent of the lockdowns. Ie. People locked down before lockdown was issued by government. When government lifted the lockdown people remained at home. When people started going out and cases went up people started staying at home again, then the lockdown came. So the lockdown itself had no impact although the removal of the lockdown would not have helped Most of the businesses who lost their customers.
Study Ottawa Canada. 4 waves, and the wave peaked 2 weeks after the imposition of stricter controls for all 4. It's all about compliance, and Ottawa has fairly good voluntary compliance and little of the essential industry that escaped lockdown and has been fueling the outbreaks elsewhere in Ontario.
I’m dubious of the papers.<p>The Lancet paper uses data only up to 1st May 2020, so really not much.<p>One uses the Imperial College model, which, after looking at the published source code, I am near certain is gibberish. My biases aside, peer review showed that it is very sensitive to input parameters, which is incidentally what the linked paper says about lockdown effects, so hard to take seriously IMHO.<p>Another says that after subtracting the effect of minor restrictions, the major restrictions had no measurable effect. But surely harsher restrictions are only brought in when rates are going up a lot, so maybe these two effects cancel out? Everyone, except Australia and NZ, avoid harsh lockdowns as much as they can.<p>Meanwhile, in the UK “2nd lockdown”, which was quite light, the overall R coef for Covid dropped below 1, but remained above 1 for the “British variant”, clearly showing that had the lockdown continued as it was, it would not be effective. Also there are just so many conspicuous timings with new cases peaking 1-2 weeks after harsher lockdowns are introduced, I think it’s hard to dismiss out of hand. Yeah, it’s technically possible that the causality isn’t there but I struggle to believe that.