This is very frustrating. We know that it was not meant to reduce deaths.<p>The lockdowns were, and are, meant to spread out the deaths that we knew were going to happen. The goal was, and is, to avoid acutely overwhelming our hospital systems so people with emergency ailments like a heart attack could still get immediate care.
Sounds like one hell of a clickbait title of scientific lit to me:
"A LITERATURE REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS OF LOCKDOWNS ON COVID-19 MORTALITY"<p>FYI written by a bunch of economists.
A political scientist and two economists walk into a room and setup that headline. Sounds like this one needs some critical examination from expert sources before it's taken for anything.
As far as I remember, the majority of lock-downs were imposed only _after_ the local medical system was becoming overwhelmed, and in a direct response to that happening.
The current spike in cases could be seen as a control scenario for what would have happened without lockdowns (remember "flatten the curve"?). For the Alpha variant, the case-fatality rate for the original variant was about 1%. In the US, the latest numbers are 424k/day. So we can suppose that if numbers were as high then, we'd have seen about 4.2k deaths/day, compared to the actual spring 2020 peak of ~2500. And that doesn't consider the probable knock-on effects on our medical system, since the hospitalization rate would have likely been much higher.