[exotree]

This is very frustrating. We know that it was not meant to reduce deaths.

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.

[hattmall]

That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely. There were lots of estimates all over the place that said X amount of deaths in 6 months with lockdowns, and X amount with out, and things like staying home 2 weeks vs 3 weeks will save X many lives.

It's my understanding that there are STILL places with some sort of lockdown going on.

The effect of lockdowns is particularly difficult to quantify though because the results seem to have been mostly the same in my area which had no lockdowns / restrictions / masking after May 1 2020 and some other places which have had all manner of restrictions and some people are even still wearing masks nearly two years later.

There are really so many variables and variable outcomes. It's really kind of a dream scenario for a data scientist because I don't know that there has ever been such a large push to make statistical information available. Their needs to be some sort of gauge / metric to quantify the level of restrictions and also look at the externalities of those.

[BaseballPhysics]

> That's not really how it was initially portrayed entirely

What did you think "bend the curve" meant, exactly? But that was the mantra when these measures were instituted.

[gojomo]

That wasn’t the only justification!

The hope was also that by preventing such ‘overwhelming’, net lives would be saved – whether just by keeping those other non-COVID medical services available, or also by delaying COVID cases to later when knowledge or capacity would allow better treatment.

If you believe this meta-analysis, even that capacity-sparing aspect showed very little effect on total deaths.

[offbeatrock]

No we didn't know buddy.

"Fauci defends coronavirus lockdowns as saving 'millions of lives'"

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/503468-fauci-defends-c...

[Dwelve]

Did people in countries that did not do a lockdown fail to get immediate care for their heart attacks because the hospitals were overwhelmed?

Thankfully we have control groups in Sweden and Florida, so you can prove your point in a very simple way by showing me the increased heart attack deaths in both those places.

[disambiguation]

and also buy time until we had better treatments and prevention.