Lockdowns do not harm health more than Covid, say researchers - The Guardian

The analysis, published in the journal BMJ Global Health, considered claims that lockdowns cause more health harms than Covid-19 by examining their impacts on measures including death rates, routine health services and mental health.

As part of their study, researchers examined countries which imposed heavy restrictions with few Covid cases to assess whether the intervention was triggering excess mortality, said author Prof Gavin Yamey, from the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University.

In contrast, places with few Covid restrictions such as Brazil, Sweden, Russia and at times parts of the US had large numbers of excess deaths over the course of the pandemic.

The excess-mortality data could not rule out harms caused by lockdown or conclude whether lockdowns have a net benefit, however, especially given very high excess mortality in many nations that did pursue such strategies such as the UK, the researchers wrote.

However, “the fact that there are no locations anywhere in the world where a lockdown without large numbers of Covid cases was associated with large numbers of excess deaths shows quite convincingly that the interventions themselves cannot be worse than large Covid outbreaks, at least in the short term”.