Lockdown? That was so not worth it

Lockdowns to curb Covid’s spread had a massive damaging effect across all of society—but did they actually save lives?

Lockdown has been a blunt cudgel to knock out Covid-19’s spread. And it’s been no free lunch: businesses have closed for good, people haven’t had urgent medical care, marriages have been postponed, mourners have been barred from funerals, children have missed school and families have been kept apart. 

So, has it saved lives? That hasn’t been so easy to answer, partly because health agencies have played fast and loose with the number of Covid deaths, often conflating those who died ‘with’ Covid and those who died ‘from’ it, and countries with more of an aging population seem to have been worse hit.

A more reliable measure is excess deaths, the number of people who died compared to a five-year average, and researchers at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine have looked at just that, taking the death rates for 2015 to 2019 and comparing them to deaths in 2020 at the peak of the epidemic across 32 countries.1

We’ve added a column that shows the lockdown strategy for each country—and the results have thrown up some surprising findings. Twenty-two of the 24 countries that had excess deaths in 2020 went into full lockdown, and just two employed a ‘guidance-only’ strategy—where the public was merely advised to maintain social distancing and mask-wearing. 

Sweden, which was criticized by its European neighbors for eschewing lockdown, recorded an excess death rate of just 1.5 percent, far lower than its full-lockdown critics.

And just one of the five countries that recorded fewer deaths in 2020 had a full lockdown; three merely advised their citizens, and the other had a partial lockdown.

Was it all worth it? After all the suffering that lockdown wrought, the sad and bitter answer has to be that it wasn’t.

Key 

Guidelines only : social  distancing, mask-wearing advisory

Excess deaths (%):  2020  figures compared  to  the average  for the five prior  years (2015–2019)

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