Lockdown 'killed two people for every three who died of coronavirus' at peak
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
This seems like two distinctly separate categories to me - if someone didn't go to the hospital because they feared the virus and later died, that person's death was completely unrelated to the lockdown (and if anything, a stronger lockdown could have saved some of those lives by ending the risk that drove them to stay home). If they didn't go to the hospital because of the advice to stay home rather than their own caution, I think that's a reasonable death to include in the numbers.
On the other hand especially the early days (or current reality for the US) meant much stress, especially for parents. Busy hospitals are also a challenge and can cause mistakes - and yet at the same time avoidance of less necessary procedures might in some ways again add a positive angle.
My point being it's all about the kind of data and timeframe you look at. In more practical terms the real consideration of the lockdowns needs to be counterfactual: how many people would have died without the lockdown. This by definition is really difficult to do as it's to a large degree guesswork.
Seriously, the problem with pandemics isn't just large numbers of people dying due to coronavirus, it's large numbers of people not being able to receive medical care because pandemic cases have already overwhelmed health services.
When there are no ICU rooms left, people who would otherwise survive (car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, etc) end up dying because the necessary level of care isn't possible.
When calculating the number of people who have died as a result of a pandemic you need to look at the excess death tally - e.g. how many people died during the pandemic, vs average death rate in prior years.
The other thing the article fails to acknowledge is that many of the people who died through not going the hospital may well have died anyway. So again, excess deaths is what matters.
Finally, if a hard lock down were actually enforced (like NZ), you bring the numbers down sufficiently rapidly to decrease the length of time of the lockdown, get the immediate load off the health care system, and then because you have a harsh lockdown, you can reopen more afterwards, and not immediately return to lockdown.
The various half assed lockdowns in the US demonstrate that "saving the economy" by not actually locking down has only served to damage the economy more by killing more people and increasing the length of time that those half assed lockdowns will need to hang around disrupting the economy.
Each treatment is risky and in short term some of them are are riskier than actually doing nothing with the medical problem you have. So less attempts at treatments means less deaths.
This effect was visible in Poland since we went into full lock down early on and never had peak infections like Spain or Italy so drop in mortality was not masked by deaths from covid.
Since the beginning of epidemic we had as much daily cases as countries have after regaining control after the huge peak.
Unfortunately since we really relaxed restrictions (formally and informally) and it's now summer we doubled the number of daily cases in less than two weeks which is scary.