Even if that is an accurate assessment, the l goal if lockdown s was not only to stop people from getting sick, but to them from getting sick all at once & overloading the healthcare system in ways that would have caused more deaths. Getting the same number if people infected over a longer period of time is a useful tactic.

> keep the country from collapsing

Unless you have odd ideas about healthcare and hospitals, I think you overlooked a key part of OP’s question. Have you forgotten the horror that went down in NYC, Italy, etc? Hospitals were overwhelmed, patients piled up all over the place, the dead packed into refrigerated trucks, staff working endless hours, equipment shortages… and you suggest not locking down would have been the better course of action?! Wow.

Were you around in March 2020? You could have been banned from most communities for suggesting this.

A ltierature review by economists is possibly the least-valuable class of paper you could cite short of actual blog posts.

This specific paper throws out anything that even mentions any effect but mortality, any paper that compares real-world results to predictive models, and includes papers from various dumping grounds an non-peer-reviewed outlets. Any paper which attempts to introduce rigor is dismissed. Some of the papers cited are actual blog posts. This paper itself is self-published by one of the authors. The second figure disagrees with its own source (it cites six specific weeks early in the outbreak, during which time the stringency index did not change, but the x axis is a range of unsourced claims). It cites the GRADE handbook to support its hyperfocus on mortality rates (to the exclusion of literally all other considerations) but fails to note that the GRADE handbook is a health care guide and healthcare institutions were in the process of being overrun during the period they investigate, basically making the now-classic "but it only has an x% death rate" misdirection we're accustomed to hearing from Facebook propagandists.

In short, this document is almost but not entirely worthless. It is worthless as a public policy resource, but it is highly valuable if you want to make noise about how the Danes should have followed Sweden's example in 2020.

It's just as well they don't seem to have bothered minting a DOI for this, because web forum comments are the only places it's going to be cited. It's sloppy work, basically cherry-picking datasets, and then using them to affirm the consequent. I'm embarassed for the authors.