> Doesn't seem to be the case so far in Sweden. In fact Minnesota's per-capita rate of COVID deaths just surpassed Sweden's even though they've done much more i

> Doesn't seem to be the case so far in Sweden. In fact Minnesota's per-capita rate of COVID deaths just surpassed Sweden's even though they've done much more in the way of lockdowns. According to Oxford and NYTimes, Minnesota has relatively lax lockdowns compared to other states: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/18/us/covid-state-restrictions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/18/us/covid-stat.... States in the US with more lockdowns also have lower hospitalization and case rates, which suggests that lockdowns are at least correlated with lower infections. To prove causation, you might want more evidence, but to me the mechanism of how lockdowns prevent infections is pretty clear. > The degree of hospital overcrowding seems overstated at the moment: https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1334565211148152832 https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1334565211148152832 This is lazy analysis. Like another responder said, national averages don't matter much when individual cities are being overwhelmed. A tech analogy: You can't say that your service is healthy just because its median latency is 50ms. If the p99 latency is a minute, then your service has performance issues. Second, because of containment measures, the prevalence of the cold and flu (and other contagious diseases) has also gone down. 2019 is not the correct baseline to make a comparison -- 2019 with lockdowns (and no COVID) would be.