There was no ability to "run a controlled experiment" in the midst of a novel pandemic. A minimum of 600k Americans died. That's the world with all of the inte

There was no ability to "run a controlled experiment" in the midst of a novel pandemic. A minimum of 600k Americans died. That's the world with all of the interventions (many of which were probably unnecessary in retrospect!). Could we have pared some down sooner? Sure but it's 100% guaranteed that the death count would have been much higher had we done nothing like you seem to have think would have been a good idea. Stopping in-person school and travel and universal masking are self-evidently going to reduce transmission, so I have no idea what "study" you expect to see. This is just covid denialism churched up with some historian's fallacy. Again, what was 100x worse? In your world in which kids went to school and we let healthy people come-and-go from covid-infested hospitals, how many more people would have died to justify that "freedom"? Our CFR is something like 2% (before Delta) - what does that calculate to if a few more tens of millions of additional people got the disease?