Mass business closures would show up in GDP stats fairly quickly, i.e. be visible by now. Regardless, we need to compare to the appropriate counterfactual; you

Mass business closures would show up in GDP stats fairly quickly, i.e. be visible by now. Regardless, we need to compare to the appropriate counterfactual; you're still listing a bunch of bad things that happened, but implicitly comparing those to some world where the pandemic never happened - but it did happen, so that's not valid; you need to tease out how much of those downsides are due to "lockdowns" specifically. There's just not a lot of clearcut evidence showing lockdowns actually were worse than the alternative - self-imposed lockdowns, or pre-vaccination mass outbreaks. Some countries suffered more; others less; but I can't see a trend (maybe somebody can, but at least a few papers on the topic are clearly biased, which doesn't help). For instance When you ascribe Fentanyl overdose deaths to lockdowns, that's a mistake. Some of those are pandemic related, sure - but not necessarily the formal lockdown bits of it. Social distancing was going to happen no matter what; as was economic disruption and huge amounts of stress - and those factors may well increase the likelihood of overdose - but they would have applies with or without lockdowns. Furthermore, the huge number of ODs existed prior to the pandemic too - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/20211117.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/... - lists the year ending in April 2021 as having 28.5% more deaths than the year ending in April 2020; and fentanyl OD deaths had been rising consistently for years up to that point too, i.e. it's not reasonable to assume they wouldn't have risen even without without covid and without lockdowns. Some of that rise was due to pre-existing trends, some of it due to covid - and perhaps very little due to lockdowns; especially if the alternative to lockdowns was even more deaths and social upheaval leading to "voluntary" economic shutdown. It's perfectly plausible lockdowns caused some of those deaths; yet it's also possible they prevented yet more OD deaths too. And if Fentanyl OD's were due to lockdowns, you might expect their timing to be correlated with them, or that states with more and stronger lockdowns have higher rates - but I can't find any evidence of that - can you? Furthermore, let's talk about that word "lockdown", which you describe as being rigidly present - well, 0% of the world's countries had rigid lockdowns for the duration of the pandemic. Some had long, very mild non-pharmaceutical interventions (including some in Sweden!). Some had occasional harsher measures, but with many long pauses in between. We might as well call these "policies", because that better represents just how diverse all these measures were, and because it doesn't prejudice the reader into thinking these measures were all particularly harsh. Is a mask-mandate for shops a lockdown? How about for public transport? How about a max-occupancy for, say, a theater? Or school closures for over 16s? How about vaccine requirements for restaurants? Or vaccine passports for large gatherings? Or non-binding work-from-home advice? ... even when in practice major firms enforce it? And even that belies practical complexities - I sure get the impression that most places, for most of the duration of the pandemic did not actually police many covid-restriction-violations very harshly. But that too will have differed from place to place, not to mention populations differ due to culture and habits and how any given restriction interacted with other restrictions. We can't just throw all these policies in one big huge box labelled "lockdowns", give it a good shake, and expect meaningful data to emerge: that's classic garbage in, garbage out. Some of the policies were surely more effective than others; and some more harmful. But which policies? If that weren't bad enough; clearly various countries had waves of differing intensities at different times, largely not due to anything the government was or was not doing. And governments deal with worse situations using the tools they have - including restrictions. But that raises the question of causality, too - in places that suffered more from social distancing and more from covid, which variable caused what change in which other variable? When we see "high death rate", what we _don't_ see is how high it _would_ have been with different policies (such as no restrictions). It's perfectly plausible that a country had excellent policy, including harsh lockdowns, real lock-down related damages, and high death rates - all at once! Because the alternative might have been much worse; and _that's_ hard to measure; we can't do randomized controlled trials on entire countries.