Did lockdowns serve their purpose?

TL;DR

This study analyzes COVID-19 death dynamics across countries, showing that lockdowns significantly influence mortality trends and support their effectiveness in reducing virus lethality.

Contribution

It demonstrates a universal pattern in COVID-19 death data when aligned to lockdown start, providing model-free evidence for lockdowns' effectiveness.

Findings

Universal death curve collapse after lockdown start

Sweden's deviation from the pattern

Lockdowns likely mitigate virus lethality

Abstract

We show that the dynamics of the number of deaths due to Covid in different countries is to a large extent universal once the origin of time is chosen to be the start of the lockdown, and the number of death is rescaled by the total number of deaths after the lockdown, itself a proxy of the number of infections at the start of the lockdown. Such a curve collapse is much less convincing when normalizing by the total population. Sweden, with its no-lockdown, light-touch approach, is the only outlier that deviates considerably from the average behavior. We argue that these model-free findings provide strong support for the effectiveness of the lockdowns in mitigating the lethality of the virus.