What is happening in India? The death rate per capita there is still way less than in the US or UK. How come the death rate in Florida is less than that in California and New York, in spite of no lockdowns and an older population in Florida?
There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.
California and New York both came close to having their health care systems overwhelmed in certain counties, Florida did not. That's exactly my point.
> There's no statistical evidence that countries with stricter lockdowns had a lower death rate than those without.
Honestly, you would expect it to be the other way around. Lockdowns are a last-resort tool to prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed. You would expect areas that implement lockdowns to be either denser (thus, hypothetically having less warning time between rising case counts and hospital saturation) or, more likely, to have an existing large scale Covid problem that they need to get under control.
Lockdowns are correlated with bad Covid outcomes because lockdowns are implemented in places that are liable to, or are already having, bad Covid problems.
http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess...
This was widely known in the US on the first week of March in 2020.
When hospitals reach capacity, people in their 40s and 50s become much more likely to die from Covid. Lots of preventable loss of life is going to occur, from Covid and from everything else that can't be attended to because the hospitals are full.
The point of lockdowns is not to reduce the individual risk. It's to reduce the collective risk of getting hit by a runaway train that completely overwhelms our health systems.