Your assertions don't fit with the data you shared. The Y axis shows strictness and Norway has peaks that are higher and therefore stricter. I suspect you know this given you tried to double-down on it immediately.

If we are playing "No true Scotsman" with the lockdowns and dragging Sweden in, how would you explain Greece vs Sweden?

Excess Deaths per 100k [0]

Sweden: 102 Greece: 38

There is simply no compelling evidence that “lockdowns doing more harm than good” from an excess mortality point of view.

Excess Mortality source:

[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

Your favoured metric of lockdown severity:

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...

a single comparison really does nothing, here's japan vs sweden that shows the exact opposite - neither of these comparisons are useful for anything other than a datapoint that should be used to study the larger issue alongside all the other data we have

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...

deaths per million: japan: 103.81 sweden: 1,404.99

again, even though my single datapoint is a much stronger contrast - these single datapoints are not useful as evidence for/against lockdowns

It does do something. It proves you can lockdown without the lockdown itself causing significant excess mortality and gives more credence (as if it’s needed) to the excess mortality that is being seen in other countries being caused purely by COVID.

COVID skeptics are full of assertions such as: It’s just the flu, PCR tests are worthless, the lockdown is killing more people than it’s saving, suicides are way up, we won’t have a second wave etc. When these are proven false they come up with a new assertion, ignoring that they have been wrong about every assertion so far. The scary thing is they seem to sing from the same hymn sheet, so they are being fed this information from somewhere.

It doesn’t matter so much now that people are getting vaccinated, but the vocal minority was a real risk to the integrity of the measures such as lockdowns. If you get a critical mass of people believing this BS then you’ve got a real problem. We’ve seen how the Q-Anon misinformation movement has had real consequences but people seem oblivious when they are being fed FUD about COVID.

you should reread what you've just written and think a bit about who you think the problem is

we were having a conversation pretty tightly scoped to PCR tests that got loosened up (by you) to include lockdowns.

Now you're talking about Q-Anon among other unrelated things. If you want to have meaningful conversation that changes minds by informing people - this isn't the way to do it. It very much seems like you just lump everything into one big ball of political hot topic and leave very little room for nuance from people who disagree with you.

That's very unproductive and I'd suggest this mentality of assuming someone elses position based on political hot topics de jour is exactly why so many people are tribalistic when it comes to choosing what they believe with science.

You’re right about some of the things you are saying, I’ve maybe lumped you unfairly due to first hand experience.

Unfortunately, with my sample size of 2, I have seen the Q-Anon stuff happening real time. Note that I’m not even in America! Both people are engineers. One is an Albanian living in London and I can’t even compute how he’s so wired in to it all. They don’t even know each other but are lockstep with all the COVID stuff they say, now even on to the anti-vaxx angle.

I am american, but to be honest I don't quite know exactly what Q-Anon even is - I just never cared to read up on it I guess

As far as covid stuff I was basically unemployed for the first three months of the pandemic (only having a small workload) so I got super interested in reading white papers etc. you wouldn't believe the amount of absolutely terrible science that got pushed through the peer review process during covid. In another thread I detail a study someone used as evidence to support their opinion on asymptomatic thread.

The study was a model where they chose 75% asymptomatic spread relative to symptomatic spread for their model - the model unsurprisingly found asymp. spread to be roughly the same as symp. spread IIRC - now where did that 75% come from? I came from three studies they cite....2 of those 3 studies they cite do not have anything resembling the number they came up with. In one of the citations it was so bewilderingly wrong I can only conclude they cited the wrong study or they just made the number up entirely.

Back to the topic of PCR - I've seen zero literature to date that suggests a PCR with a CT>40 is beneficial. Further we have many studies that show false positives are absurdly high for many viruses well before CT40

So for someone to claim it's reasonable to use CT40, I believe the burden is on them to prove it since all literature I've seen suggests otherwise.

here's the garbage study: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...