Exactly. People who complain about the NSA spying on Americans don’t appreciate how many terrorist incidents were stopped. It would be way worse otherwise.

Compare states - Florida with almost no mitigation, vs New York, New Jersey, or California with extreme mitigation.

Go ahead and check the pre-vaccine data - there is no indication that the extreme mitigations did anything.

Have you actually looked at the data? Take a look at this study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261286v...

And you do realize that in the past month Florida has 3x as many deaths as California, while being a much smaller state.

This is an unfalsifiable claim. Sweden used but a fraction of the mitigations Israel did, yet the former is better off now.

How can you prove the mitigations worked? The only controls out there (Sweden, some US states, etc.) aren’t very robust (nor in favor of mitigation efforts).

There are 50 states in the US, all of which had different responses and mitigations in place last year. There is no compelling evidence that they made much difference, let alone a 5x one.

All you have to do is look at a deaths/infections curve before and after mitigations.

it's been looked at several times, and a vast majority of the convincing evidence seems to fall in favor of the camp that overall mitigations do nearly nothing compared to control samples of places with no/fewer restrictions

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

That article is more than a year old. A far newer, more complete assessment shows that mitigations do you have an impact in reducing deaths and infections:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261286v...

Yes, but you need a control to compare it against. How do you get one?

Just look at the trend line? You might also want to look at the excess statistically significant deaths numbers.

https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac8...

You need controls to account for confounding factors. Looking at a trend line does not account for confounding factors.

Ok, what would be a confounding factor?

There's no convincing evidence the mitigations made a real difference, especially in the long-run. I'd expect to see bodies in the streets in Sweden given that they largely avoided the ritualistic behavior that the rest of the western world engaged in.

Unfortunately, people have it so drilled into their heads that the lockdowns and masks worked, that I don't know what I could possibly say to convince someone otherwise.