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?