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It's possible that lockdown didn't reduce deaths. Excess deaths is a tricky stat because it contains so much underlying confounding inputs that all you know is that more people died than what you expected based on historical averages and that is --all-- you can get from it reliably.

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Yeah I would look for “medical” deaths (as opposed to crime, suicides and accidents) as the metric to compare to covid deaths. Not sure if that data is widely available.

The other thing to add to the mix of ups and downs is that the demographic of covid deaths is overly people with a short life expectancy so I would expect 2021 excess deaths to be reduced by the 2020 covid deaths that would have died in 2021 otherwise.

I agree with this. I think that would be a measure of the direct impact and as long as it also factors in all types of medical deaths. I personally know people who died waiting for a hospital bed for completely unrelated stuff.

But what about places where less people died than normal?

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