Lockdowns may have prevented more than 3 m deaths in Europe

[Javert]

It's perfectly believable that lockdowns in Europe might have saved over 3 million lives but we'll never really know.  Brazil has had no lockdown and little in the way of government policies aimed at controlling the pandemic so that could form a comparison as events unfold there.

Yes but I think they are censoring their numbers last I heard?

[Hyperduck Quack Quack]

It's perfectly believable that lockdowns in Europe might have saved over 3 million lives but we'll never really know.  Brazil has had no lockdown and little in the way of government policies aimed at controlling the pandemic so that could form a comparison as events unfold there.

[johnofgwent]

Methinks the key word is ESTIMATED

[Borg Refinery]

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/09/1002936/lockdowns-may-have-prevented-more-than-3-million-deaths-in-europe/">https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/0 ... in-europe/">https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/09/1002936/lockdowns-may-have-prevented-more-than-3-million-deaths-in-europe/

Lockdowns in Europe helped stop 3.1 million deaths up to the start of May, researchers have estimated. Strictly limiting people's movements and enforcing social distancing cut the average number of people that contagious individuals infected by 81%. The measures pushed the epidemic's reproduction number, R, down from 3.8 to below 1 in all 11 European countries they studied, including Germany, France, Spain, the UK, and Italy, thus drastically curbing transmission. The calculations by the team from Imperial College London are set out in a paper in Nature this week.



How it was worked out: The team combined data on covid-19 deaths from each of the 11 countries and worked backwards to figure out how much transmission had occurred in the weeks running up to May 4. They estimated that between 12 million and 15 million people had become infected up to that point, causing almost 130,000 deaths. They then compared these figures with a model assuming that no interventions had been made at all. An estimated 3.1 million deaths across the continent were averted, the model suggested. France's lockdown was estimated to have prevented the most deaths: roughly 690,000. Instead, there were about 23,000.

It's pub'd in nature, maybe it will be interesting to see what others' reviews of it turned up.