There are actually five studies now on this, all show that it has <10% positive effect on spread of covid, and no delta in excess deaths it just changes causes from covid-19 to deaths of despair.
This also claims that the more restrictive measures actually increased the spread:
In none of the 8 countries and in none out of the 16 comparisons (against Sweden or South Korea) were the effects of mrNPIs significantly negative (beneficial). The point estimates were positive (point in the direction of mrNPIs resulting in increased daily growth in cases) in 12 out of 16 comparisons (significantly positive in 3 of the 12, in Spain and in England compared with Sweden). The only country where the point estimates of the effects of mrNPIs were negative in both comparisons was Iran (-0.07 [95CI -0.21 - 0.07] compared with Sweden; -0.02 [95CI -0.28 - 0.25] compared with South Korea).
Certainly in the UK back in March/April a large number of deaths are likely attributable to sick older people being placed back into care homes from hospital to free up capacity
What I see missing from this and several other types of analysis is lockdowns aren’t supposed to be instantly effective. A single infected individual will expose potentially many people in their household. That’s known and accepted, the goal is to stop the spread between groups. Effectively you need to compare infection growth rates 1 month into a lockdown not 1 day.
Unfortunately, US covid data is also really unreliable as the percentage of people diagnosed clearly isn’t constant over the course of the pandemic. Most obviously dips in daily infections and deaths over Thanksgiving and Christmas are clearly artifacts in data collection.
Looking at for example the weekly all-cause deaths in the U.S. shows large spikes corresponding to the 3 waves, but those peaks don’t map to the reported daily COVID deaths. Similarly the rates of COVID hospitalization and deaths don’t map between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_the_COVID-19_pan...
PS: It’s easy to count the number of positive test results, much harder to accurately estimate total infections over time.
