Lockdowns come with huge socio-economic costs but do help reduce deaths.
Another article on this website examines the socio-economic costs of lockdowns and whether their viral spread benefits are worth it. This article is solely about whether lockdowns help reduce deaths.
Before we continue, a clarification: the article refers to lockdowns only limiting indoor activities. Limiting outdoor activities mostly doesn’t make sense, and implementing such measures was mostly a mistake.
Do lockdowns truly reduce COVID deaths?
Lockdowns reduce social interaction, and social interaction helps COVID spread; hence, lockdowns help reduce COVID spread.
And the higher the COVID spread, the more people die, so by reducing COVID spread, lockdowns reduce COVID deaths.
But wouldn’t people have been infected anyway?
Let’s assume it’s true. When people get infected matters a lot. First of all, slowing the spread down might mean that fewer people get infected before they get vaccinated, and that alone would mean that fewer people die.
Secondly, slowing down the spread and smoothing the peaks of infections help reduce pressure on the healthcare system, which means that patients get better treatment, which means that fewer patients die – including patients who might have needed treatment for conditions other than COVID.
Thirdly, how many times one gets infected matters. Especially for the vulnerable, the more times they get infected, the higher their chances of suffering from severe effects from at least one infection. Reducing spread helps reduce the number of times one gets infected, and that saves lives.
But lockdowns cause people to spend more time indoors.
Yes, but which indoor spaces matters. Most people would spend at least 8 to 10 hours at home anyway. Spending more than ten hours in the same location with the same people only marginally increases the risks of infection.
Conversely, lockdowns reduce the number of indoor spaces we spend time in and the number of people we spend time indoors with, and that really helps lower the risk of infection.
If lockdowns work, why did Sweden have such low excess deaths?
Probably because they had a healthier population, or a better healthcare system, or less virus entered the country in the initial stages of the pandemic, or some other country-specific variable.
Consider that Bulgaria, a country with a similar policy strictness as Sweden’s, was the European country with the worst excess deaths rate.
Moreover, consider that few countries want to lock down. Most lock down when the internal situation gets too bad. This means that the countries that lock down are likely to witness high deaths anyway – or, more precisely, high deaths if they lock down and even higher ones if they don’t. Conversely, countries that do not lock down are usually countries whose internal situation is not too bad to begin with. And countries that do not lock down despite a bad internal situation end up like Bulgaria, with a ton of deaths.
Do lockdowns kill more people than they save?
Probably not. If they did, places that locked down while having low spread, such as Singapore in 2020 or Sicily during the first wave, would have witnessed high excess deaths. Instead, they recorded negative excess deaths: that is, fewer people died than during a usual year.
This is because lockdowns prevent viral spread of all kinds – not just COVID, but also the flu, etc., which saves lives – and because they lower suicides (in 2020, suicides decreased by 8% in the UK[1] and by 3% in the US[2]).
Do lockdowns cause more deaths because of decreased access to healthcare?
This question is explored in depth in this article. The short answer is: probably not.
What about school closures? Do they work?
School closures come with huge costs for the children, and they should be avoided if possible. (The article “How to keep schools open safely” explains how they can be kept open during a pandemic.)
That said, most of what has been said about lockdowns also applies to school closures: they are costly but they work, they reduce the spread at least partially, and how much they reduce it depends, among others, on what other measures are used to reduce the spread. In fact, studies from before 2020[3] estimate that school closures reduce the spread of flu between 16% and 40%).
Conclusions
Despite having large socio-economic costs, lockdowns save lives – both from COVID and from other causes.