Do/did lockdowns work?

[djay]

The lockdowns have a big cost but did it result in less deaths or illness? and did it work in Thailand

[djay]

Good analysis in More or less podcast 23rd Feb of recent study (jan 22) claiming lockdowns had very little effect

• more in Fact check by USAToday
  The mains reasons are that
• they define lockdown poorly including very different measures under the same definition
• they exclude any study in their meta analysis that includes modelling so only end up with very few studies. They cherry picked their data.

Many other studies show lockdowns do work. #TODO: references
e.g.

• https://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/research/do-covid-lockdowns-really-work
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7

Thailand mobility data shows complex situation where mobility is influenced by restriction policies and peoples reaction to rising/falling cases, so it's not easy to say one causes the other

You can try to compare countries but without controlling for comorbities, ages etc direct comparisons are not fair.
But it's not hard to find a lot of countries that took more relaxed stances like USA, sweeden and see that their cumalitve deaths were more than thailand. Thailand avoided the first waves buying time to vaccinate and this is the most likely reason. Nz/AU did the same.

Should Thailand have been like Sweden?

One example brought up a lot is Sweden with the idea that they had less lockdowns and did well due to that. For a start it's a misunderstanding that Sweden had no social distancing.

Data on restrictions shows that sweden did not have no restrictions.

• Schools Sweden vs Thailand
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• Borders: Sweden vs Thailand
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• Stay at home: Sweden vs Thailand
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• Workplace: Sweden vs Thailand
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Source: Reuters

OWID shows similar

Source OWID

Mask use was a big difference between the countries

Perhaps because sweden like most of the rest of the world got hit hard in the first waves and Thailand didn't the cumulative death rate in Sweden is not good.

[Source: IHME](https://covid19.healthdata.org/thailand?view=cumulative-deaths&tab=compare)