There has been some evidence both ways, but I think that the best argumentation has been that lockdowns were net-negative by a lot. Dumbledore’s Army linked this paper, which is not the same as the one that originally convinced me, but it’s also good and I don’t have the other link on hand.
In particular, analyses in favor of lockdowns tended to make two errors:
They compare a lockdown to a hypothetical situation in which there is no mitigation at all, rather than allowing for private, voluntary mitigation.
They assume that infections which do not occur during the lockdown never occur at all, rather than simply occurring later. Since we never got close to actually eradicating COVID, deaths during lockdown were mostly delayed rather than prevented. (The exception would be the cases where we delayed long enough to get good treatments or vaccines, or where we avoided medical system collapse, but even taking these into account the benefit is still smaller than assumed.)
Most importantly: relying on voluntary isolation allows people to choose their level of risk based on their vulnerability, their risk tolerance, and their ability to bear the costs. This is not perfect (you wind up with some people who would prefer to self-isolate but can’t do so for economic reasons), but it’s still miles better than forcing the same policy onto everyone.
There has been some evidence both ways, but I think that the best argumentation has been that lockdowns were net-negative by a lot. Dumbledore’s Army linked this paper, which is not the same as the one that originally convinced me, but it’s also good and I don’t have the other link on hand.
In particular, analyses in favor of lockdowns tended to make two errors:
They compare a lockdown to a hypothetical situation in which there is no mitigation at all, rather than allowing for private, voluntary mitigation.
They assume that infections which do not occur during the lockdown never occur at all, rather than simply occurring later. Since we never got close to actually eradicating COVID, deaths during lockdown were mostly delayed rather than prevented. (The exception would be the cases where we delayed long enough to get good treatments or vaccines, or where we avoided medical system collapse, but even taking these into account the benefit is still smaller than assumed.)
Most importantly: relying on voluntary isolation allows people to choose their level of risk based on their vulnerability, their risk tolerance, and their ability to bear the costs. This is not perfect (you wind up with some people who would prefer to self-isolate but can’t do so for economic reasons), but it’s still miles better than forcing the same policy onto everyone.