One of the constant complaints about lockdown has been that more people would die of the lockdown than of the disease.
There's been no evidence to support the claim, but it's damned hard to prove it can't be true, either.
Somehow the Rightists don't whip out their favorite No Data argument when it comes to arguing lockdowns are worse for people's health.
I don't think its hard to prove that it can't be true. Excess deaths (how many more people are we seeing die now than during equivalent periods previous years) have been used to track the true toll of COVID, usually to argue that the official death toll is being under-counted. I've seen different estimates on how far those under-counts go, but most I believe put it more or less at 15-20% excess deaths unaccounted for.
Now even if you were to argue that every one of those excess deaths was due to lockdown and not related to physical response to COVID itself (very, very unlikely, but even so) you would not get a number that is higher than confirmed COVID deaths, but a number that is 15-20% of confirmed COVID deaths. Then factor in that we know there would be
even more confirmed COVID deaths if there wasn't a lockdown, and the gap between COVID deaths without lockdown and "lockdown deaths" would be even greater.
135,000 confirmed COVID deaths over the last four months. If lockdowns have made a greater contribution to that death total than COVID itself we would be seeing greater than 135,000 unaccounted for excess deaths over that period. Of course, we haven't.
I don't dismiss that there are some deaths of despair and depression that have come from the lockdown. I, peronally, do not believe they are statistically significant compared to what we have seen from the sickness itself. But I don't think there is any way to argue in good faith that the lockdown has done more harm than good.