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You misunderstood the question.
Where is your baseline study showing group A who did the mask and shutdown thing versus group B who did nothing?
I don’t care about death rates from 5 years ago, that was sans covid.
Aah I see.
Since we don’t have two copies of the UK, we only have the one data set to go off of.
However, the three infection spikes are all display different spread rates and different peak sizes. If a downward trend in the spikes occurred naturally, all three spikes would display similarities to each other, but they don’t.
All of them curbed their trends downwards as the three lockdowns were put into place, which suggests it is the lockdown restrictions that caused this and not a natural occurrence.
The same trends can also be observed in different countries.
Remember that PCR threshold has been quietly lowered from 45 cycles average to 32 cycle average, and now after mass vaccinations you can expect PCR threshold to once again drop. This has the effect of reducing positive results, false or otherwise.
If you make your testing methodology more strict, you will have less cases by virtue of fewer values falling into range.
I’m basing my conclusions on the death rates and the infection rates, not just the latter. Both follow the same trend so we can exclude PCR test numbers as a possible variable.
That’s a good point, but again, I can’t draw any conclusions from that because there’s no control study. Anecdotal evidence is not scientific proof.
The UK gov did experiment with regional restrictions during lockdown 2 but it just wasn’t working, so I guess the data you’re after is out there but just not publicly available.
You could always ask for it using a freedom of information request, however the world’s data suggests that lockdowns and the measures put in place do in fact prevent the spread of airborne diseases as the infection rates always drop after stringent lockdown measures.
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