Are lockdowns justified?

[FlatAssembler]

The fact, cited by many anti-lockdown papers, as well as this pro-lockdown paper, is that the strigency of the lockdown was, at the beginning of the pandemic in Europe, correlated positively with COVID-19 cases per capita, as well as deaths per capita. And the same seems to be true (though I haven't done a precise statistical analysis on that, nor have I seen anybody doing that) in the USA now, as the COVID-19 cases are falling in Texas, but they are rising in many USA states with mask mandates and lockdowns. The fact that there are such correlations severely undermines the notion that lockdowns are effective.
And the computer models that were used to argue for lockdowns are wrong, because, first of all, most of them do not model nursing home transmissions at all. Read this, it might change the way you see the world: https://www.aier.org/article/the-failure...n-we-knew/

The article exhibits a flaw in logic.  It ignores evidence that proves lockdowns work, and points to an unknown data point. 

Yup, someone incorrectly modeled the rate of COVID spread in pre-lockdown Sweden.  The authors attributed the gap to voluntary behavioral change (though this article dismisses that, because it doesn't back up his point of view).  Of course, the authors may have just messed up their model.

This is what happens when people listen to their favorite news source, instead of people who actually study this stuff.  One can always find an outlier data point that backs up your preconceptions, and social media and political media are more than happy to feed it to you.

That model (on which the famous claim that 3 million lives have been saved by lockdowns here in Europe) did not just incorrectly model the spread of COVID in pre-lockdown Sweden, it drastically overestimated deaths that will be caused by COVID in every single country. Be it with a lockdown or without a lockdown. Only for the USA did that model at least get the order of magnitude right. For most countries, it was 10 or more times off.