Are lockdowns justified?

[FlatAssembler]

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.

I remember the modelling debate earlier last year.  There was no problem with the models.  They gave envelopes based on behavioral change.  The worst-case outcomes were based on no behavioral or government change.  Obviously that is never going to happen.  People don't just do the same things during a pandemic, lockdown or not.  The creators of the models said that people were misconstruing their models.

Of course, some of the knowledge of COVID has improved, and modelling has become more accurate.  We are in a 3rd wave in our country, and the worst-case modelling based on moderate restrictions was getting toward India-like levels.  Obviously, those aren't going to happen, because of new restrictions, and the population (at least the reasonable part of it) understanding what is going on.

The problem is that that model drastically overestimates COVID mortality both without a lockdown and with a lockdown. The truth is obvious: it was not 3.2 million people that were saved by lockdowns. And the model that predicted that is, if not entirely wrong, incredibly simplistic. It literally assumes asymptomatic individuals are as likely to spread COVID as those who have symptoms. A similar model, but which corrects for that, predicts that around 262 thousand people were saved by lockdowns in Europe: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/...20202267v1
That's how it is with computer models in social sciences. In my study about the names of places in Croatia as well: computer models are very susceptible to variables which cannot be precisely known. If you assume the entropy of the pairs of consonants in Croatian is 7.839 (as the raw measurements suggested), the p-value of the patterns I have found is 1/500. If you do some reasonable corrections to the results of those measurements, and you assume the entropy is 5.992, then the p-value becomes 1/17. The computer models in social sciences give results no better than guessing.

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Well, the US is the highest in the world in type-2-diabetes, which makes COVID-19 much worse. And it is among the highest in the world in heart disease, which, again, makes COVID-19 worse. There were also massive protests during the pandemic. You know, the Black Lives Matter, the Capitol Riots... Those result in spreading COVID-19. Presumably more so than stores or restaurants do. The nursing home scandal also played some role, but not a lot. It is a combination of factors.

Wrong again - 

Diabetes Rates by Country 2021 (worldpopulationreview.com)

Countries with the highest diabetes prevalence:

1. Marshall Islands (30.5%)
   
   
2. Kiribati (22.5%)
   
   
3. Tuvalu (22.1%)
   
   
4. Sudan (22.1%)
   
   
5. Mauritius (22.0%)
   
   
6. New Caledonia (21.8%)
   
   
7. Pakistan (19.9%)
   
   
8. French Polynesia (19.5%)
   
   
9. Solomon Islands (19.0%)
   
   
10. Guam (18.7%)
    

I must admit I haven't even heard of most of those countries. How well are they dealing with COVID?