"Assessing COVID-19 pandemic policies and behaviours and their economic and educational trade-offs across US states from Jan 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022”| The Lancet

This is to try to explain the chart in the Lancet study.
Only those in red, left of the vertical line are 
beneficial to lower deaths. Others are ambiguous.

This is a dense and difficult paper. The above is my attempt to explain the many similar charts in the paper.

Summary: for Covid infections the policy responses (above) had some limited effects. For Covid deaths, however, the policy responses had zero unambiguous effects, apart from vaccines, which unambiguously lowered death rates. 

I’d argue that deaths per capita are the best comparison, because we know what deaths are and while we can’t know that infection rates were measured in the same way everywhere, no matter how well-intentioned the testing. 

For the next pandemic, the lesson is: get making a vaccine. And don’t mandate stuff like school closures, masking, etc. 

My earlier post on this Lancet Study