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"Outside of Wuhan, no evidence was found of any significant increase in overall mortality, suggesting the success of the rapid control of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in addition to appropriate maintenance of healthcare services during the nationwide lockdown."
In this thread I will use travel data to show that the lockdown was too late for this to have been possible.
I will further show that this study uses distorted graphs making the lockdown look like it occurred earlier than it really did.
Liu J, Zhang L, Yan Y, Zhou Y, Yin P, Qi J et al.
Excess mortality in Wuhan city and other parts of China during the three months of the covid-19 outbreak: findings from nationwide mortality registries
BMJ 2021; 372 :n415
doi:10.1136/bmj.n415
Here I've created a composite of the previous image with a WHO image produced from the same data set.
I used GIMP to add daily/weekly tics to the x axis and vertical red lines showing the false and true dates of the lockdown.
The left dotted vertical line is claimed to fall on January 23rd, but actually falls on January 17th.
The vertical red line on the right shows the correct lockdown date of January 23rd.
With the correct placement of the vertical line it's possible to see that excess mortality had already risen substantially before the lockdown was implemented.
Both publications use January 1st 2020 as day 1 of week 1, which I only note because the convention in both China and the US is for day 1 of week 1 to always fall on the Sunday of the week containing January 1st, which usually means day 1 falls during the last week of December of the previous year.
The discrepancy in the Y axis is likely due to this:
"we used the 2019 population in each DSP area to calculate weekly or quarterly mortality rates in 2020 (see supplementary table 3), which were then multiplied by 52 or 4, respectively, to yield annual mortality rates to facilitate comparisons. "
WHO image is Fig. 12. A from the "WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part"
